How much do I need to pay my Internet Marketing Team

So, you have started an ecom website 2 months ago and even started selling to your friends and family, but quickly the flow dried up, and you went from one sale a day to one sale a week…

Or maybe you already have a brick-and-mortar retail that’s been running for the past several years and, because everybody’s talking about it, you decided to extend your brick-and-mortar retail to the Internet. In no time, as you are still selling 20 times more on your store than on the internet, you realized that brick-and-mortar stores and e-com stores were two different beasts.

Or maybe you have an ecom store that’s selling 20k-40k a month. If that’s the case, congrats!! You are well ahead of the others. But it’s been a couple of years and you still can’t leverage it and pass the $40K month.

Thanks to a whirlwind of nonstop change & evolution, developing platforms, eventual social media bannings or canceled Facebook Ads accounts, fake gurus, shiny objects and ingenious strategies, your digital marketing skills are not what they should be, and you may need to outsource (or hire) your marketing strategy to a real internet professional…

Easier said than done.

Of course, for a moment, you could hire Fiverrs to write articles, make videos, design infographics or place ads on Facebook. But do you really think that a professional will charge you $5 to implement a campaign with AdWords, or create a Landing Page?

Wake up call: this is not 2017 anymore and what was working one year ago has become obsolete. Anyway, do you have 50 hours EVERY YEAR to spend on ( yes-it’s-free) Facebook re-Training just to understand how to place an ad?

When I started creating websites for customers in the early 00’s, I had a lot of them telling me: “Thanks, but no-thanks. My nephew can do it for free!” Guess what happened to those websites?
Last year, when I approached businesses with social media strategy, I had the same kind of answer: “My niece has 1,000 followers on Instagram. She’ll do it for free because she loves being on the Internet!”

Yeah right…

Time to hire

To help you start building an internet team, I’ve listed below 6 indispensable digital marketing skills you need to find in the email marketer haystack across the world.

Expertise: Content Marketing

Salary range: $50,000 – $120,000
The genesis of content marketing might stem from 1895 thanks to a tipsheet edited by John Deere. The brilliant idea served to enlighten American farmers on how to boost profits. There was also awesome images of green tractors and the latest tools in heavy tool machinery for farmers. It’s still published today.

Content Marketing as a digital method is unavoidable. If you have a website without Content Marketing, you are throwing away the rest of your marketing.

Not only you need content, but it also needs to be actionable (think CTA). And to produce actionable content, not only you need to have certain skills but also technique. You need to know on what supports your content will be more exciting for your readers!

Where are you going to publish your content?

• on posts that target potential audiences
• on podcasts that inform & create brand awareness
• on social media posts, infographics
• on books or eBooks that introduce prospects to your brand & offers
• on educational resources, webinars & surveys that help your prospects estimate their choices
• on customer stories
• on cheat sheets to help move prospects over the edge & make them purchase

Now, just figure out all of this is a puzzle.
Unless you have all the pieces that fit together, you can’t see the big picture.
That’s what it takes to make a good content marketing: fitting all those different forms of content and combining together to guide someone from the awareness to the purchase.
All of this is the domain of content marketing: strategically generating essential information assets to turn a prospect who does’nt know anything of your business or products into a buyer & brand evangelist.

The Content Marketing Big Cloud

Now that you know the necessary skills to be a good Content Manager let’s see what potential Content Marketing positions would be the best for your business

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Brand Journalist

Salary Range: $50,000 – $76,000
If you have never heard of the term “Brand Journalist,” that’s because it’s new. Sometimes called “corporate reporter”, a brand journalist is a writer who writes a variety of infomercials or narratives on different supports that convey the brand image & value to your company’s customers.

Comparable to an in-house PR or news anchor. Only that the PR or news being produced is used as an alternative way to generate leads & sales. For instance, brand journalists often look for narrative or testimonials on how actual users are using your company’s products. They curate that narrative or testimonial and rebrand the story in engaging ways to help leads & prospects switch to buyers.

