What Does a Digital Marketer Do? 5 Essential Responsibilities

Even a great retail product with a compelling brand can get lost among competitors. To help yours stand out in a crowded field, digital marketing can make a big difference. Honey Pot, an herbal feminine care company, promoted its brand on digital platforms by addressing taboo topics with honest, humorous content. Magnolia Bakery—a famous New York City–based dessert chain—used detailed customer segmentation to increase the likelihood of repeat sales.

Understanding what a digital marketer does can help you grow your own brand—and decide if and when you may need to bring in some expert help. Here’s a look at what digital marketers do every day, plus the real-world strategies that powered Honey Pot’s buzz and Magnolia Bakery’s surge in online sales.

What is a digital marketer? 

A digital marketer is a professional who concentrates on the online side of a business’s marketing presence, ensuring brands are visible and appealing where customers spend time online. Digital marketers focus on promoting businesses through online marketing channels such as websites, search engines, email, and social media. A digital marketer’s job also involves building relationships and community with customers, often by creating useful content or conversations that draw people in.

What does a digital marketer do?

• Social media marketing campaigns
• Content marketing
• Email marketing and customer retention
• Digital advertising campaigns
• Data analysis

Digital marketers wear multiple hats to help businesses connect with customers online. Depending on the business size, one person might handle all these tasks, or a team may split the responsibilities. Here are the key responsibilities a digital marketer might take on for a small business or ecommerce brand:

Social media marketing campaigns

This involves creating and posting content on Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, or Pinterest, and interacting with followers. For example, a boutique shoe store owner might share behind-the-scenes videos on Instagram and reply to customer comments or DMs. Some organizations may hire a social media manager to run this specific type of digital strategy.

Content marketing

A content marketing specialist produces content (like blog posts, videos, or product guides) that attracts people through search engines and helps them learn more about the brand. An online pet supply store might have a blog with tips for new pet owners that contains keywords for search engine optimization (SEO). This helps it rank higher on Google searches for questions like “how to train a puppy.” In turn, this content draws in potential customers and subtly promotes the brand’s products.

Email marketing and customer retention

Many digital marketers manage email lists and craft newsletters or email campaigns to welcome new faces, keep the curious coming back, and turn readers into customers who buy first and tell their friends second.

Digital advertising campaigns

While all social media marketing initiatives are online advertising campaigns, not all online advertising campaigns happen on social media. For example, a local artisan soap company might run Google ads shown only to users in its shipping areas who are interested in natural skin care.

Data analysis

Digital marketers look at data and metrics—think website visits, email open rates, and conversion rates—to see what strategies are working. By continually testing and refining—from tweaking website copy to trying new ad images—they discover important customer behaviors, so they can spot a photo, word, or button that flips a scroll into a sale.

How to improve your brand’s digital marketing

• Boost organic visibility
• Engage and build your online community
• Segment your audience
• Connect with micro-influencers
• Adopt a continuous test-and-learn approach
• Invest in targeted paid advertising

You don’t need an infinite budget or a full-time team of marketing veterans to run great initiatives across digital platforms. Many small ecommerce business owners begin by doing it all themselves. But over time, these tasks can pile up or require more expertise than you can manage alone.

Whether you decide to create digital marketing positions at your organization or keep doing the work yourself, these tips may come in handy.

Boost organic visibility

If you want customers to find your store without you shelling out money for pay-per-click (PPC) ads, you need to show up in search results. A sizable share of online experiences begin with a search engine, so creating valuable blog posts, product guides, and other content can drive organic traffic. Digital marketing can also help you boost organic traffic across multiple content marketing formats:

• A coffee maker brand could create a series of YouTube videos with brewing tutorials and recipe ideas, becoming a go-to authority for coffee enthusiasts.

• A fitness apparel company might run a blog featuring workout tips, healthy recipes, and athlete interviews, which naturally incorporate its products and improve SEO for fitness-related searches.

• A home improvement retailer could design infographics on DIY projects (e.g., “5 Steps to Build a Backyard Fire Pit”), with shareable content that links back to its website.

