Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for Digital Manager

🎯 Role Definition

The Digital Manager leads the planning, execution and optimization of multi-channel digital programs that drive customer acquisition, engagement and revenue. This role combines strategic digital marketing expertise (SEO, paid media, email, social), data-driven decision making (analytics, A/B testing, conversion rate optimization), and cross-functional leadership (product, creative, engineering, commerce). The ideal candidate translates business goals into measurable digital roadmaps, owns channel P&L and partners with stakeholders to scale growth and improve customer experience.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

Digital Marketing Specialist or Coordinator with 2–4 years of hands-on channel execution.
E‑commerce or Online Merchandising Specialist responsible for site performance and campaigns.
Paid Media / SEM Manager or SEO Specialist with proven campaign ROI.

Advancement To:

Senior Digital Manager / Lead Digital Strategist
Director of Digital Marketing or Director of Growth
Head of E‑commerce or VP of Digital / VP Marketing
Chief Marketing Officer for smaller organizations

Lateral Moves:

Product Manager (growth/product-focused teams)
Growth Manager / Head of Growth
CRM or Marketing Automation Lead

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

Develop and own the holistic digital strategy and 12–24 month roadmap across acquisition, retention and monetization channels (SEO, SEM, paid social, programmatic, email, affiliate, organic social and content), aligning objectives to company revenue and engagement KPIs.
Set channel-level goals and measurable targets (CAC, LTV, conversion rate, ROAS, AOV, churn) and produce weekly/monthly scorecards to track performance against targets for executive stakeholders.
Plan, manage and optimize the digital marketing budget including media spend, agency fees and technology subscriptions; forecast ROI and reallocate spend across channels to maximize margin and growth.
Lead paid media strategy end-to-end: campaign strategy, audience segmentation, creative testing, bid management, landing page optimization and attribution reporting for Google Ads, Microsoft Ads, Meta and programmatic partners.
Own organic search strategy: perform technical SEO audits, on-page optimization, content gap analysis and backlink initiatives to increase organic traffic, impressions and search rankings.
Design and execute A/B and multivariate testing programs for site, landing pages and checkout funnels to lift conversion rates; collaborate with UX and product to prioritize hypotheses and measure impact.
Manage email and lifecycle marketing programs: build segmentation, personalization, automated journeys and re-engagement flows using marketing automation platforms (e.g., Marketo, HubSpot, Braze) to improve retention and repeat purchase rates.
Lead cross-functional launches with product, engineering, creative and analytics teams to ensure tracking, site readiness and go-to-market activation for new features, categories or campaigns.
Implement and maintain analytics and attribution frameworks (UTM governance, GA4/Universal Analytics migration, Adobe Analytics, server-side tracking, data layer) to deliver trusted measurement and insights.
Build and maintain dashboards and reports in BI tools (Looker, Tableau, Data Studio) to provide actionable insights and ensure data-driven decision-making across marketing and commercial teams.
Serve as primary point of contact for external agencies and vendors; define scope of work, SLAs, performance KPI, and manage vendor performance to ensure high-quality deliverables and cost efficiency.
Oversee content strategy and production workflows for owned channels (site, blog, social) to improve SEO performance, brand storytelling and conversion through persuasive product copy and content experiences.
Drive conversion rate optimization workstreams by analyzing funnel drop-off, session behavior, heatmaps and user recordings; prioritize experiments to address top revenue-impacting issues.
Implement and govern CRM best practices and customer data management (CDP integration, consent management, segmentation) to power personalization and loyalty initiatives.
Manage product feed optimization and marketplace performance (Amazon, Walmart, marketplaces) including listings, pricing, promotions and enhanced brand content to increase visibility and sales.
Own site merchandising and on-site personalization strategies (recommendation engines, category merchandising, promo placements) to maximize average order value and conversion.
Coordinate crisis and reputation management for digital channels including social response strategy, site incidents and negative PR mitigation in collaboration with communications.
Recruit, mentor and develop a high-performing digital team and coordinate cross-functional resources; set clear KPIs, run regular performance reviews and plan for succession.
Translate customer insights and competitive intelligence into actionable growth opportunities; run win/loss analysis and market experiments to expand addressable market and product-market fit.
Ensure compliance with legal and privacy regulations (GDPR, CCPA), ad platform policies and industry best practices for data collection, consent, email and advertising.
Define and govern tagging strategy and event taxonomy for analytics, experimentation and personalization tools to support robust data collection and reporting.
Produce executive summaries and quarterly business reviews that synthesize performance, learnings, hypotheses and prioritized roadmap actions to inform strategic leadership decisions.

