Whether you’re a small business owner, start-up founder, or marketing pro at a larger company, you likely know that digital marketing can help move the needle for your business. If you’re not a digital marketing expert, it might be worth it to bring a digital marketing strategist into the mix to maximize your growth potential online.

No matter how much or how little you understand the potential impact of a digital marketing strategist (or digital marketing plans in general), sometimes it’s best to just delegate to those in the know.

Here, we’re breaking down what a digital marketing strategist does, why you should consider hiring one, when you should hire one, where to go to look for one, and more. Pretty soon, you’ll feel much more confident about bringing in a digital marketing strategist for your business objectives and marketing efforts.

What Is a Digital Marketing Strategist?

Digital marketing strategists are, unsurprisingly, digital marketing pros. The role of a digital marketing strategist is to ideate, plan, and oversee all of the marketing strategies related to helping businesses expand their reach and hit their online goals. While digital marketing specialists focus on specific areas of your overall digital marketing plans (like email marketing, social media, or SEO, for example), digital marketing strategists look at everything as a whole.

It’s their job to analyze KPIs, track performance across digital channels, do an audit of your current performance, determine where changes may need to be made, create a plan for future success, and more.

Your digital marketing strategist helps you determine the direction in which your digital marketing efforts need to go by finding your audience, looking over your business’s marketing goals, and building a roadmap for how to get there.

What Does a Digital Marketing Strategist Do?

Digital marketing strategists handle a wide variety of tasks. Here’s some of what a digital strategist job description typically looks like:

Developing Personas and Conducting Audience Research and Analysis

Digital marketing strategists have a deep understanding of who your brand is currently reaching and who your brand wants to try to reach in the future when it comes to your online presence. Part of this is defining these groups and creating personas who will help you create content that will resonate with them and drive them to do what you’d like them to do.

Create the Right Channel Strategy

Not every single platform will necessarily be best for your business and digital goals. Plus, what works on one platform won’t necessarily work on the others. Digital marketing strategists are tasked with determining which platforms (search, social, email, and more) will best help you reach your goals.

Develop Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Content Strategy

Because digital marketing strategists have a good grasp of the big-picture marketing goals, they’re the perfect person to create a plan to help boost discoverability in search results and create content that your audience will love.

Planning and Executing Marketing Campaigns

Have a new product to launch, new services you’re offering, seasonal promotions to share, or something else that deserves special effort? Digital marketing strategists plan and execute campaigns that move the needle.

Analyze KPIs

Part of a strategist’s job is to keep an eye on the numbers and figure out what’s working and what’s not and making decisions and adjustments accordingly. Data analysis helps the whole digital marketing team work smarter. You want data-driven decisions, not just guesses.

Coordinating with the Team

Digital marketing strategists usually can’t do it all on their own—they work with designers, content creators, social media specialists, ad managers, and others to execute the plans they created.

Essentially, digital marketing strategists are the link between your business’s marketing goals and your presence online.

Why Should You Hire a Digital Marketing Strategist?

Although it might seem like you don’t need a dedicated digital marketing strategist, here are a few reasons why it’s worth considering:

They can save you time and resources: Because digital marketing strategists are experts, you won’t have to spend so much time guessing what might work for your target audience. Instead, they can help you focus on what will actually convert.
They can increase your ROI: Digital marketing strategists use data to help inform their decisions and planning. Because the numbers are backing up their ideas, you’ll get more results for your marketing spend.
They can keep you competitive: Marketing is a fast-moving industry, but digital marketing strategists can help keep you ahead of competitors, making your team more agile as trends shift.
They can actually drive growth: Because these pros set clear goals and use measurable methods to help you achieve them, it makes it easier for you to hit the revenue, growth, and other targets you’ve set for your team.

When Should You Have a Digital Marketing Strategist Join the Team?

Evaluating your marketing initiatives? It might be time to bring in a digital marketing strategist if you’re doing or seeing any of the following:

You’re getting ready to add a new service offering or launch a product.
Your website is either not growing or even seeing a decline in traffic.
Your ads aren’t converting.
There’s something about your messaging that feels disconnected across various channels and platforms.
You don’t know which KPIs are most important or how to analyze the data.

Bringing in a strategist doesn’t mean your marketing team isn’t working hard, they just might not be devoting their energy to the right places and initiatives. Strategists will dig into the data, analyze what they see, and give you some clarity and direction to help build growth and momentum.

How to Find the Right Digital Marketing Strategist

Now that you’ve determined it’s time to hire a digital marketing strategist, you might be wondering how to find the right person for your team. Here’s some of what you should look for when evaluating resumes and experience so that you have a better chance of finding the right strategist for your business:

Experience in your industry (or similar ones)

Experienced (and talented) digital marketing strategists can often adapt to the standards and best practices of different industries, but finding someone who already knows your industry well can minimize any learning curve when it comes to competitors, audience, and more. Ask questions about their experience and past clients, particularly in your own industry.