Skills:

Strategic – Ability to align their copy with the overage content strategy of the company.
Creativity – A brand journalist must be able to tell a variety of stories in new and engaging ways across a variety of platforms.
Organization – Articles are often deadline-driven, so methodology is essential for success.

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Managing Editor

Salary Range: $55,000 – $102,000
Managing editors are a little bit like brand journalists: they mostly handle the general storytelling of a company. However, if you produce a lot of content every day (because you have several brand journalists), you need a managing editor to handle the scheduling, publication, and overall coherence of a company’s content marketing assets.

Skills:

Organized – Tough deadlines, extensive projects, hard people: that’s the life of a managing editor.
Adaptable – Writers oversight their deadlines, articles get killed, priorities are changed; a great managing editor is able to handle last-minute stress.
Communication – As team managers, editors often oversee other writers, so unequivocally communicating a company’s content objective is a necessity.

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Content Marketing Manager

Salary Range: $72,000 – $120,000

Content marketing managers are the kings of content. Not only they are the managers of a company’s content team, but they also make sure that all of the content resources are in line with the overall marketing strategy.

Content Marketing Managers are in charge of:

• team management
• content creation & administration
• design approval
• developing multimedia assets
• audience development.

Skills:

Creative – Content marketing is based on processes but, creativity is also as important.
Leadership – Must be able to direct a copywriter team.
Project Management – Content often precedes a product launch, which means a deadline, so project management expertise is necessary to succeed.

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Expertise: Social Media Marketing

Maybe you think that Social Media Marketing was born in the mid-2000’s when Facebook started to explode… But its forefather, Social Marketing was “created” in the 70’s, when Philip Kotler and Gerald Zaltman realized that the same marketing principles that were being used to sell products to consumers could be used to “sell” ideas, attitudes and behaviors. Regardless of who and when it was created, Social Media Marketing is now one of the most sought-after skills for businesses looking to implement digital marketing strategies.

Social Media Marketing is especially regarded as an unstoppable force that ecoms have harnessed to:

• directly connect with audiences.
• get feedback in real time
• drive brand awareness & website traffic,
• generate leads and sales

Although all social media platforms rise and fall (Think about Pheed, MySpace or Google,) you’ won’t find anybody who thinks that social media is irrelevant. It means that Social Media Marketing strategies are here to stay.

Social Media Marketing is all about:

• Building a tribe around your brand.
• Dynamically connecting with your audience
• Curating & editing shortlists
• Understanding the best way to create content, regardless of the medium
• Creating the right copy to put in front of the right audience
• Networking with other industry leaders whose influence can move the needle for your company.
• Attending your audience
• Translating needs & pain-points into relevant content & products
• Creating offer awareness that doesn’t feel intrusive or overly sales-y.

Social media marketing core competency is

• listening
• networking
• influencing
• selling (sometimes)

Here are 8 “social” skills that you need to look after if you want to hire a Social Media Manager:

1. Social Skills

Being “Social” is 1 of the core tenants of what social media is.
That means that establishing and building a digital relationship is still a treasured attribute, especially since not everybody can do it.

A community manager should be able to navigate between promoting your brand and engaging with your customers. It means slowly converting an observer into a customer by patiently answering questions.

2. Creative in Nature

A big part of social media turns around visuals. Don’t think only about Instagram and Pinterest, if you don’t have a great visual on Facebook, forget about it.
That means you have to be a decent photographer, videographer or graphic designer. At the very least, you should be able to distinguish between a great and poor image.

3. Organized & Efficient

warning: Social Media is addictive. You find a funny video on Facebook and you loose 30mn of your productivity…
A good social media manager needs to be task- and goal-oriented to accomplish all the items on the checklist.

