Businesses expect their marketing department to provide solutions for improving interaction with their customers. They get help from interactive media managers to create and strategize effective campaigns that grab consumers’ attention.
Read the article to learn how interactive marketing managers use social media platforms, different forms of content, and marketing strategies to increase awareness of products and grow sales. This article also talks about the expected salary and duties of an interactive media manager.
Who is an interactive media manager?
An interactive media manager may also be called a digital marketing manager, leads and directs a team of marketing experts to develop different ways of interacting with the target audience. He devises ways of using customers for product branding.
Interactive media managers play many roles in organizations. Their goals differ from one organization to the other. Some employers may ask them to create strategies and promote products, while others may ask them to write content and upload it on different social media channels to boost customer engagement and interaction.
Due to the diversity of the roles that interactive media managers play, they can be web developers, mobile app developers, content creators, or web marketers who use different tools and techniques to engage audiences in new innovative ways.
Interactive media manager skills that employers value
Content management skills
An interactive media manager knows how to plan and create different forms of content. He has the ability to spot emerging trends and use them to create trendy content. As an interactive media manager, you should know how to handle content promotion, content management system (CMS), content curation, content strategy, and image management.
Teamwork skills
Teamwork skills will help you collaborate with other teams and work with a group of people to achieve common goals. To become an effective interactive media manager, you should have decision making, goal setting, coordination, collaboration, time management, conflict resolution and rapport building, and listening skills.
Spoken and written communication skills
As an interactive media manager, you should know how to convey information and establish strong relationships with your target audience.
Your written and spoken communication skills will help you reach out to more people. Some examples of communication skills that you need to have include copywriting, editing, proofreading, storytelling, and presenting proposals.
Technical computer skills
An interactive media manager performs most of the tasks on the internet and computer. Having technical computer skills can help him improve his performance and work better in different situations. Some examples of technical skills that employers look for in a media manager are Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Analytics, HTML, Java, WordPress, PowerPoint, and Microsoft Excel.
Marketing skills
The business-to-business and business-to-consumer marketing strategies have completely changed over the years due to advancement in technology and an increase in the usage of the internet. Gone is the time when companies used to rely on direct mail, prints, and other traditional marketing ways to reach their target audience.
Today, interactive media managers must know search engine optimization, search engine marketing, and social media marketing skills in order to help companies make progress.
Web analytics skills
These skills will help you create competitive content that ranks higher in search results. Some examples of web analytics skills include determining key performance indicators, Google analytics, understanding numerical data, and assessing campaign performance.
Community engagement or customer services
Social media is one of the top channels to reach out to more and more customers. However, only a few businesses make the best use of social media for customer support. It indicates there is a huge opportunity for businesses to provide exceptional customer services and establish strong customer relationships.
An interactive media manager connects with his target audience through direct communication. He should know how to talk to them patiently and use different ways to have a healthy interaction.
Budgeting
As an interactive media manager, you should know how much budget to allocate to a particular task. You will have to pay for multiple tasks such as paid advertising, web hosting, images, etc. you can perform these tasks better if you have the basic budgeting knowledge.
What does an interactive media manager do?
Find different ways of interacting with the audience
The primary role of an interactive media manager is to develop new ways of interacting with the customers and increasing their profile, post, or product engagement. He uses different platforms such as Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp, YouTube, and Quora to try new solutions for customer interaction.
Some examples of the ways that interactive media managers use to create engagement with customers are:
- Use an attractive visual image having a concise text on it
- Share a personal experience in the form of a story
- Describe behind the scene
- Talk about a recent event and ask for the public’s opinion
- Share an insight about what’s going on in the state
- Ask a provocative question
- Run a contest or arrange a giveaway
- State industry-related interesting facts
- Create a poll or quiz
- Use a short and interesting how-to video
- Provide a troubleshooting guide
Develop interactive marketing campaigns
Interactive marketing is a marketing strategy that allows you to have a meaningful interaction with your customers and build a lasting relationship with them. An interactive media manager creates a successful marketing campaign with the help of different methods of interaction.
He uses personalized content that his target audience actually wants to see. He puts that content in front of them when they want it the most. He may arrange virtual, remote events to have an interaction with the people on the other side of the world.
An interactive marketing manager sets marketing goals and then creates a marketing strategy according to those goals. He makes sure that campaigns are tractable and adjustable, so he can evaluate their performance over time.