Secondary Functions

Support ad-hoc data requests and exploratory data analysis.
Contribute to the organization's data strategy and roadmap.
Collaborate with business units to translate data needs into engineering requirements.
Participate in sprint planning and agile ceremonies within the data engineering team.
Coordinate creative briefs and QA creative assets for digital campaigns to ensure on‑brand and on‑message execution.
Maintain documentation of playbooks, campaign templates, naming conventions and SOPs to scale repeatable processes.
Evaluate new channels, tools and vendor pilots by running small tests and building business cases for full adoption.
Support sales and account teams with digital insights, campaign results and promotional calendars to help close strategic deals.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

SEO strategy and technical SEO (site audits, structured data, canonicalization, crawl optimization).
Paid search and display advertising (Google Ads, Microsoft Ads) with hands-on campaign setup, optimization and bidding strategies.
Paid social management (Meta Business Manager, TikTok Ads, LinkedIn Ads) and audience layering for prospecting and retargeting.
Web analytics and tagging: Google Analytics 4, Adobe Analytics, GTM (Google Tag Manager), server-side tracking and event taxonomy design.
Marketing automation & CRM platforms: HubSpot, Marketo, Braze, Salesforce Marketing Cloud — segmentation and lifecycle orchestration.
Conversion Rate Optimization (A/B testing frameworks, Optimizely, VWO, Google Optimize) and statistical significance interpretation.
Data analysis & SQL for querying marketing and product datasets; familiarity with Python or R a plus.
CMS and e‑commerce platforms: WordPress, Shopify, Magento, Salesforce Commerce Cloud — content and product feed management.
BI and dashboarding tools: Looker, Tableau, Google Data Studio / Looker Studio.
Attribution modeling and media measurement (last click, data-driven, MMM) and experience working with attribution partners.
Basic front-end understanding (HTML, CSS, responsive design) to collaborate on landing pages and site fixes.
Excel/Google Sheets advanced skills: pivot tables, VLOOKUP/XLOOKUP, formula-based modeling and budget tracking.
Advertising policy and privacy compliance (GDPR, CCPA) and consent management platforms (CMPs).

Soft Skills

Strategic thinking with a bias for measurable outcomes and experiment-driven growth.
Strong stakeholder management and cross-functional collaboration with product, engineering, creative and commercial teams.
Clear, concise communications and executive reporting — translates data into business stories and recommended actions.
Project and program management skills with the ability to run multiple campaigns, launches and iterative tests concurrently.
Leadership and people development — hiring, coaching, mentoring and building culture within a distributed team.
Problem-solving under ambiguity and prioritization of high-impact opportunities.
Negotiation skills for vendor and agency contracts and media buys.
Customer-centric mindset and user empathy to prioritize UX and conversion touches.
Adaptability to fast-changing digital platforms, algorithm updates and business conditions.
Attention to detail and strong QA skills to ensure tracking, creative and technical accuracy.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

Bachelor's degree in Marketing, Business Administration, Communications, Data Analytics, Computer Science or related field.

Preferred Education:

Master's degree (MBA or MSc in Marketing/Data Science) or specialized certifications (Google Analytics, Google Ads Certification, Facebook Blueprint).

Relevant Fields of Study:

Marketing, Digital Marketing or Brand Management
Business Administration, Commerce or Economics
Computer Science, Data Science or Information Systems
Communications, Journalism or Content Strategy
Statistics, Applied Mathematics or Analytics

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range:

3–8+ years of progressive experience in digital marketing, e-commerce or growth roles with at least 2 years owning digital channel strategy.

Preferred:

5+ years leading digital programs or managing small teams, proven track record of driving measurable growth (CAC reduction, ROAS improvement, increased LTV).
Experience in B2C e‑commerce, retail, direct-to-consumer brands or B2B SaaS growth functions depending on the hiring company.