4. Adaptive

Social Media platforms rise and fall. What was working yesterday is NOT working today. So, being adaptive is a mandatory trait for a social media manager. Being able to scheduling posts is not enough. You should try out new features and change your posts to fit with what’s being talked about in the timeline.

5. Copywriting

Warning: writing and copywriting are very different. I write in AP style, but I use the Oxford comma in copywriting. Social Managers are NOT Content Managers, and that’s why they need to know about copywriting.
Copywriting Resources

• Grammarly
• Hemingway Editor

6. Strategic

If you don’t have a documented posting strategy you may feel like you’re posting for a faraway planet.
having a strategic thinking in your posting means:

• knowing the best times to post
• creating balanced marketing campaigns
• keeping an eye on what everyone else is talking about

You don’t want to be the only feed talking about a sneakers’ special when it’ll get lost in a stream of political updates.

7. Decisive

Consumers expect brands response to inquiries or messages in less than 4H. But, social managers only answer to 11% of these inquiries & in about 10 hours. You definitively don’t want to be in that horrible situation.

8. Analytical & SEO Driven

You need to take a look at your monthly analytics reports and make sure you’re on the right track. That will also help you see what type of posts have been performing well, so you can rinse and repeat.

Main Social Media Marketing Jobs

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Social Media Marketer

Median Salary: $30,000 – $76,312
Social media marketers blood is data-driven content. They are curators who represent the company’s voice on social media platforms like Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, or anywhere else your company is maintening an internet presence. They smoothly control the flow of information by generating & scheduling media content like copy, comments, answers to questions, photos, videos, & graphics.

Their Return On Investments KPIs are:

• likes
• comments
• fans
• reach
• engagement leads collected
• sales

Skills:

Original – Social media marketers design much needed content for multiple platforms which requires a creative mindset.
Conversational – A conversational tone is essential… The last thing you need is having all your notifications to look like an ad.
Analytical – Strong social media marketers study raw KPIs to anticipate their next move.

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Community Manager

Salary Range: $38,000 – $75,000
Be careful, most people (and companies) think a Community Manager and a Social Media Marketer are the same.
The community manager is responsible for advocating a brand on social media. CM create their own social persona, actively go out within the online community to connect with prospects and advocate accordingly. Community managers typically deal with those who may or may not have heard of the business they work for, and boost awareness for the brand.
While it looks like Community managers and Social Media marketers may seem identical, social media managers essentially act as actual brands while community managers represent themselves on behalf of the brand they’re promoting.

When social media marketers are engaged to make the brand attractive and engagement-worthy on social media platforms, community managers create and nurture the human relationships hidden in social media communication.

Skills:

Empathy – Understanding, being aware of, being sensitive to, & vicariously experiencing the feelings, thoughts, and experience of your potential customers is essential for this position
Time Management – Social media is a blacks hole. Being able to stay focused and prioritizing tasks is a must.
Friendliness – Community managers need to establish purposeful relations not only with potential clients but also team members.

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Expertise: Email Marketing

Even though it’s been 47 years since Ray Tomlinson sent the first ever email via Arpanet, marketing is relatively new. Over the past 47 years, the ability to send messages through the Internet has evolved into one of the most cost-effective forms of direct marketing.

Not only email marketing fastest and cheapest method, but it has opened the doors to how marketers can monitor and react to consumer behavior in a way that was never previously possible.

This is another way to make your business profitable. Provided you hire a skilled email marketer.

Although since its creation, email was a thing of desktops almost exclusively, by 2012, it was reported that over 40% of emails were opened on a smartphone. That number jumped to 60% in 2017.

