Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for Digital Director

🎯 Role Definition

The Digital Director is a senior marketing leader responsible for defining and executing the organization's end-to-end digital strategy to drive measurable growth across acquisition, retention, ecommerce, and brand channels. This role leads cross-functional teams and agencies, owns the digital P&L and roadmap, optimizes customer journeys using data and experimentation, and scales marketing technology, content, and performance programs to deliver ROI, lifetime value and growth targets.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

Head of Digital / Head of Digital Marketing
Director of Ecommerce / Ecommerce Lead
Digital Marketing Director / Performance Marketing Director

Advancement To:

VP, Digital / VP, Marketing
Chief Digital Officer (CDO)
Chief Marketing Officer (CMO)

Lateral Moves:

Head of Growth / Growth Director
Director of Product Marketing
Director of Customer Experience (CX)

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

Define, articulate and own the multi-year digital strategy aligned with corporate objectives; create a clear roadmap for paid, owned and earned channels, ecommerce, CRM, content and product partnerships to increase revenue, ROAS and customer lifetime value.
Lead the planning and execution of omnichannel customer acquisition programs (search, social, programmatic, affiliate, display, video) and manage integrated campaign strategies that balance brand and performance KPIs across the funnel.
Own the digital budget and P&L: set quarterly and annual investment plans, allocate spend across channels, forecast ROI, monitor performance, and reallocate resources to maximize growth and efficiency.
Establish and drive a data-driven performance culture: define KPIs and dashboards (revenue, CPA, CAC, LTV, conversion rates, churn), implement measurement frameworks (UTM, attribution, incrementality), and present actionable insights to senior leadership.
Direct SEO and content strategy to increase organic visibility, drive qualified traffic, and support conversion through on-site optimization, technical SEO audits, content planning, and link building strategies.
Lead paid search and social advertising programs (Google Ads, Microsoft Ads, Meta, TikTok) including audience strategy, creative testing, bid management, and performance optimization to hit acquisition and revenue targets.
Own the customer lifecycle and retention strategy: design and optimize CRM, email, SMS, push and lifecycle journeys, including segmentation, automation, personalization and reactivation programs to grow retention and recurring revenue.
Manage ecommerce strategy and operations: optimize onsite merchandising, product page conversion, checkout flow, payment and fulfillment integrations, and align with merchandising and operations teams to improve average order value and conversion.
Implement a continuous experimentation and conversion rate optimization (CRO) program: prioritize hypotheses, run A/B and multi-variate tests using tools like Optimizely/VWO, interpret results, and scale winning variants.
Define and manage the martech stack roadmap (CDP, DMP, CRM, CMS, analytics, tag management, experimentation tools, ad tech) to enable scalable personalization, measurement, and automation across channels.
Lead UX and product collaboration to improve customer journeys and product discovery, applying UX research, user testing, and analytics to remove friction and enhance mobile-first experiences.
Oversee creative and content production: set creative briefs, test formats across channels, optimize for performance and brand consistency, and manage agency, freelance and internal creative resources.
Manage vendor and agency relationships: select partners, negotiate contracts and SLAs, ensure outcomes and accountability for media buying, creative, data, and technology vendors.
Build and mentor a high-performing digital team: hire talent across paid media, SEO, content, analytics, CRM and UX; define roles, KPIs, career paths, and establish a culture of ownership and continuous learning.
Lead cross-functional stakeholder engagement with Product, Engineering, Sales, Finance, Legal and Customer Support to align digital initiatives with product roadmaps, compliance and operational requirements.
Establish and maintain robust privacy, compliance and data governance practices for marketing data, consent management, and ad targeting to meet GDPR/CCPA and platform policies.
Drive new growth programs and channel diversification including partnerships, marketplaces, app growth, international expansion and emerging channels to expand reach and revenue.
Create executive-level reporting and storytelling: translate complex data into concise recommendations for the CEO, executive team and board, and provide clear monthly/quarterly performance reviews with action plans.
Develop pricing, promotion and loyalty strategies in collaboration with commercial teams to balance acquisition velocity, margin and customer lifetime value.
Lead digital transformation initiatives: identify process and technology gaps, sponsor implementation projects, manage change, and deliver measurable productivity gains.
Set standards and KPIs for creative, landing pages and attribution models to ensure reliable testing and measurement across the funnel.
Liaise with Finance to reconcile marketing investments to revenue, model scenario analysis for demand planning, and ensure responsible budget governance and forecasting discipline.
Champion brand voice and governance in digital channels, ensuring consistent messaging, legal/compliance adherence and quality across global markets and partners.
Identify and prioritize technical debt and platform improvements with Engineering/Product to improve site speed, stability and overall digital performance impacting SEO and conversion.

