Digital marketers in Nigeria help promote small businesses and top companies online in order to generate awareness and sales. Digital marketing is quite a lucrative career in Nigeria and this article explores how much a digital marketer in Nigeria could earn monthly.
Digital Marketers in Nigeria earn between ₦40,000 and ₦2,000,000 monthly in Nigeria. The amount a digital marketer takes home monthly depends on their level of experience as well as the sector of digital marketing they specialize in.
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Who is a Digital Marketer?
A digital marketer is a professional who is responsible for managing all marketing activities over the internet for a brand or company.
He or she helps promote the brand and its products or services online.
Digital marketers help companies;
- Boost their brand reach and exposure
- Drive traffic to conversion assets (e.g. website, social media)
- Acquire leads or prospects
- Convert leads to paying customers or clients
What are the roles of a Digital Marketer?
1. Content Creation
The backbone of digital marketing is content.
Texts, images, videos etc created and posted by a brand to inform, entertain or educate the audience about a brand.
Therefore, it is important for a digital marketer to be able to curate or create content that drives positive impacts for the brand.
This means graphics design, video editing, and web design skills are important for a career in digital marketing.
2. Paid Online Advertising
Digital marketers help companies they work for set up paid ad campaigns in order to show their products or services to more people and generate brand exposure or revenue.
Whether you are a startup or you have been in business for a long time, reaching people is important.
If you are a startup, it is difficult to generate a buzz without spending a dime. Also, established companies need to reach people who don’t currently follow them.
Paid online advertising helps brands reach more people at a cost.
The two major online advertising platforms in Nigeria are Meta (Facebook) and Google.
Meta shows ads to people using their apps (Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger) as well as websites and apps in partnership with them. These people are targeted based on interest and demographics.
Google (Google search in particular) shows ads to people based on what they are searching for. Google ads show above organic (unpaid) Google search results.
The Google display network includes YouTube, Gmail (and other Google Apps) as well as websites and apps that allow Google to show ads to their visitors and users respectively. Google display is quite similar to Facebook ads as it targets people based on interests and demographics.
Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, TikTok, and Quora also have paid advertising platforms. However, they are not as developed and effective as the two highlighted above.
3. Social Media Management
Social media platforms are spaces online where unique sets of people connect with people like them.
Where you find people, you find business. Therefore, companies create business profiles in order to acquire leads and customers from social media platforms.
It is the job of a digital marketer to manipulate the brand’s voice to fit the way people communicate on platforms chosen by the businesses they work for.
Content is dynamic, therefore, digital marketers need to understand how to convert or modify content from one platform for use on another platform.
4. Organic Traffic Generation
While it is not advisable to depend on organic (free) traffic alone for your business, organic traffic is great for long term business growth.
A Company could have a dry spell where they can’t fund paid ad campaigns. Work done to generate organic traffic does not dry up. And it’s free traffic!
Therefore, one of the roles of a digital marketer is to drive free traffic to the company’s website.
This could include the use of social media or search engine optimization.
Social media by directing people to ‘sign up on our website’ on various campaigns.
Search engine optimization involves those steps taken to inform search engines like Google and Bing that your website is the best option for a particular searcher’s needs.
What skills do you need to be a Digital Marketer in Nigeria?
Graphics Design
In Nigeria, employers value versatility.
Graphics design is an easy skill you can pick up to spice up your resume as a digital marketer.
Graphics design is crucial to social media marketing where a lot of content is visual.
Conveying ideas to a graphics designer takes precious time from the content creation process.
Therefore, digital marketers bypass time-wasting by creating designs by themselves.
They also help their employers maximize costs by removing the cost of hiring a graphics designer for the company.
Social Media Expertise
Over 70% of the world’s population are users of one or more social media platforms.
Hence, it is important for companies to harness the power of social media.
Most companies don’t have competent employees to manage their social media accounts.
Therefore, they need to hire digital marketers to do the job.