When you hire someone to take care of your email marketing, you need to make sure that the person:

• Acts like a revenue-driven marketers
• Knows her customers and markets
• Create remarkable customer experiences
• Is a great storytellers
• Test everything and assume nothing
• Never stop acquiring new marketing tricks
• Enjoy working with technology
• Manage their work according to a schedule
• Write very, very well
• Deliver specific, identifiable results
• Knows the technical part of email automation
• Understands the different email automation strategy at each level of the funnel
• Knows the importance of headlines & hooks
• Knows how to measure & analyze open rates, conversions, click-through rates, deliverability, engagement, trends, & outliers
• Knows how to coordinate email scheduling and campaign assets such as graphics & copywriting

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Potential Email Marketing Job Titles

Direct-Response Copywriter

Salary Range: $40,000 – $85,000
When it comes to copywriting, David Ogilvy’s name is always mentioned… One of his ideas was that Direct-response copywriting is easily testable; indirect-response copywriting is not.
That’s because copywriting means that you will drive the reader to take immediate action through engaging and persuasive content.

Direct-response copywriters realize that they need to step aside from true creation and use processes and methodology in getting their readers to take immediate action after opening a marketing email. That’s the power of the irresistible headline that gets the email opened in the first place. Copywriters excel at using factual pieces to weave a compelling story.

Skills:

Persuasion – Here is the kingdom of the elevator pitch. You only have 10 seconds to convince.
Insightful – That’s where the “art” of copywriting resides: successful copywriters just know what to write to make readers click.
Storyteller – Copywriters don’t sell a product, they tell a story so amazing about the product that their readers are literally compelled to click.

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Email Marketing Analyst/Specialist

Salary Range: $61,000 – $85,000
Email Marketing Analysts collect & interpret email consumer behavior and data that help them determine sales probability.
Emailer marketing analysts are a specialized sub-sector of individuals who research online marketing campaigns and strategies. As such, their utility is expected to increase as more companies and institutions market themselves online.

The duties are diverse, and include

• collection and interpretation of data regarding consumer behavior online
• development and implementation of email advertising and promotional strategies
• email analysis and email optimization

Email marketing analysts also translate raw data into coherent information about consumer behavior and sales trends.

Skills

Organization – Since they need to manage various campaigns at the same time, Email marketers need to have organization skills.
Detail Oriented– It’s amazing how many typos you still find after several reviews.
Methodical – Email marketers also manage numbers that are the basis to make informed decisions.

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Expertise: Conversion Rate Optimization

Those nerd marketers have morphed into social mathematicians. They are masters at juggling with numbers, looking at survey results, analyzing what those results mean, and then making changes for the better.

News Flash: SEO is out
Old-school digital marketers were focusing on search engine optimization (SEO.) Now, the new companies implement a strategy that is much more cost-effective: conversion rate optimization (CRO.) CRO is an analysis process for increasing the percentage of visitors to a website that converts into customers, or more generally, takes any desired action on a landing page (submitting a web form, making a purchase, signing up for a trial, etc.)

CRO shares many principles with direct response marketing – a marketing approach that emphasizes tracking, testing, and on-going improvement.

Since CRO has recently grew in popularity, there is a high demand from companies who understand that they need to test all their landing pages.

But only true analysts know

• what to test
• how to test it
• for how long
• what tools to use
• how to analyze the results

Optimization is the methodology of making websites & landing pages as productive as possible.

To find the best CRO analyst, you must look for someone who knows how to:

• Research the best & latest in website optimization methodologies.
• Multivariate & A/B testing of landing pages, websites, & other web assets features.
• Understand the cause-and-effect relationship of website conversions.
• Stop collecting data when optimum traffic has been reached
• Understand what KPIs to look at in each level of your marketing funnel.
• Make sure that all pages convert & the CTA button is highly performing.

Your CPA will secretly dream about CRO after your conversions rates & sales soar to high numbers!

Possible Testing & Optimization Job Titles
Salary Range: $71,000 – $95,000
Website Optimization Specialist / Conversion Specialist
In the field of ecommerce, competition is stiff, so making sure your website is technically superior is mandatory.

Website optimization specialists are accountable for the website speed and the implementation of campaign optimization. They ensure usability across all of a company’s web-based collateral is a breeze.