Secondary Functions

Support ad-hoc data requests and exploratory data analysis.
Contribute to the organization's data strategy and roadmap.
Collaborate with business units to translate data needs into engineering requirements.
Participate in sprint planning and agile ceremonies within the data engineering team.
Provide mentorship and ad-hoc training sessions on analytics, attribution and martech best practices for cross-functional partners.
Serve as a subject matter expert for RFPs and vendor evaluations related to digital marketing and analytics.
Assist in crisis communications and rapid response campaigns for platform incidents or reputation management.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

Digital strategy development and execution across paid, owned and earned channels.
Advanced knowledge of paid media platforms: Google Ads, Microsoft Ads, Meta Business Manager, TikTok Ads, programmatic DSPs.
Deep SEO expertise: technical SEO audits, on-page optimization, schema, site architecture, content strategy, and backlink strategy.
Analytics and measurement: Google Analytics 4 (GA4), server-side analytics, tag management (Google Tag Manager), event tracking, and KPI modeling.
Attribution and experimentation: familiarity with multi-touch attribution, incrementality testing and A/B/MVT testing frameworks and tools (Optimizely, VWO, LaunchDarkly).
Martech stack management: experience with CDP, CRM (Salesforce, HubSpot), CMS (AEM, WordPress), marketing automation platforms, and data warehouse integrations.
SQL and working knowledge of data querying to validate marketing performance and perform ad-hoc analysis.
Ecommerce platforms and payments: Shopify Plus, Magento, BigCommerce or enterprise platforms and knowledge of marketplace integrations.
CRO and UX optimization: funnel analysis, heuristic reviews, conversion optimization tools and UX research methods.
Tagging, tracking and data governance: consent management (CMPs), privacy-first tracking strategies, and compliance with GDPR/CCPA.
Budgeting, forecasting and P&L ownership for large digital budgets and vendor contracts.
Proficiency in dashboarding and visualization tools: Looker, Tableau, Power BI, or Data Studio.
Familiarity with programmatic ad operations, partner integrations and APIs for ad performance automation.

Soft Skills

Strategic thinking and the ability to translate high-level objectives into tactical, measurable plans.
Strong leadership, team building and talent development skills; experience managing dispersed or matrixed teams.
Excellent stakeholder management and influencing skills with executives and cross-functional partners.
Data-driven decision making with a balance of analytical rigor and commercial judgment.
Exceptional communication and storytelling skills to translate complex analytics into clear recommendations.
Change management and the ability to lead digital transformation in a complex organization.
Prioritization and project management aptitude; comfortable balancing short-term wins and long-term initiatives.
Creative problem solving and a growth mindset with continuous curiosity for new channels and technologies.
Negotiation skills for vendor, agency and partner contract management.
Resilience and ability to operate in fast-paced, high-pressure environments with tight deadlines.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

Bachelor’s degree in Marketing, Business, Communications, Computer Science, or related field.

Preferred Education:

Master’s degree (MBA or MSc) in Marketing, Digital Media, Business Analytics or related discipline.
Executive education/certifications in digital marketing, analytics or leadership (e.g., Google Ads/Analytics certifications, Pragmatic Institute, or similar).

Relevant Fields of Study:

Marketing
Business Administration
Computer Science / Information Systems
Data Analytics / Statistics
Communications / Media Studies

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range: 8 - 15+ years in digital marketing, with at least 3-5 years in a senior leadership role managing multi-disciplinary teams and budgets.

Preferred:

Proven track record of driving measurable revenue growth via digital channels in B2C or B2B ecommerce environments.
Experience with enterprise martech stacks, data warehouses and cross-functional digital transformation projects.
Demonstrated P&L ownership, large-scale media buying experience and ability to manage annual budgets in the millions.
History of successful agency/vendor management and procurement for media, creative and data partners.
Experience scaling global or multi-market digital programs and adapting strategies for localization and regulatory environments.