This makes social media marketing an important skill for digital marketers in Nigeria.
Social media marketing is more than posting content or boosting posts on Instagram.
There is a possibility that the social media platform a company focuses time on is not even right for them. After all, the best place a business can be online is where its customers live.
Social media platforms are made different; what works on Twitter might not work on Instagram.
Therefore, digital marketers need to deeply understand what works for every platform they choose to work with; the best time to post, the best type of content, how often to post etc.
Digital marketers who work on social media marketing also need to understand the basics of branding.
It is important to maintain consistent branding across content, this helps the audience create a separate space for the company in their mind.
Pay Per Click (PPC)
Just like it sounds, pay-per-click are promotional campaigns where companies only pay if their target audience clicks to visit their website.
Because it involves payment, it is important that the company generates enough returns to justify the amount spent on PPC campaigns.
Therefore, a digital marketer needs to target the proper audience and get them to click at the most cost-effective cost per click (CPC).
PPC advertising is a very important skill to master due to its high-risk return nature.
The most popular platform for PPC campaigns is Google search ads.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
SEO involves working on your website in order to position it high on search engine result pages.
Web pages that show up on top of search engine results get over 90% of the clicks by search engine users.
Therefore, these websites generate free traffic.
SEO is a long-term inbound marketing strategy and requires the efforts of a skilled SEO expert in Nigeria.
SEO is a tough skill to master, you need to be patient as you probably won’t see the results in less than a month.
Also, it involves writing and structuring content in accordance with search engine best practices.
Web Design
Just like it is difficult to pass across graphics design ideas, the back and forth it takes to create landing pages and websites could frustrate digital marketing efforts.
Also, a website created by a digital marketer is surely different from that created by a web designer.
A web designer just puts together texts, images or videos provided by the company in a structure that looks good to him or her.
However, a digital marketer understands how potential buyers see website content so they can perform profitable actions.
Therefore, web design is an important digital marketing skill to master.
Content Marketing
The purpose of content marketing is to inform, engage or educate your target audience.
Not everyone will buy from you immediately, therefore, you need to keep your audience interested in your brand until they need your product or service.
One important skill for digital marketers is the ability to create content that the target audience engages with and shares with their network.
Content marketing applies to both social media marketing and SEO.
You need a strong backbone of content for both types of marketing to work for you.
Data Analysis
Marketing is continuous.
As long as there is a business, it is important that the business is being actively promoted.
Therefore, it is important that your marketing campaigns get better with time.
How do you get your campaigns to be better?
Simple.
Looking at past campaigns;
What worked last month? What didn’t work? Was the ad budget enough? Why did our followers increase so fast?
Answers to these questions are in the data generated as the marketing work is done.
It is essential that a digital marketer knows how to look at marketing data generated objectively and draw constructive inferences.
Marketing Automation
A lot of jobs in marketing are routine e.g. posting content, and running ads.
If you already know the potential outcome, there is no need to spend your time doing it over and over again.
Marketing automation is the process of putting repetitive marketing tasks on auto.
This frees up time to do ‘new’ marketing work that yields better results.
Digital marketers need to be skilled in marketing automation tools to help their employers save time and resources.
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Which Digital Marketing specialization is the best in Nigeria?
Roles you can specialize to fill as a digital marketer include;
- Social media marketer
- PPC expert
- Content developer
- SEO specialist
- Facebook ad expert
When trying to choose a digital marketing role to specialize in, there are three factors to consider;
- Demand: It is nice to understand how to do something. However, if your skills are not in high demand in Nigeria, it will be difficult to find a job or get someone to hire you.
- Competition: When the supply of talents outweighs the need for talent, then employers of labour will pay less to hire people in such fields.
Therefore, you need to look to build a career in digital marketing roles where the demand for professionals is low but the supply (competition) is low.
Working in these roles is likely to earn you the most money.
How much does a Digital Marketer earn in Nigeria?
