Describe a day in the life of a digital marketer! What does a typical workday look like?
(The following was written a couple of years ago, when I was still working full time in a marketing role at a software company.)
Most of the time I head to office in the morning, at about 9 or 10 am. I check in on my dashboards – what’s our blog traffic looking like? Did we get any interesting new mentions or backlinks? What’s going on in the company, does anybody have any requests or suggestions? At 1130 the marketing team goes over what we each did the day before, and what we’re doing today. We use Trello to keep track of the tasks that we have planned for a given week. We plan out these tasks at fortnightly meetings.
My goal right now is to continue to increase blog traffic. For the current sprint that we’re in, I’m currently focused on improving the content architecture of the blog – updating old content, merging things that should be merged, deleting things that should be deleted. We had several tasks planned out for that, and I execute on those.
Sometimes I interview our existing customers to produce content for the blog, so that can happen at weird hours because of time differences. Sometimes I’m working with a colleague from another team (design, engineering, etc) to produce or edit content. The Engineering team is currently working to increase its public profile, so I’m helping them figure out how to get their blog up and running. The UX team is looking to update some copy in the ReferralCandy app, so I help out there a little.
I have a team of freelancers who help me out with content, so I email them to check in on how they’re going, edit their blogposts, schedule content for publishing.
I’m always on the lookout for other people who can help out – new freelance writers, people to help with distribution. Eventually I’d like to hire someone to basically do everything I do, so that I can move on to figuring out other interesting things to do in the organization.
Sometimes I’m talking to people who want to pitch guest posts on our blog. Often I’m doing distribution for our existing content on the various sites where people read our stuff. And I always have to set aside some time to keep up with the industry, learn new tools, figure out how to get more precise and accurate about everything I’m doing. A while ago I had to learn how to set up lead capture on the blog. Now I’m learning more about the nitty gritty of Facebook advertising, and about optimizing our blog for search engines.
There’s always more to be done.