A day in the life of a Chief Marketing Officer

Marketing automation

I spend a lot of time working on marketing automation. When someone comes to our website we want to take them through a journey to purchase, and preferably, do it automatically.

One of the things that we focus on is getting visitors to give us their email address so we can send them cool information – SEO training, resources, answers to our most frequently asked questions etc. So after they sign up, they will get a series of emails tailored to who they are that take them through that journey, and also promote our products throughout.

Depending on their actions, they may also receive emails from our account management team that are also automated. For instance when they receive their first report, we automatically follow up with them to make sure everything looks great.

By automating the journey, it helps our customers get where they need to go faster!

Analysing and optimising paid traffic

I also spend a good amount of time analyzing and optimizing paid traffic. We have a variety of products that we sell, so we have lots of different types of ads that drive traffic to our site with the ultimate purpose of selling those products.

It’s pretty amazing to see how much you can optimize ads and reduce costs by looking at what types of demographics convert better (male vs female, age groups, targeting, etc) as well as images, copy (the words on the ad), etc.

When you break out each aspect of targeting, you can shut off underperforming demographics, placements, ads, angles etc and can save enormous amounts of money!

It takes time but in a competitive online landscape, you need to make sure your ads are very relevant to the audience your targeting and that your engagement is high. Otherwise, you’re just throwing money down the drain!

My advice for grads breaking into the industry

If you want to be in online marketing, the best place to learn it is from other online marketers.

Taking action and getting your hands dirty can pay huge. Learn everything you can from building a website, HTML,  CSS and WordPress. Run Facebook ads or Adwords for a local business. Study copy-writing. Learn about Inbound Marketing and SEO.

Marketing is one of the most powerful professions you can have, because every business in the world needs customers.

Clayton Johnson – CMO at SEO company, The HOTH. 

Check out our marketing roles here. For more information on marketing, see our blog posts on what is digital marketing, and what is social media marketing.