How much you earn as a digital marketer in Nigeria depends on;
- Your Experience
- Your Specialization
- Whether you are looking to work for full-time employment or you prefer freelancing/consultation.
- Your location
Digital marketing consultants with several years of experience in a specialization that has a high demand and low competition earn the most from digital marketing in Nigeria. Usually, professionals in Lagos and Abuja earn more than professionals in other locations in Nigeria.
Here’s a list of how much digital marketers earn in Nigeria from the specialization with the lowest demand. There are more specialized roles for digital marketing across the world, however, these are the roles businesses in Nigeria usually look to fill.
Content Developer
Content developers are responsible for creating engaging and compelling content for online platforms like web pages, social media, blogs etc.
Most employers in Nigeria combine the content developer role with social media marketer or digital marketing executive roles.
Content developers in Nigeria earn between ₦40,000 and ₦200,000 per month.
Social Media Manager
This professional is responsible for brand communications across the social media platforms selected by the company.
It is important that an employer differentiates between a social media manager and a social media ad expert. Most social media managers claim to understand how to create ad campaigns when the best they have done in this regard is ‘boosted posts’.
Social media ad setup is complicated, you need to hire someone who is specialized in this to get a good return on your ad spending.
Social media managers in Nigeria earn between ₦50,000 and ₦250,000 per month.
Facebook Ad Expert
Facebook ad experts are responsible for setting up ad campaigns that are shown on facebook.com, the Instagram ad and Facebook messenger.
They also create retargeting ads that target people that have been in contact with the business in order to drive conversions.
Facebook ad experts are directly involved in generating sales for the company. Therefore, their credentials as experts are questionable if they don’t generate any sales for the company or clients they work with.
Facebook ad experts in Nigeria earn between ₦150,000 and ₦400,000 per month.
PPC Expert
PPC experts set up ad campaigns on pay-per-click platforms like Google ads, Eskimi, Taboola, Bing ads etc.
They do keyword research, copywriting, and graphics design for these platforms since said platforms have guidelines and best practices for said ads.
Also, PPC experts are good with data analysis, they look at the numbers generated from their ad campaigns and make decisions that lead to better results.
PPC experts in Nigeria earn between ₦150,000 and ₦500,000 per month.
SEO Specialist
SEO specialists are responsible for developing and implementing tactics that help a business rank in top positions for search terms related to its business.
Their work includes keyword research, SEO copywriting, content creation, link building and programming.
SEO specialists in Nigeria earn between ₦150,000 and ₦500,000 per month
Digital Marketing Manager
In top companies, the professionals above work together as a team to drive results.
Therefore, it is important that they have a supervisor monitoring their inputs and results and relaying information about their activities to the management in a way they can understand.
This is the job of digital marketing managers.
Most digital marketing managers have tenable experience in the various sections of digital marketing. Therefore, they are in the best position to galvanize efforts by the digital marketing team and proffer solutions to problems faced by team members.
Digital marketing managers in Nigeria earn between ₦300,000 and ₦2,000,000 per month
| Job Role | Salary (Monthly) |
| Content Developer | ₦40,000 – ₦200,000 |
| Social Media Manager | ₦50,000 – ₦250,000 |
| Facebook Ad Expert | ₦150,000 – ₦400,000 |
| PPC Expert | ₦150,000 – ₦500,000 |
| SEO Specialist | ₦150,000 – ₦500,000 |
| Digital Marketing Manager | ₦300,000 – ₦2,000,000 |
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Here’s the thing
Multinational companies in Nigeria who hire digital marketers pay in dollars. Hence, Nigerian employees of these companies tend to earn significantly more regardless of their level.
Also, some digital marketers don’t actively seek employment. Rather they ply their trades as digital marketing freelancers or consultants. There is no cap on the amount digital marketing freelancers can earn. Experienced and connected digital marketing professionals earn in excess of ₦2,000,000 monthly.