Skills:

Curious – Always wonder why things happen the way they do!
Detail Oriented – Creative solutions require a sharp eye to locate the root-cause behind any outlier.
Innovative – Optimization/conversion specialists look for new and creative ways to test conversion rates and increase website usability.

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Expertise: Video Marketing

If a photo’s worth 1000 words, then how much more valuable is video? That’s the basis of video marketing, a forward-facing marketing strategy that integrates engaging video into your marketing campaigns.

Video marketing is sometimes considered as a sub-category of the content marketing expanse. However, companies and marketers know it nothing tells a story as powerfully as a video. That’s why video marketing is a specialized craft that will never go out of style because nothing tells a story quite like showing a story.

That’s why video marketing is a specialized skill that will never go out of style. New features like YouTube Cards and Facebook Live make video marketing more engaging and accessible than ever.
Knowing the strategies around video marketing are a must for digital marketing efforts.

To develop your video marketing strategy, you need someone who knows how to:

• Allocate resources. You’ll need a budget for your video – at the least, decent equipment, good editing software, and a video marketing guru.
• Tell your stories. Storytelling has never been as important as it is in video, so get brainstorming: What stories do you want to tell? How will you tell them?
• Engage. It’s not enough to simply tell your stories. You must engage your audience while you do so. How will you make your stories interesting? What will hook your audience?
• Optimize. Like landing pages, videos need to be optimized for search engines using keyword-rich tags or descriptions.
• Listen. Organize interviews, testimonials, demos, & other storytelling narratives to meet the needs of the target audience.
• Keep it short. There’s no set length for marketing videos, but the general rule is that shorter is better. Be ruthless with your editing. Cut, cut, cut out everything extraneous. Attention spans are short, so make the best of what you get.
• Publish. Publish your videos far and wide – embedded in your website, uploaded to Google-owned YouTube, and on all your social media channels. Then, promote, promote, promote.
• Analyze. Track metrics and stats, to determine which videos do the best – and why.

Potential Video Marketing Positions

Video Production Technician

Salary Range: $49,000 – $73,000
This is the technical side of video marketing. Production technicians are specialists who direct, organize & facilitate all your company’s video requests.

This includes:

• content planning
• scripting
• hiring (actors)
• filming
• editing
• mixing
• compressing
• uploading on social media

And all the added feature of tangibly preparing the content and blasting it out to the masses.

Skills:

Creative – Video production specialists need to be able to take an abstract idea and turn it into an engaging visual story.
Empathic – A convincing personality does wonders for calming worried video subjects.
Task Management – Video production specialists often work with deadlines, so effectively managing projects is a must.

Video Marketing Manager

Salary Range: $42,000 – $80,000
Similar to production specialists, video marketing managers sometimes handle the technical side of content creation, with the added responsibility of positioning and communicating the content’s unique value to a target audience. The Video Marketing Manager is responsible for the coordination and production of all video content.

A good video manager can:

• create and leverage interviews, testimonials, demos, and
• create storytelling copy in video format to strengthen emotional connections, engagement levels, & marketing initiatives.

The Video Marketing Manager has a creative mind and specializes in translating a variety of messages into a compelling visual story that is consistent with the brand.

Skills:

Tactical – Video marketers approach video content creation strategically; they understand where in the funnel their content will land.
Research – Video marketing relies heavily on thorough research to ensure the right message lands in front of the right audience.
Cutting-Edge – Great video marketers are on a constant lookout for the latest in tools, techniques, features, and platforms.

Expertise: Marketing Funnel & Hourglass

Marketing funnels represent a buyer’s journey from awareness to the actual conversion and purchase of the product. The concept of marketing funnel is that marketers spread a vast lattice to catch as many leads as possible and then gradually foster prospective customers through suitable schemes, even though the numbers lessen with every passing stage.

