Originally posted in r/digitalmarketing on reddit, but it’s now deleted, boo! Content has been redacted to respect the original poster’s privacy.
Question
Hi everyone,
I wanted to share my story and see if anyone has some advice they wouldn’t mind offering. I know how things can be discouraging when posting in here, but I’m hoping to find some helpful suggestions.
Let me give you some background:
I’m originally [redacted] moved to the US. I earned a degree in Marketing & Tourism, followed by an MBA in Digital Marketing [redacted].
My first position after graduation was in [redacted], working for a travel agency specializing in [redacted]. I began as a Marketing Intern and progressed to a Marketing Analyst role over three years. During that time, I gained solid experience with SEO, social media content creation, copywriting, and Hubspot workflows for sales and email marketing.
Unfortunately, I lost my job when the pandemic hit in 2020. I moved to Europe and found a Marketing Analyst position with a company focused on [redacted]. A few months in, they needed sales help, I offered a temporary hand, but now I’ve been in sales for the past four years. Our CEO isn’t a big believer in digital marketing; he actually fired that department completely, that’s why I’m still in sales.
Our website needs a serious overhaul, and my SEO audit confirmed it.
I’ve explained the potential of digital marketing to our CEO countless times, but so far, no luck.
He hired an intern to handle social media and figured that was sufficient. I’ve tried highlighting the importance of market analysis and understanding our competitive digital landscape.
The company has relied heavily on cold calls and emails for the past 16 years. It’s a successful model for them – [redacted number of] locations worldwide and [redacted number of] employees. Given that, I understand the CEO’s confidence in the current approach.
After a year of not bringing up digital marketing, imagine my surprise when the CEO offered me a Digital Marketing Manager position two weeks ago! He’s opening a new department. While I was excited, it’s been [redacted] years since I’ve been hands-on with digital marketing and I just got a promotion. This has me feeling a bit overwhelmed.
Now, I’m tasked with establishing a digital marketing department from the ground up. I’m refreshing my knowledge with courses, of course, but I’d really appreciate any practical advice on how to best handle this situation.
In my head I am thinking:
- Working heavy on making the website SEO friendly.
- Possibly Account Based Marketing Strategies.
- LinkedIn Marketing…
- Email marketing using qualified leads.
Of course, these ideas are mostly just me thinking at 2 AM, but I would love to hear about any advices on B2B digital marketing.
Note: He wants me to hire 2 interns to start this work with me.
Answer
Well… first, congratulations!
And second…
“He wants me to hire 2 interns to start this work with me.”
… oof… doesn’t sound like your CEO is taking it seriously…
Anyway, you probably want to consider start reading as much as possible about everything digital marketing right now. As in, get off reddit and start reading.
Run through everything – digital marketing has changed a lot in the past 4 years.
A few things you need to be careful with at your day job:
- Budgets: be extremely clear from the beginning what can or cannot be achieved with the budget you’re allocated, otherwise someone’ll find a way to pin the failures on you: no, you didn’t fail to deliver, you couldn’t deliver x or y because you didn’t have money to begin with and you said that right at the start.
- Expectations: manage expectations as much as possible — define timelines, and make sure everyone understands it shouldn’t be a one-man job: you can’t do SEO, Social, email, website management all at the same time with two unexperienced interns, that’s impossible. Also, digital marketing isn’t magic, especially not if you start in 2024. They need to know that. You need them to know that.
- Workload: see above — you can’t do everything, so you’ll need to prioritise… now your next question is going to be “how do I know what to prioritise?”: chat with the stakeholders/your boss, understand what their problem is right now (is it purely a lead gen issue?) and find solutions from there. No point in growing an Instagram account with memes if they expect you to run sales.
- Team management: your interns will most likely know even less than you do, that means they might slow you down at first, and by the time they know how to do the job properly, their contract will have ended: it’s sad and silly, but you need to think of ways to make them work on mindless tasks that don’t need much training.
I can’t imagine your boss will give you budget to hire agencies, so consider requesting a budget from your HR department (approved by your boss obviously) for training/coaching or a consultant to bring you/your company/team up to speed with digital marketing knowledge.
Argue it’ll cost x€ for the first 6 months BUT you’ll save x€ because there’s nothing worse than wasting 6 months not being sure what to do…
… but again, I can’t imagine your boss will give you the budget, considering it took him 16 years to open a digital marketing team staffed with 2 interns…
In any case, good luck and let us know how it goes!
The user replied after that, but I forgot to copy and paste at that time, so I only have my answer to their question which was along these lines: “Cél, thank you, you’re so amazing!” I actually don’t remember, so out of humility, I won’t make a quote up here.
Here’s my answer anyway to their mysterious question:
You probably got it right.
As a tiny team, your hardest jobs will be educating, convincing and converting.
- Educating: telling the stakeholders why you’re doing something, not necessarily what is done, but what the purpose is.
- Convincing: getting them to understand why it’s important. Important to you isn’t necessarily important to them.
- Converting: turning them into believers/supporters of what you do instead of asking you questions, they go to you to get problems solved.
But you need to educate yourself before educating others, so again, good luck with that. Remember you can’t do everything, so focus on what you can do.
I’ve been in that position – my director (and everyone above) hated digital marketing, ads and everything… but it’s also our job to educate our colleagues about the importance of our jobs.
Communicating is one thing, but if you don’t have good results, that’s a problem.
On the other hand, having good results is good, but being able to communicate upon them is even better.
Oh, as for that company now? I think they’re convinced about the importance of digital marketing since their team has grown… …maybe I did a good job?
And I’m wishing you every success in your new endeavours, dear colleague!