Digital marketing mentors came first, and then came the experts. Surely, in this chicken-egg-first or chicken-first riddle, the chicken came first. They are the ones who brought out the first bunch of digital marketing experts. They were the ones who branched out from the conventional marketing stream to create a new stream of experts solely focused on improving your brand’s digital presence. The global digital marketing size is expected to reach a market size worth $1.3 trillion by the end of the year 2033. The North American and European marketing mentorship markets accounted for 7.7% of the total revenue by 2024. Almost 82% of marketing leaders reprioritized investments in their chosen digital channels. Improved marketing data is expected to bring about a better customer experience.
Here’s more alarming data:
By 2028, almost 70% of total ad expenditure will go to mobile advertising.
Google and Facebook continue to dominate market space.
By 2018, content marketing revenue has already increased by more than 10% annually.
Around 84% of B2B marketers have successfully generated strong brand awareness around their brands through content marketing.
[Source: Hostinger.com]
The entire market growth comes from a significant contribution by digital marketing mentors.
They are the ones who shaped this massive market environment.
But digital marketing mentors are still useful in every other sector, as every sector is trying to grow to its fullest potential during this time.
Hiring a digital marketing mentor is different from hiring a digital marketing consultant.
A digital marketing mentor guides your enterprise with the skill sets it needs for growth, the kind of technologies it needs, and the kind of platforms it wants to focus on and helps you with both basic and advanced-level questions and queries.
A digital marketing consultant rectifies the gaps, and most consultants even help find them, but the work must be only in a certain direction.
But fixing gaps is different from showing you the way and telling you about every area where you need to make changes. The question thus focuses on the scope of having a digital marketing mentor.
What does a digital marketing mentor do?
The roles and responsibilities of a digital marketing mentor are not limited just to career development but also to offering strategic guidance to enterprises.
1. Developing skills
Skill development within an in-house marketing team is the work of a digital marketing mentor.
If there is already a team in place that’s capable of handling everything, but they fall short in some skill types, then a digital marketing mentor can instead do well in such a scenario.
When hired, they can teach that particular skill set and close the gap existing conveniently.
They can also be hired for teaching a team different tricks and tips around a particular key skillset area.
2. Helps in showing the gaps to businesses
Often, those in business do not understand what kind of gaps exist because they see everything up close.
They always need the help of someone who can show them the gaps they are missing to locate.
Common gaps revolve around poor conversion rates, lack of content strategy, weak brand positioning, unseen growth opportunities, and inconsistent social media presence.
Understanding the digital marketing strengths and weaknesses, identifying gaps and creating solutions to plug them, while building effective strategies that can bring leads, traffic, and sales is also a part of their work portfolio.
3. Brings support for the brand
Here’s the real difference between a digital marketing freelancer, mentor, and consultant.
The digital marketing freelancer does tasks for you – tasks you ask to be completed – no ideas.
When you hire a digital marketing consultant, they do offer some amount of ideas, but these ideas are solely focused on the questions you ask them to answer and solve.
A digital marketing mentor, on the other hand, inspects the project from every angle and projects real-time solutions to seal the gaps that seem most disturbing.
To do this, they need the help of tools and real-time support from men. These mentors are well connected, and they do create good support for the brand.
Projecting real-time images of the brand and holding up the brand in the right light is the usual goal of a digital marketing mentor.
Which tools you’d need, which platforms can fare well in your business line, and which division can receive help from what kind of support are all things a digital marketing mentor will assess and support.
4. Offering strategic guidance
Strategic guidance means providing expert mentorship and strategic leadership to the marketing team in an enterprise.
Developing effective SEO, social media, content marketing, email and paid advertising strategies is what comes packed together as strategic guidance.
Along with that, you get a good analysis of market trends, a look at customer behavior, and good campaign performance.
Improving brand visibility, lead generation, and audience engagement becomes an important part of rendering strategic guidance.
Industry best practices, actionable insight generation, and improvising digital marketing skills and decision-making abilities is what together becomes a part of strategic guidance.
5. Generating personalized feedback
Personalized feedback from a mentor is the best way to work around everything.
A mentor sees the entire system in place and chooses to offer personalized feedback.
What matters is how ready you are to act on these feedback points?
Personal feedback systems often get supported by ideas and suggestions together. These ideas can significantly impact the entire system.
6. Providing accountability and support
Starting from sharing clear objectives to generating suitable milestones, constructive feedback, practical solutions, and maintaining momentum, a mentor can help you with everything. Being accountable for your activities and learning continuously is what we would call getting proper support from a digital marketing mentor.