Create written and visual content
An interactive marketing manager creates different forms of content based on what his target audience likes or what his marketing goals are. He has good writing skills that he uses to write compelling sales copies, blog posts, articles, web content, social media posts, etc. He keeps his content concise and to the point because this is what most social media users prefer now.
In addition to writing content, he creates visual content such as images, videos, animations, etc. He has a strong command of basic graphic design tools. He can use them to create visual content without getting help from professionals.
Create advertising campaigns
An advertising campaign is designed to promote a product or service. An interactive marketing manager gets sales copies written by copywriters and promotes them on social media or digital media platforms to reach the target audience and provoke them to make a purchase.
The manager not only creates the campaign but also analyses its results to notice public reaction towards the campaign. He creates reports of campaign results, and he shares them with his co-workers and stakeholders to inform them about the campaign’s performance.
Stay up-to-date
Social media and digital media platforms are changing at a fast pace. New features, tools, and techniques are being introduced every now and then. It is important to be aware of them and understand their effectiveness, so you can decide whether to add them to your marketing strategies or not.
An interactive marketing manager keeps himself updated. He conducts online research every day to observe the change in algorithms and predict its cause. He does not hesitate to try new methods, techniques, trends, and tools to increase his means of interaction.
Use different techniques to boost social media exposure
An interactive marketing manager applies numerous techniques and tools to distribute his content and increase its reach. Staying active on social media channels and providing 24/7 customer service are some of the important ways managers use to increase exposure.
Manage budget
Budget management allows you to handle and track the expenses of your department. Interactive media managers measure total revenue, operating expenses, capital expenses, and employee expenses to create a proper budget for a project.
Assist social media manager
Social media managers handle the social media accounts of the company. They create engaging content, distribute it on different profiles, track its performance, create a marketing strategy and record its results. Interactive media managers give ideas to social media managers to help them produce desired results.
How to become an interactive media manager?
- Complete your qualification: To apply for the interactive media manager post, you should have at least a bachelor’s degree in a relevant field. Any field that teaches you the skills required to be an interactive media manager is considered relevant. Although a master’s degree is not a necessity, having it can be a plus point for the candidate.
- Learn more skills: A four-year degree program will teach you many skills but not enough to excel in this field. Therefore, you will have to enroll in different courses that teach skills like Photoshop, Java, HTML, web development, content creation, content management, etc. As a beginner, you can find many free resources on the internet. Once you learn through them, you can move to paid courses that give in-depth knowledge.
- Get an internship: Working as an intern will open many doors to new opportunities. You will learn how to work among a group of people and how to coordinate with different teams. You will learn how to be an active listener and where to practically use your learned skills. Most importantly, you will gain experience that a majority of employers look for in candidates.
- Apply for the job: Now that you have gained knowledge and experience, you should start looking for a suitable job. There are many online platforms where employers post jobs every other day. You should check these sites regularly. If you have a particular company in mind, you should visit its official website or social media profiles every day to see if they have new vacancies available.
Prepare your portfolio and apply for the post as soon as you find a suitable vacancy. Prepare for the interview to increase your chances of acquiring the job.
What are the best practices for interactive marketing?
There are some popular interactive marketing practices that interactive media managers use to design effective marketing strategies. Some of these practices include:
- Two-way interaction: It is about creating content that gives your target audience something to do. Your users should be able to play an active role; otherwise, your content may not be able to generate the results you want.
- Provide an incentive: While it is easy to increase engagement of a post by sharing quizzes and games, you should still provide a more compelling reason to your target audience to gain more shares, likes, and followers. Entice your audience using different ways, such as offering first come first get chances, or free downloads for the first 100 followers.
- Resonate with your target audience: You should understand your target audience and know what their likes and dislikes are. It will help you create visual and written content that resonates with their thoughts and ideas. This is a great way of gaining your target audience’s attention and increasing engagement.
- Personalization: Learn the pain points and preferences of your users, so you can create more valuable content that matches their lifestyles and daily needs.
What is the average salary of an interactive media manager in the United States?
The average total annual salary of an interactive media manager in the United States is approximately $140,460. It consists of the annual base pay of $122,472 per year and additional pay of $17,988 per year. Your pay can be more than the pay mentioned here if you have years of experience, higher qualifications, and a broad skill set.
New York, Palo Alto, San Jose, Seattle, and Riverside are the top highest paying cities in the US for interactive media managers.
Summary
An interactive media manager is responsible for creating engaging content and sharing it on social media and digital media platforms to boost customer interaction and promote a company. They collaborate with different teams and design marketing strategies to help a company reach a wider audience and increase its sales.