When It’s Time to Hire a Digital Marketing Manager

Updated January 17, 2023

Keeping Your Website In Line & Online

Are you considering hiring a digital marketing manager or SEO specialist? Whether you’re currently outsourcing or thinking about bringing in a new internal resource, there are several considerations. The right answer depends on the type of website you’re running, the needed skill level, and the amount of time you can devote to your online empire. Most business owners, especially those who haven’t dedicated IT or marketing professionals, find that it takes tremendous time to keep up-to-date with website formatting trends, software options, and tracking down and fixing coding bugs.

How to Know You Need to Hire a Specialist

For some site owners, managing their business relies solely on managing their website (e.g., tending their eCommerce product line). While others, their website is just one aspect. Regardless of the camp you’re in, hiring a digital marketing manager hinges on time and effort. If you’re spending too much time “in” the business rather than growing it, it’s probably past time to hire a dedicated web manager.

What A Digital Marketing Manager Can Do For You

• Keep Your Website Maintained. Web managers are tasked to update all website software, monitor theme, and plugin updates, and verify functionality on all aspects of your site, including eCommerce.
• Optimize Your Website Speed. Digital managers and SEO specialists are usually aware of technical SEO strategies like running checks on download speed and ensuring visitors can access information with a limited lag time. Curious to see how speedy your pages load? Check out this free Google Page Speed tool and review your desktop and mobile scores.
• Diagnose & Solve Issues. This is one of the most beneficial aspects of hiring a web manager. They can competently identify and fix any glitches or problems with your site efficiently. This also includes deindexed pages, 404s, and any incompatibility issues from plugins.
• Identify User Experience & Conversion Opportunities. Beyond the technical management of the website, digital marketing managers evaluate a site’s user experience and match conversion opportunities with business objectives. For example, if you know that booking demo appointments is a key milestone in the sales cycle, then it’s logical that web pages should enable scheduling with trackable buttons or forms.

Digital marketing managers frequently perform other duties. It depends on their skill level and experience. We highly recommend managers that can analyze website data and provide insights and recommendations for improvements.  As your business grows, the above tasks become too much for a single person to handle. If you don’t have time, isn’t delegating that responsibility to an expert a better use of your time? Also, consider hiring an agency, as it may be an affordable way to outsource various functions requiring deeper experience across multiple disciplines (e.g., content writing, data analysis, A/B variate testing).

What it Entails

Hiring someone to handle your website can be a scary process. You’re sharing the controls of your online presence with another person. It’s important to find the right partner to work with in this venture.

1. Ownership
If you’re having the site built by your new web manager, make sure that you’ve ironed out the details of who will do what and when in advance. You should create an agreement to keep the site and content in your ownership. Note: we believe you should retain 100% ownership of all your accounts and data. Never relinquish complete control; rather, you’re allowing access to a specialist to perform tasks on your behalf. Examples: domain registration, website hosting, and web account access.

2. Data Privacy & Protection
Websites collect customer data (through form submissions) and other private business details. Be sure to partner with someone who values data privacy and is willing to sign an NDA. 

3. Partnering over Hiring
There are specialists proficient in understanding how organic search works. They get you results, and they get paid. But then, there are those that help you understand the organic search ecosystem for long-time growth and success. Essentially, you want to work with someone looking at your long-term success rather than quick and fleeting results.

The Hiring Process

In-house, outsourced, and agencies

Many search engine specialists work freelance. Still, you can hire an digital marketing agency specializing in web design and offering ongoing maintenance services. Depending on the budget, others opt for an in-house marketing specialist, but that requires other considerations (e.g., employment processes, competitive benefits, etc.). Whatever the scenario, you want to thoroughly vet the person who will be running your website.

Check their portfolio and ask how their services have improved their client’s (or employer’s) website performance. Professional web managers will be able to give you concrete examples of the value of their work. Make sure you do your due diligence and request references. Your online presence represents a significant portion of your business’ branding and marketing.

Short-term vs. Long-term

We have experience with some clients that are in it for the short term. This is usually when your website has problems that your team can’t handle or pinpoint. It can be as small as a few slow pages or as big as a traffic and keyword drop. There are digital marketing managers that specialize in using analytics or marketing tools to diagnose these problems. 

We’ve also had clients who partner with us for the long term. The starting point could be: 1) no history of SEO being done on their site or 2) cleaning and up issues, or 3) a continuation of efforts. Since it is a long-term partnership, expectations and priorities are set for both parties. The benefit is that they can come to us with any concerns about their website. Plus, we call out any issues we see and tackle longer-range strategies that a short-term project can’t provide.

B2C vs. B2C

From experience, digital marketing managers, can be specialists leaning towards working with B2C companies or B2B companies. Since these two audiences have many differences, you can expect marketing to be done differently. Often B2C web managers have a shorter sales funnel, while B2B have longer sales funnels with more complicated buyer journeys.  If you’re a B2B business, it’s comforting to know that your web manager understands that you’re not just trying to get traffic but qualified traffic that generates qualified leads.

Has your business grown to the point of hiring a web manager? What were your telltale signs?

FAQs on Hiring a Digital Marketing Specialist