7. Networking
Networking in the right way with the right people and the right group is often a difficulty most enterprises deal with. Networking the right way within organizations, internal teams and members, as well as external and providing consistent support, guidance, and objectives with measurable results is what a mentor will sew together.
8. Provides you with practical guidance
Telling you a theoretical analysis and providing you with a practical solution are two different scenarios.
Theory and practice differ from each other, and a digital marketing mentor can provide you with on-hand advice which has worked for others, which is working for others, and which will surely work for others.
9. Updates you regularly
They keep you updated on the current trends and offer you the best support when it comes to understanding a particular concept.
Regular understanding of the market is important for almost every type of available business.
Keeping a tab on market trends and regularly focusing on constructive changes that could positively impact the market is essential to progress forward. Thus, regular updates are a kind of benefit you get best from their support.
10. Reviews your work
The roles and responsibilities of a digital marketing mentor are not limited just to career development but also to offering strategic guidance to enterprises.
Types of digital marketing mentors
It depends on which kind you want. The term, digital marketing mentor, is an umbrella, and there are different niches under it.
- SEO Mentor
- Content Marketing Mentor
- Social Media Marketing Mentor
- Analytics and Data Mentor
- E-commerce Marketing Mentor
- Personal Branding Mentor
- Digital Marketing Strategy Mentor
- Marketing Career Mentor
- Paid Advertising Mentor
How do you know which digital marketing mentor type you need?
Of all these different mentor types, which ones do you need? How do you know?
- Identify your goals clearly
- Find your gaps
- Consider your industry sector
- Match the mentor’s expertise with your needs
- Determine the career stage
- Assess the learning you need from your end
- Search for digital marketing mentors who have a good track record in the field you want
Qualities to seek in a digital marketing mentor?
The qualities are what separates one mentor from another, even within the same niche.
- Experience level
- Education level
- Niche or domain supported
- Expertise in your industry type
- Monetary compensation requested
There is a high chance that these factors will match from one individual to another.
But what really differs are these factors and choices:
- A strong industry experience is what will differ from one person to another on a personal level.
- Up-to-date knowledge around a specific direction you seek to resolve in your enterprise.
- Use cases and proven results in a specific direction.
- Excellent communication skill sets
- Match of temperaments of the enterprise and the mentor
- How do they carry their knowledge, and is the existing team fine with it?
How to choose a digital marketing mentor?
Once you know the direction in which you seek a mentor, you must find a platform next.
An online platform is the most suitable these days.
A platform like VirtUp can offer you no commission, no lock-in feature with no hidden fees to pay.
Every platform has its own merits and demerits.
You will have to choose one based on what you can withstand and what you can’t. You must decide on your bandwidth and your direction in the process.
- Do you want to connect with a consultant through a platform?
- Are you in need of a platform that works freely for you, or are you fine paying commissions?
- Do you desire to have a platform that locks you in or offers you complete freedom to pursue your business needs?
- Do you want a platform-owned communication system, or do you prefer a platform that gives you complete freedom to choose your own communication tools?
All these questions will help you reach the right platform – the one that operates the way you want.
VirtUp is a new name, an emerging platform but nonetheless successful in patching up the right combination and sending it your way.
Benefits of having a digital marketing mentor?
Do you know how you’d benefit if you had a digital marketing mentor by your side?
Here are the benefits of having one, whether you’re a startup, or a large enterprise with differing needs but to be solved through a digital marketing mentor.
When you’re hiring a digital marketing expert, ensure you profit on all these four fronts.
1. Foundational Benefits
Here are the benefits that can be summarized under foundational or early benefits of having a digital marketing mentor.
- Avoiding common mistakes by all means
- Adopting personalized feedback and guidance
- Learning fast
- Developing skillsets quickly
- Understanding the digital marketing concepts
- Developing better confidence in the marketing activity implementation
2. Growth Benefits of a Digital Marketing Mentor
Intermediate benefits of having a digital marketing mentor by your side include-
- Developing effective long-term marketing strategies
- Improving campaign planning and execution rate
- Improving the problem-solving capabilities
- Improving metrics around accountability and motivation
- Using industry best practices and related tools.
3. Advanced Level Benefits
Suitable growth benefits will include leadership, innovation, and long-term success-oriented benefits.
- A mentor must offer business growth guidance
- They help access valuable professional networks
- Developing teams and leadership goals in an enterprise is also their purpose
- They provide a competitive advantage through their deep expert insights
- It’s easy for them to identify new market opportunities
- They can thus contribute to achieving a higher ROI
4. Long-Term Benefits
Here are the long-term benefits that a digital marketing mentor can bring around an enterprise.
