Digital Marketer or Digital Marketing Strategist? Here's How to Tell Which One You Need

By Jim Butz, Founder of Anuncier, a growth strategist with 20+ years of experience helping businesses and nonprofits solve growth challenges through smarter digital marketing strategy.

A digital marketer executes marketing tasks: building a website, running ads, posting content. A digital marketing strategist decides what needs to happen before any of those tasks start. Most businesses hire the first one when they actually need the second.

"Digital marketing" gets used to describe a hundred different jobs. Someone doing Answer Engine Optimization (AEO), someone running Instagram, someone writing email sequences: they'll all tell you they "do digital marketing." That's not helpful when you're the one trying to hire.

The real question isn't what digital marketing means. It's what kind of help your business actually needs right now.

What Are the Three Types of Digital Marketers?

Every digital marketer falls into one of three categories: technical, content, or strategy. You need all three eventually. You rarely need all three at once.

What Does a Technical Digital Marketer Do?

A technical digital marketer builds and optimizes your website and SEO. They take what you've already decided about your business and translate it into a site that works: one Google can crawl and rank, and one that actually loads on a phone. If your website is five years old and held together with plugins, this is the fix.

What Does a Content Digital Marketer Do?

A content digital marketer creates and distributes your social media, video, and written content. They take a brand that already knows what it wants to say and get it in front of people, consistently, in formats people actually watch and read. If your message is solid but nobody's seeing it, this is the fix.

What Does a Digital Marketing Strategist Do?

A digital marketing strategist diagnoses your business before recommending any platform, campaign, or rebuild. They dig into your business, your customer, and how you're actually showing up online right now, then tell you where the gaps are.

Why Do Most Businesses and Nonprofits Struggle With Digital Marketing?

Most businesses and nonprofits don't have a marketing problem. They know who they are and what they're good at. What they have is a gap between conveying that and how they show up digitally. Google sees an outdated or confusing site. AI tools pull old information. Customers get a version of your business that doesn't match reality, or worse, isn't targeted toward them at all.

A strategist closes that gap first. Skip that step and you can hire the best web developer or content creator around and still miss the mark, because you built a beautiful presence around the wrong message.

Which Type of Digital Marketer Do You Need?

If you know your website is outdated and holding you back, start with technical. If your brand and message already work and you need more eyes on it, start with content. If you're not sure where you stand, or you've already spent money on "digital marketing" without seeing results, start with a strategist.

You don't need to be ready for a full engagement to have that conversation. Even a short call with a strategist, before you've committed to anything, tells you which of the three you actually need. It also saves you from paying a content team to promote a message that isn't landing, or a developer to rebuild a site nobody was going to find anyway.

Does a Strategist Replace the Other Two?

No. A strategist isn't selling you technical or content work. Their job is to figure out what you actually need, then bring in the right people, sometimes from their own team, sometimes not, to get it done. Once the strategy's in place, they're the one keeping score on whether it's actually working, and for whom.

There's overlap between all three. A good technical shop thinks about content. A good content team thinks about strategy. But someone has to own the whole picture, and that's rarely the person also building your site or writing your captions.

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Not sure where you stand? Anuncier's Digital Strategy Blueprint is a one-time, $500 engagement built to answer exactly that question: a clear read on where your digital presence has gaps, and what to fix first.

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Yes, some of this was written with the help of AI, but our content starts and ends with humans. Please visit our AI policy.