Of course, the job of the marketers is to make sure that most of the leads are turned into customers so that their marketing funnels could distort its ways and turn into a marketing cylinder.
However, we call them funnels because the probability of sales and proceeds gradually decreases at each step. Some people opt out, some lose interest, and some choose another portal. At each step of the funnel, you have less and less people, but for the ones that stay you have more and more opportunity to move them from leads to customers.

This graphic representation of a marketing funnel helps a lot to understand how it’s working.

Here is a quick recap of the 6 frequent pitfalls of the traditional marketing funnel:

• customer journeys are linear
• customers always enter through the TOFU
• after the 1st purchase, customers are “acquired”
• the broad picture is enough
• lacking a complete view of the entire journey
• not accounting for external influences

The Funnel Marketing approach is still very much valid, but it is incomplete because it doesn’t take into account all the work that can still need to be done after the 1st purchase.
What’s missing in the Marketing Funnel is to move customers from 1st-time buyers to Repeat Buyers.

Some people have now updated their funnel with an hourglass concept.
The first part of the Funnel consists in moving a perfect stranger into a customer.
The 2nd part consists and moving a customer into, not only repeat customer but brand evangelist…

To move the customer from Awareness to Evangelist, you need to have your prospects go through a lot of steps. Those steps are represented by Landing Pages, Articles, Email Marketing, eBook, White Papers, Case Studies, Videos, Quizz, Trials, Seminars, etc.

Whether you decide on a Marketing Funnel or on an Hourglass really depends on what products you sell, but in any case, you need a Funnel Specialist to create all the steps.

Funnel-Hourglass Manager

Average: $50,000 – $90,000

The Purchase Funnel is referred to as the “customer funnel,” “marketing funnel,” “sales funnel,” “conversion funnel,” or AIDA-model, an acronym which stands for Awareness, Interest, Desire, and Action.
The Funnel Specialist is like a conductor. He drives people through the different stages of the funnel with the ultimate goal of making them purchase a product. He needs to create landing pages and email campaigns infrastructure but uses other people’s products to feed its operations. As the “conductor” he needs to have a perfect knowledge of searching, keyword advertising, lead generation, outbound sales and internet impressions.

Skills:

Organized – Funnel Specialists have to be organized because they need to manage other people’s content
Strategic – They need to have the ability to align content with the overall content strategy of the company.
Analytical – Funnel Specialists look at lots of numbers and need to be able to make informed decisions.

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Expertise: Traffic Acquisition

Even a couple of years ago, traffic was the king of all manager’s activities. The idea was it’s easier to convert people to your products when you have hundreds of thousands of them going through your website every month.

Nowadays, marketers have realized that quality is better than quantity.
In plain English, it’s better only to have 30,000 very interested people going through your website than half a million suckers.

Before social media, the only way to get traffic to your website was through Google. But things have changed and now Facebook is a greater resource to bring traffic.

Possible Position/Traffic Acquisition Specialist
Average: 58,000 – $63,000

Traffic Acquisition Specialists are uniquely qualified to help brands and businesses leverage traffic channels such Google, Facebook and other demand-gen platforms to grow their customer base without breaking the bank. In short, Customer Acquisition Specialists are not only able to deliver fresh leads and customers but they are also able to deliver those leads and customers at a PROFIT.

Traffic Acquisition Specialists generally develop long-term search marketing strategy while delivering on a day-to-day hands on tactical activity. They are responsible for hands-on SEO: on-and-off page optimization as well as undertaking keyword and competitor research. They also work closely with the Content team to assure regular, high-quality content (from a search perspective) and with a PR / Social teams to make sure they are distributing their content in a way that maximizes SEO.

Skills:

Technical– Good knowledge of Google Analytics, Adobe Analytics, email Marketing, Medium level of HTML / CSS layout.
Analysis– Be able to analyze data from the sources above on spreadsheets
Enthusiastic – The Traffic Acquisition Specialists is generally multi-tasking, and with the ability to adapt to changes