We tell you about the profession of a director: what the specialist does, how much he earns, what skills are useful and what opportunities there are for growth.
What does a director do?
Pros and cons of the profession
What knowledge and skills does a director need?
Demand and salaries
How to become a director and grow in the profession
Expert advice
What does a director do?
Table of Contents
A director is a performance marketing specialist who works in the Yandex Direct advertising system. His tasks and responsibilities include working with Yandex Direct tools, namely preparing and launching advertising campaigns. This is what a director does:
● interviewing product owners and brand/product managers;
● studying consumer demand and competitors;
● analyzing the target audience of the business;
● collecting the semantic core (semantics) – keywords (queries) by which users search for a product in Yandex search;
● setting up and launching advertising campaigns;
● website traffic analytics, working with end-to-end analytics;
● supporting advertising campaigns, optimizing them and achieving efficiency.
Most often, a director is an operator who works with his hands. In large companies or projects, there are entire traffic departments, which include all performance marketing, or a contextual advertising department, where the gradation of specialists is built according to generally accepted grades: junior, middle, senior.
The basic level implies the ability to collect semantics, launch and run effective advertising campaigns. Advanced — the ability to understand end-to-end analytics and attribution models, carry out media planning, build a user path and optimize the Customer Journey Map (CJM) .
You can learn how to bring new clients to your company’s website and increase sales using search engine advertising on the course “Contextual Advertising Specialist”. The course includes theory and practice in an online simulator, as well as workshops with Yandex experts.
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Pros and cons of the profession
Pros
✅ You can predict an advertising campaign and get a controlled result.
✅ The profession is in demand on the labor market, and earnings often depend on personal qualities.
✅ Suitable for introverts, since the client’s brief is only a small part of the work.
✅ You can work freelance: set your own schedule and choose your own place of work.
✅ There are opportunities for horizontal and vertical growth.
Cons
❌ A fairly routine profession that requires perseverance.
❌ High competition in the labor market: to get a job, it is important to stand out.
❌ The result of the work may be limited by the customer’s advertising budget.
❌ Advertising tools are constantly updated, you need to monitor the changes and quickly adapt to them.
❌ There is a knowledge ceiling in a profession, after which you can grow by developing in related areas.
What knowledge and skills does a director need?
Let’s look at the basic professional and personal qualities that a director must possess.
Hardskills
Basic understanding of digital marketing
how leads are generated and sales funnels work, knowledge of the user’s journey, etc.
Proficiency in analytics
Yandex Metrica, Google Analytics. Ability to create reports and calculate outgoing traffic from the advertising account. Ability to work with web analytics reports and end-to-end analytics, such as Roistat, is also valuable.
Understanding attribution models
methods for distributing the effectiveness of acquisition channels that led to conversion. It is important for a director to be able to determine the relevance of using a particular attribution model depending on the specifics of the business.
Understanding the project economics
It is important to understand the needs of the business and its unit economics in order to correctly determine the profitability of advertising campaigns and the acceptable share of advertising expenses (AAE).
Soft skills
Perseverance and patience
you need to be ready for routine work, such as collecting a semantic core or daily cleaning of negative words when optimizing a campaign.
Analytical thinking
the ability to analyze data and ask questions – for example, to brief a product owner or product manager, understand your target audience, analyze the results of a campaign.
Empathy
will help you understand which groups of requests can be converted into sales or target actions, and which cannot.
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Demand and salaries
The minimum salary for a beginner director is currently 70-80,000 ₽. Specialists with three years of experience earn 120,000-150,000 ₽ depending on their personal results. With increasing experience and responsibility, you can move to a management position in the context department, where your income can grow to about 250,000 ₽. At the time of writing , hh.ru has almost 400 vacancies for directors, of which 21 vacancies offer a salary of 220,000 ₽.
In addition to standard grades, the salary of a director depends on the industry and place of work. In agencies, the income is usually lower at first than in business, but the former often hire juniors. Working in an agency also gives the opportunity to gain more experience in different cases and add it to the portfolio. Business prefers to hire middle or senior level specialists, but then the salary growth is often slower.
Sometimes in medium-sized companies, a director receives bonuses for fulfilling the plan. Conventionally, the specialist will receive as much percent of sales as he or she sold directly through his or her toolkit. In expensive niches, such as real estate or automobiles, this percentage is quite significant.
How to become a director and grow in the profession
At the moment, there are no higher education institutions that teach directors. There are two options to get the profession:
1. Take online courses
as a rule, their duration is several months. The format is convenient because throughout the training, students are accompanied by tutors and mentors, to whom they can ask questions, and experienced reviewers who provide feedback on assignments. Also among the advantages is the opportunity to put educational projects in a portfolio and prepare for Yandex Direct certification during the training process.
2. Engage in self-education
independently search for information and answers to questions on YouTube, thematic forums and communities. This path is slower and requires more effort, and the result is less predictable.
Now we can talk about a certain transformation of the profession: it is important for companies to hire specialists who are proficient in both contextual and targeted advertising. A good understanding of Yandex Metrica, the ability to build reports, analyze data and user behavior on the site will help grow in the profession. To increase their demand in the labor market, it will be useful for a direct marketing specialist to obtain Yandex Direct and Yandex Metrica certificates – they are valued by employers.
There are two ways to grow in the profession. Horizontal growth for a director is a transition from an agency to a business or a change of spheres, which is accompanied by a noticeable increase in salary. Vertical growth implies a classic career move from a beginner to an experienced specialist. Then a director can grow to the head of a department. If you expand your horizons in terms of marketing and master related tools, you can grow to the position of marketing director.
