Thoughts on Digital Marketing

Cleverly Leveraging a Marketing Intern

The most cost-effective way to run a digital marketing department for small and mid-sized companies is to combine the skills and experience of a digital marketing consultant with labor provided by a paid intern, with supplemental work performed by a graphic designer.

Let’s be real for a moment. The majority of work to develop and maintain an effective website is pedestrian work: data entry, coding, graphics optimization. These are $17 per hour skills. $25 an hour if you add SQL and Scripting. A qualified mid-range graphic designer will cost about $75 per hour. But you only need a graphic designer for occasional projects.

The skill set of an experienced digital marketing director on the other hand run $80,000 per year and upwards. This is out of reach for most small and mis-sized companies.

So how does a smaller company get the digital marketing performance they need?

The answer lies in blending the skills in the ratio that suits your company delegating tasks to the lowest level of cost.

Let’s create a scenario:

You hire a digital marketing specialist who works with your marketing people who brings him or her up to speed on your product, brand and market. Understanding your objectives, they then use their experience to choose an appropriate platform, draw up an implementation plan, and develop a search engine and user-friendly architecture.

Based on this architecture, the consultant and marketing team will develop the site content and gather visual resources.

It’s now time to bring in a graphic designer who, in coordination with your marketing people and the digital marketing consultant develop a design brief.

Working from the design brief, the content and architecture, the designer produces the key design elements and specifies the styles that will be used in the site development as well as developing the. page templates.

With content and design in hand, the site can now be built out by an intern. Updates and improvements, based on analytics and at the direction of the consultant, can be implemented by the intern.

How does this pencil out?

As an example, lets pay an intern $17 an hour for 24 hours a month and the consultant $100 an hour for 20 hours a month. This equals $28,895 a year plus taxes for the intern. A comparable salary for a digital marketer would range $80k-$125K plus taxes and benefits.

You can look at this as a $60,000 saving or, with more context, a company with less than $1million in sales can afford the same skill set as a company making $3million.

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