- Strong brand development
- Teaching adaptation to industry changes
- Creating sustainable business growth
- Finding long-term mentorship opportunities for oneself
- Providing professional support to the organization
- Better industry recognition and improved credibility
Which kind of companies benefit the most from a digital marketing mentor
Mostly every kind of company will benefit from having a digital marketing mentor.
- This category includes startups that are struggling to understand how to market their products.
- MSMEs, trying to keep a foothold in the market to reach the right contacts.
- SMBs trying to find out how to expand their businesses while retaining the structure of the business intact
- Large enterprises are looking for more ways to find support for their ongoing process of keeping the business running smoothly.
Where To Find a Digital Marketing Mentor?
Finding a digital marketing mentor is easy, but where you get one makes the real difference.
- Agencies and offline units work best for small regional businesses.
- New businesses or startups function best when they employ a mentor from an online platform—the one who can tell them how they can market their product range slowly and concisely but neatly.
- Some also prefer to hire completely independent experts through their websites.
There are some disadvantages to the process –
- Verifying a person’s credibility becomes tough.
- Using agencies and offline offices can cost more.
- Finding an online platform works, but most people dislike being tied to just one.
- A platform might delay the time that one needs to find a mentor—quick service is either through extra payments or unavailable.
- A platform might be costlier by itself, and paying commissions can seem like an arduous process for many.
- Paying securely is difficult with some platforms.
- Safe communication through the platform channel is difficult to maintain. Most people fear sharing their details and using the communication channels of third parties.
- Another constraint clients face on the platform is around the user-friendliness of the platform. From navigation to opaque forms, everything adds to the burden of a client who already has an enterprise to manage.
- VirtUp, a new name in the bandwagon but, nonetheless, one of the best upcoming platforms. Using VirtUp is easy, the interface is user-friendly, the process of selecting an expert is quick, a 2-minute process, and onboarding starts as soon as the expert agrees to take up the project. It’s easy to communicate with experts and convenient since you could use any means of communication to talk to them. Payment is safe and secure, while the platform is free, you will pay only for the expert charges when using it.
VirtUp is a no-commission, no lock-in platform which means you can establish long-term relationships with your mentors for a longer, healthier, stabler, and far more fruitful association.
We are already getting booked fast, join us to be the first few and to receive abundance of benefits in the process.
Charges to pay a digital marketing mentor?
There are different ways a mentor might charge; a digital marketing mentor might charge differently from a consultant.
- Beginner mentors—$50 an hour to $200 an hour.
- Experienced mentor—$100 to $250 an hour
- An industry expert mentor—$120 to $500 an hour
If you want to opt for monthly mentorship programs, then here is what you might need to pay for.
- Basic guidance—$1500 to $3500 a month
- Ultimate guidance—$1800 to $6400 a month
- Industry-specific guidance—$2500 to $10,000 a month
Frequently Asked Questions
How can different types of digital marketing mentors help you?
Each kind of mentor will bring with them the niche-specific expertise.
If you can target the expert from the right niche, you can benefit from growing in that niche significantly.
What topics can a digital marketing mentor help with?
They can work around SEO, social media and content marketing, email marketing, PPC advertising, personal branding, marketing strategy, and career development.
Is digital marketing mentorship worth the investment?
Yes, a good mentor can save you a lot of time and bring down the rate of trial-and-error learning, thereby providing valuable insights and offering accelerated professional and business growth.
Conclusion
Having a digital marketing mentor is like having a guru by your side. Knowing what to do means walking with the guide and learning from their experiences and failures. A digital marketing mentor can provide you with the right kind of solutions adequate for running your business.
They can also guide career paths but then that’s just a small portion of the overall scope.
What do you pay a mentor for?
Their time!
VirtUp works on a free plan model for clients. It means you don’t pay VirtUp a penny while selecting your expert from it. You just pay the expert for their time. Enjoy building a long-term support system for your enterprise by involving the most talented and eligible experts of this period.
When you choose a mentor from VirtUp, it’s different from choosing a mentor from a pure mentoring platform like Growth Mentor.
The selection process differs, and so does the kind of mentor you want to acquire for your enterprise.
If you are planning to learn a skillset or two, mentoring platforms could be the go-to platform.
But if you are planning to find an aid for your enterprise, we would recommend using VirtUp to find a digital marketing mentor.
Transparency, reliability, and suitability are factors that differ between the two different kinds of platforms available in the market.
One kind is represented by VirtUp, and another by these mentoring platforms.
If you are on VirtUp, you will know how much it liberates you from the shackles of a so-called platform. A new-gen model built to support the long run. Join us today to find what’s in store for you.