What I Learned in Six Months of Fully Remote Digital Marketing

It’s been six months since my internship at Cantiere Creativo began, and it has since grown into a part-time role.

Not every company gives you real mentors who are willing to teach you the tricks of the trade and pass on a way of working that is revolutionary compared with the companies around it.

I’ll try to explain what it means to be a digital marketer working remotely, and show why companies and professionals need their services.

The service Cantiere Creativo offers as a Digital Partner has taught me that boredom is not an option in this job, and that you never stop learning.

Since clients come from different industries, asking questions and reading a lot is essential. Every day you face different needs.

When my internship started, I had no idea there were fantastic collaboration tools for brainstorming with the team and building customer journeys or full design systems, such as Miro and Figma.

So I let my ideas loose with sticky notes, colored pens and sheets of paper taped together until they took over the couch behind my desk. I looked more like an upholsterer than a digital marketer!

Every remote digital marketer has surely joined at least one call in pajama pants and slippers, with breakfast left half-eaten, and been interrupted by couriers, the mail carrier, the vacuum cleaner and furry friends.

There is always new tech to improve the workstation: two screens and a pair of headphones are the bare minimum, plus a microphone for recording videos.

There’s also a virtual office (the computer) that can teleport to the car, the train, the kitchen, the couch, a café or a B&B.

It may sound chaotic, but sometimes traveling helps creativity and keeps both personal and work organization flexible.

Now that we have set the scene for this quirky, always-on-the-move profession, let’s look at what digital marketers do and why companies need them.

A digital marketer takes care of the client, learns about their industry and builds a strategy to tell their story. It’s tailored work, made up of micro-goals that add up to the final objective.

In the analysis phase, the digital marketer handles search engine rankings, tracking performance on specific keywords.

A strategy isn’t just saying how I want to climb the funnel starting from how my offer is positioned; it means planning a series of tactics. To that end, a full periodic editorial plan can be drawn up by goal, target audience, product or service.

You’ll figure out which touchpoints the brand can use to communicate and how to fit into the customer journey.

Content can be created through brainstorming or entrusted to the digital marketer, who will follow a copy strategy and make the content readable and appealing to Google, with the help of inbound links, images or videos.

If needed, the digital marketer can take over full management of social channels, including analysis, brand identity, strategy, content and customer support through the company pages.

For special occasions, such as launching a new product or pushing a specific service, the digital marketer plans Google Ads campaigns or sponsored posts on social networks.

And let’s not forget that goals must be measurable, so it’s essential to keep the importance of data in mind after the first phase.

Constantly watching the metrics and tracking the customer journey help us understand our personas. Don’t underestimate monitoring the conversations about your business and your competitors’ either: it helps you understand the sentiment of your personas and adjust your strategy if needed.

Data lets us reconstruct the user’s story with our brand and what they are looking for on our site; it can’t be made up!

Cantiere Creativo offers hands-on training courses and workshops for companies that already have an in-house marketing team but need more specific skills in an area of digital marketing such as SEO, social media marketing or, why not, analytics.

That’s why the digital marketer’s role is so essential, and why the tip-of-the-iceberg metaphor rings so true: people tend to see only what the brand shows, without realizing how much work lies beneath the surface.