A strategic approach, not just methods

You want a strategist who wants to understand your business goals and then will create a marketing plan that will help you reach those goals. If a candidate you’re speaking to is focused on methods before even understanding what you’re trying to achieve, they might not be the right person to help you reach your goals. Their strategic vision is valuable.

Past positive results

If you’re serious about a potential strategy candidate, ask them for case studies and examples of past strategies that they developed and implemented and the results that came from them. You want as specific an example as possible to help you determine if they’re going to be able to give you the best results.

Strong communication skills

Ultimately, marketers need to be able to clearly communicate why they’re recommending certain strategies, what various data points mean, and what they need from team members they’ll be working with. Communication barriers can make a working relationship extremely difficult over time.

An understanding of the tools and analytics they’ll be using

Successful digital marketing strategists will need to be able to use cutting-edge tools like Google Analytics, CRM platforms, keyword research programs (things like SEMrush, RankIQ, Ahrefs, and the like), and more. Not only do good strategists need to understand how to use these tools, they also need to know how to interpret and understand the data these tools give them access to to ensure your digital marketing strategies are solid. A willingness to learn new tools is also helpful.

How they’ll fit with your team

No matter who you bring in, whether they’re full-time, an outside consultant or contractor, or a part-time or freelance worker, the digital marketing strategist you work with will be working very closely with your team, your business, and your brand. You want to work with someone who will work well with your team.

Where to Look for a Digital Marketing Strategist

There are a number of different platforms and places you can look for an experienced digital marketing strategist. Here are few:

LinkedIn: LinkedIn is a great spot to search for digital marketing strategists. You can filter by industry and experience level to get you the best possible results.
Various freelance platforms: Search for freelance strategists on platforms like Upwork, Fiverr, and other similar sites.
Online marketing groups and communities: Reach out to industry-focused groups and communities on Facebook, Slack, Substack, and more.
Your network: Ask colleagues, friends, family members, coworkers, fellow university alumni, professional groups, and more for anyone they know or have worked with before who might be a good fit for what you’re looking for.

How Much Does it Cost to Hire a Digital Marketing Strategist?

You’ve decided you want to hire a digital marketing strategist and you’ve started scanning various platforms to find the best one, but how much does it cost to hire someone? Ultimately, hiring a digital marketing strategist (or any team member) is an investment in your business and your long-term growth.

There are a number of different factors that go into the cost of hiring a good digital marketing strategist. Here’s some of what might affect the pricing:

The scope of work: Part of what determines the price is the scope of the work that you want done. Are you bringing someone on to focus only on strategy? Are they handling both strategy and execution? The more involved the strategist is, the more it will cost.
Their experience: A digital marketing strategist with more years of experience is going to cost more than someone new to the role.
The industry you’re in: Different industries have different typical levels of compensation.
Your marketing and campaign goals: If you’re only looking to raise brand awareness, that will likely be a lower lift than if you’re looking for lead generation or for conversions, sales, etc. The more direct a result you’re looking for, the more intensive the work is likely to be.
The target markets you’re working in: Are you working locally or globally? Which city are you located in, if working locally? If the market is more expensive or you’re working in numerous markets, that can affect the cost of the strategy work you’re looking for.

While you might think it makes the most sense to go with the cheapest option, that’s not always the best decision in the long-run. Try to figure out who will give you the most value while helping you hit your marketing objectives, not just the lowest price.

FAQs

A successful digital marketing strategist needs to have a wide variety of skills to do their job. Look for analytical skills and experience, creativity, knowledge of and experience in SEO, an understanding of paid media, experience in content strategy, communication skills, and more.
Digital marketing strategists are primarily responsible for planning and direction, while a marketing manager is usually also responsible for execution of the plans and directly supervising team members to make sure everything is done correctly. That being said, the roles are sometimes combined, especially at smaller companies where they don’t have as many people on the team.
There are a number of factors that influence the pricing for digital marketing strategists. It can depend on the person’s experience, the scope of the work, if they’re in-house or contracted, where you’re working, and more. Remember, hiring a digital marketing strategist is an investment in your business and long-term growth.
It definitely can be! Bringing in a strategist can help clarify and redirect your team’s current efforts to make sure that they’ll meet longer-term goals, make sure existing digital marketing campaigns are on track, as well as inject the team with new, innovative ideas they may not have thought of or haven’t had the bandwidth to take on.

Digital marketing strategists can really make a difference for your business, especially because the digital landscape can change very quickly—you want someone who will combine data-driven strategies with the latest trends to produce measurable results. Whether you’re trying to boost brand awareness, increase engagement, drive traffic to your website, increase conversions, or achieve some other marketing goal, ensuring you have the right strategy in place can change everything.

What is a Digital Marketing Strategist? A Guide

What Is a Digital Marketing Strategist?

What Does a Digital Marketing Strategist Do?