How To Hire A Digital Marketer: What To Look For & Avoid
Digital marketing is one of the most in-demand skills right now. So it’s only natural that knowing how to hire a digital marketer is such a vital skill. If you’ve never hired an online marketer before, or even if you’re just a little rusty, read on, this is for you.
Who is a Digital Marketer?
Hiring a digital marketing manager can be tricky when you’re not sure what the position entails. A digital marketer is a person in charge of growing a company’s online presence through digital channels, both paid and free.
They generate leads and increase brand awareness through a variety of channels, including social media, SEO, the company website, email marketing, content marketing, and other contemporary marketing channels. A digital marketer establishes and tracks digital marketing KPIs. They can work internally or independently as marketing consultants.
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So why is it important to know how to hire a digital marketer? In essence, your digital marketing strategy determines how your customers perceive you. In other words, your marketing campaigns could make or break your success as a business.
Hiring a Marketer: Skills to Look Up
Marketers are typically the “skilled in all trades” type, with little knowledge of many subjects. You also get marketers who are experts in their particular field (marketing is a huge field).
Recently, there has been talking of the “T-shaped marketer”, someone who is a generalist but also has a deeper knowledge about a particular area.
Depending on the type of position you are hiring for, you will need to know exactly How To Hire A Digital Marketer and keep an eye on some or all of these skills when evaluating candidates.
1. They are Very Analytical
Most of a digital marketer’s job is to look at the numbers on their screen and discover the story they are telling. From Google Analytics to dashboards on social media platforms, a digital marketer should be good at finding the right numbers, interpreting them, and strategizing to improve your Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). It is also great to have a solid knowledge of Excel because they will need to work with sheets, regardless of their specialty.
2. They are Great Writers
Even if your main job has little to do with writing, all digital marketers should have a talent for the written word. From writing captions for social media to writing copy for PPC ads to writing SEO-optimized content for your blog, your digital marketer needs to have the right writing skills to get the job done right.
3. They know SEO
Even if you are not an SEO specialist, all digital marketers should have some knowledge of SEO basics. Some examples include how to do basic keyword research, how to optimize for a specific keyword, what signals on the page are important for ranking, the difference between white hat and black hat SEO, and more. Also, it is good to know at least one major SEO tool like Moz, Screaming Frog, or Ahrefs/SEMrush.
4. They write Emails that Gets Opened
Your marketer needs to write great emails, but also know what happens once those emails are sent. They need a solid understanding of email marketing metrics, as well as knowledge of how to improve them.
5. They are Excellent Communicators
A digital marketer is someone who is the face of your business. They interact with their customers through the content they create and they need to feel comfortable communicating on a variety of platforms with different types of stakeholders.
Additionally, they should feel comfortable partnering with other marketers, business owners, contractors, website publishers, and anyone else who can help them and the business do better.
How to Hire a Digital Marketer
So, you have a ton of candidates for a job offer and now you need to narrow them down to find the best person for the job. Here are some 5 steps we’ve found very helpful in How To Hire A Digital Marketer.
These tips will help you identify your high-quality digital marketer quickly and with minimal effort (and some tips on creative sourcing strategies if you need to grow your lead pool).
1. Examine Candidates With a Skills Test
There is no better way to start shortlisting candidates than by putting your skills to the test. Instantly, the best will rise to the top. Many pre-employment testing tools allow you to generate a skills test in just 2 clicks from a database of over 1500 questions, and then rank candidates based on their performance.
Just select the Digital Marketing or SEO & Content Specialist roles, and instantly create a skills test for you from their library of over 3500 questions.
For example, the test might ask them to create a title for a social media image, calculate the conversion rate of a page, or correctly answer a technical question about SEO or Google Ads. It also has the added benefit that hiring managers who are not technical marketers can generate tests and evaluate candidates with complete confidence.
2. Search Them on Google
A good online marketer has a history of guest posts, appointments, and summary post entries, preferably on their website and blog. Dive deeper into your pool of shortlisted marketing candidates by Googling their names and seeing what comes up.
It will help you get an idea of their past work and experience, which you can use in addition to their skills test results to determine who to invite to the interview.
3. Look for Their Presence on Social Networks
Most digital marketers maintain a large presence on social media platforms.
Take a look at their LinkedIn, Twitter, and maybe even Facebook profiles to get an idea of the type of content they post, how active they are, what kind of communities they have built, and what kind of engagement they get.
Also, see who they are connected to. Is their LinkedIn network full of people? If you have mutual connections, you can potentially ask them for honest feedback on the marketer’s work. This brings us to the next point …
4. Request Testimonials
Testimonials, reviews, and recommendations from past clients are powerful tools in our arsenal when it comes to hiring digital marketers. See what people have said about working with your candidates on their LinkedIn profiles.
You can always reach out to the original LinkedIn review poster and ask directly for more detailed information about their performance and what it was like to work with them. The more specific the recommendation, the better.
5. Conduct Some Valuable Interviews
Since they completed their skills test, you now have all the information you need about the candidates to run a great interview. You can discuss your test results in the interview, but we find it more helpful to spend time getting to know the candidate as a person.
Ask about past experiences and what they learned from them, their leadership style, situational judgment, and career ambitions. This is a great way to find out how your candidate thinks and if they will fit in well culturally. In addition, you can ask additional questions related to the exam questions.
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Conclusion
Although it may seem complicated, knowing how to hire a digital marketer is not too difficult once you do your homework. Take some time to learn the most important aspects of a digital marketer’s job, think about what you want them to do for your business, and you won’t have a problem finding the right person for the job.
