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Alas, AI hasn’t advanced quite that much yet. You still need a person (or sometimes many persons) to create and manage your marketing, because the bots can’t be trusted.
As part of our ongoing quest to educate and improve the marketing operations of diesel shops, we’re here with the first post of a new series about…wait for it…different marketing roles!
Our rationale is this: Maybe you’re not sure about hiring Dieselmatic. Maybe you really want to give marketing a try yourself. What do you need to learn, and who do you need to hire to make it happen?
We’ll get started with a pretty important role: that of marketing manager.
WHAT IS A MARKETING MANAGER?
Generally speaking, a marketing manager is the person in charge of your overall marketing efforts. At larger operations, they may be in charge of an entire team. In the context of a commercial diesel repair shop just sticking a toe into the marketing waters, though, they may be handling…well…everything.
Some of their responsibilities for you could include:
- Creating and overseeing all marketing efforts, both digital and print.
- Researching the industry, your local competition, and changing trends to inform said campaigns.
- Depending on their experience and skill set, they may be responsible for emails, landing pages, blogs, social media, and Google Business ads. They may also perform SEO research and update your website based on what they find. As noted above, bigger shops may have them managing a team of specialists. Depending on budget, your marketing manager may also hire freelancers to help fill out those roles.
- Analyzing the data your campaigns generate so they can improve on what isn’t working and capitalize on what is.
In short, you may be looking for a marketing jack-of-all-trades, or someone with extensive experience in managing teams and projects (or, in rare cases, both!). The bottom line is that your marketing manager will put your shop in front of people—which will, in turn, pull in more customers and drive revenue.
WHAT SKILLS SHOULD I LOOK FOR IN A MARKETING MANAGER?
Above all else, your marketing manager needs to center everything on communication.
Good marketing isn’t about who shouts the loudest. It’s about who connects with potential customers. Marketing is all about communication, so your marketing manager must recognize and prioritize that. They’re tasked with sharing your shop’s story—and what you can do—with the world.
You should also look for someone who can interpret data. You absolutely don’t need to look for a data scientist, or even an analyst role—but someone who can look at your website’s metrics and say, “Hmm, the bounce rate on this page is out of this world. Let’s rewrite it and see if we can improve!”
Creativity is another area where your marketing manager should shine. Marketing is almost never a paint-by-numbers situation. It’s part weird art project, part science experiment, and part guessing game. Someone who can think outside the box and dream up unusual solutions to problems is an absolute game-changer.
HOW MUCH SHOULD I PAY A MARKETING MANAGER?
As always, salaries will vary by location and experience. Salary.com gives us a range of $87,473 and $146,522, with more experienced marketers commanding higher rates. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, meanwhile, suggests a median $133,380 yearly salary.
Oof, you might be saying, even the low end of that scale is still a lot of money.
It is. But ideally, this person is driving a lot of revenue for you—enough to justify their salary and then some.
HOW DO I HIRE A MARKETING MANAGER?
You figure out what you want their job to entail—whether it’s the jack-of-all trades we mentioned or someone who will oversee other specialists—and then you write a job ad and start interviewing.
Something to keep in mind: most marketing managers aren’t going to have extensive knowledge of the commercial diesel world. This isn’t always a bad thing, but it does mean you’ll have to teach them what they need to know to effectively reach your ideal customers—which is going to be more time and effort on your end.
If you’d like to see how this works in real life, our friends at Fullbay talked to Jimmy Wall of Donahue Truck Centers about his experience hiring a marketing person.
THIS FEELS LIKE A LOT OF WORK…
Well, yeah—it can be! Even if you hire the most experienced marketing manager out there, there’s still a lot for you to do in planning the role, hiring the right person, and then teaching them the basics (or more) or the diesel industry.
Which brings us to an important point: the whole “lack of diesel marketing managers” is a big part of why we started Dieselmatic. We knew diesel repair shops needed help in their marketing efforts, and we realized we could take on that role.
When you work with Dieselmatic, you won’t just have one marketing manager running in circles taking care of everything. You’ll have an account manager who facilitates the relationship between you and a team of specialists who are absolutely obsessed with driving more traffic to your shop. Our base plans won’t cost you the salary of a highly experienced marketing manager, and you’ll also see in real-time how we’re doing. Oh, yeah, and we know the diesel industry already—which means we know how to talk to and reach your best customers.
(We’re also not robots, so we definitely have that going for us!)
Want to know more? Hit us up! We’d be happy to talk all things marketing with you.
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