Finding your unique angle is key to standing out organically. For Honey Pot’s VP of marketing, Giovanna Alfieri, it involves taking customers’ individual experiences and using them to identify universal trends that competitors haven’t addressed. “We all have a desire to look immediately to the competition and be like, ‘Ooh, what are they doing? Is there anything that we can plug and play from there?’ I think that just breeds more sameness,” she says on an episode of the Shopify Masters podcast. “That's personally not interesting to me as a consumer, nor as a marketer.” By tapping into consumers’ experiences, she’s able to create content around the fundamental things her audience cares about.

Engage and build your online community

Building a community means going beyond one-way marketing and fostering two-way conversations with your audience. If you’d rather stay elbows-deep in tasks like product development and financial modeling, hire someone who can build a lively Discord, turn every DM into a miniature focus group, and keep the conversation humming while you focus elsewhere.

A digital marketer should establish a consistent, authentic presence where your customers spend time—whether that’s LinkedIn or a niche community on Reddit. They might post content that invites interaction, such as questions, polls, live Q&As, contests, or behind-the-scenes peeks at your business. Over time, these interactions cultivate brand loyalty.

Segment your audience 

One-size-fits-all marketing is outdated. Dividing your audience into meaningful segments, such as by demographics, purchase history, interests, or engagement level, can tailor your digital marketing campaigns and messages to be far more relevant.

Adam Davis, Magnolia Bakery’s senior marketing manager, emphasizes the power of tagging and segmenting shoppers for future outreach, on an episode of Shopify Masters: “If a customer’s ordering a pie for Thanksgiving, we want to make sure that Shopify is tagging that customer as such. Next Thanksgiving, we import that list into our email database and send an email about pies to people we know who have purchased pies in the past.”

Connect with micro-influencers

Not all social media influencers have millions of followers. Micro-influencers—who are people with a few thousand tuned-in listeners—can have comment threads that feel like a group chat with friends. Partnering with smaller-scale influencers can give your brand an authentic form of reach and credibility that bigger influencer endorsements sometimes lack.

Giovanni says smaller content creators are often naturally funny without thinking twice about it, and that’s good for business. “We want content that connects with people and is funny and is educational,” Giovanna explains. “Humor opens up an opportunity to simply laugh or to have that moment of reflection.” This allows the brand to connect with its audience on an emotional level.

A digital marketing specialist should spot niche micro-creators, slide into their DMs with a crisp pitch, and seal a deal with expected deliverables (e.g., one post, two Stories, and/or a discount code) while measuring the ROI on every click with web analytics software.

Adopt a continuous test-and-learn approach 

Successful marketing campaigns are never static. The best brands adopt a culture of continuous improvement across their digital marketing efforts—constantly testing, learning, and optimizing their online presence.

For website optimization, regularly run experiments such as A/B tests on your site’s pages and features. You might test two versions of a website header to see which drives more clicks, or experiment with different call-to-action button colors, layouts, or copy to increase conversions. A seasoned digital marketing manager can help your organization understand all the different approaches you can take to meet key performance indicators (KPIs). 

Adam says Magnolia Bakery has a culture of trying new ideas to optimize results. “There’s nothing off limits for us when it comes to our website and testing and learning new things.” Even small tweaks—like adjusting a landing page layout or call-to-action—can reveal why some visitors buy and others bounce.

Invest in targeted paid advertising

Building organic reach is vital, and paid advertising is an accelerant that can drive quick visibility and results for digital marketing efforts. Digital marketers should know their way around ad platforms and be strategic with the budget. By focusing your budget on the right customers—those most likely to be interested in your product or service—you can increase the efficiency of your campaigns.

Effective paid advertising also needs clear goals. Are you aiming to boost brand awareness, drive traffic to a landing page, or generate immediate sales? A skilled digital marketer uses eye-catching visuals or concise, impactful copy to grab attention. Most of all, they continually monitor, adjust, and optimize your ads, tracking metrics like click-through rates, conversion rates, and cost per acquisition.