Building a results-driven marketing team starts with hiring digital marketing experts who truly understand your business needs. But let’s face it — finding and hiring top talent in today’s competitive landscape isn’t always easy. Many businesses either struggle to identify skilled professionals or feel uncertain about making the right hiring decisions.

No worries — this blog is here to guide you through it all.

We’ll walk you through the essential skills to look for, explore reliable hiring resources, and help you understand the budgeting involved in bringing the right people on board. Whether you’re assembling a new team or scaling an existing one, this guide will help you make informed and confident decisions.

Let’s begin by understanding the key digital marketing skills you should prioritize.

How to Hire a Digital Marketer: Skills to Look For

Here are the core skills every top-tier digital marketer should possess — and continue to sharpen over time. While the list isn’t exhaustive, it highlights the essential capabilities you should look for when shortlisting and building your digital marketing team:

1. Search Engine Optimization (SEO): Your chosen digital marketer should be well-versed in SEO and SEM. Their expertise in these imperatives helps your content reach the target audience, narrow down the user database, optimize various forms of content and keywords, launch engaging campaigns, and much more.

2. Data Analysis: You need to hire digital marketers who have good command over functional procedures, modern software, and data analytics tools such as Google Analytics. They should know how to gather valuable information from users’ age, gender, location, device, preferences, etc.

3. Pay-per-click (PPC): Your digital marketing team should have a clear plan and budget to spend on advertising. They should be well aware of what and where to spend it to generate maximum returns – multiple sites around the web, direct advertising, Google Ads, sponsored posts, social media ads, etc.

4. Email Marketing: Another must-have skill that a digital marketer should possess is the knack to reach the user base via their inbox. They should have good knowledge about email marketing campaigns and how to implement them effectively.

5. Basic Design Expertise: Marketers that have a basic know-how about graphics designing and UI/ UX can help you benefit in the long run. As such, you need to choose candidates that have decent experience in Canva, Inkscape, and Adobe Creative Suite (Photoshop, After Effects, Illustrator, InDesign, etc.)

6. Customer Relationship Management (CRM): Marketers should have good CRM skills to monitor and maximize customer experiences. They should have the ability to connect with your user base on a personal/ emotional level and roll out essential strategies to meet the evolving demands.

7. Content Creation: Your selected specialists must be passionate about creating relevant, monetized, and user-centric content. They should focus on delivering quality content that accelerates user loyalty and retention. They should follow industry-acclaimed standards and security measures for every release.

8. Technology Approach: Digital markets need to keep up with the times and have a keen eye for the latest technology trends or changes. They should have hands-on expertise in using popular tools to monitor conversion optimization, lead capture/ enrichment, landing page, and so on.

Along with all the above, you also need to focus on hiring a professional with skills like adaptation to failures, teamwork, change management, storytelling, creative problem solving, leadership, agility, strategic planning, etc.

Where to Find Your Digital Marketing Dream Team?

Identifying the right hiring resources play a vital role in onboarding your choicest digital marketing experts. Hence, we bring you this compilation that will help you choose the best and elevate your digital transformation journey.

• Extend your in-house capabilities with targeted paid job ads or outsource your requirements by partnering with a full-service digital marketing agency.
• Look for potential candidates on social media such as marketing groups on LinkedIn & Facebook.
• Hire via online job boards like LinkedIn, indeed, Monster, Glassdoor, etc.
• Attend marketing events, conferences, seminars, and hackathons.
• Check out online marketing forums like Reddit, Digital Point, Quora, AffiliateFix, etc.
• Gather referrals and recommendations from your professional circle.
• Contact universities offering marketing degrees and ask them to introduce you to their best students.
• Attract candidates through your company website.

Recruiting processes for Expert Digital Marketers

If you’re in dilemma on whether you should hire an agency or hire a marketer, first ask yourself these questions:

• Do you need to build high exposure for the launch of your business/product/service?
• Have you already got a solid sales process in place which needs more leads?
• Do you already have established marketing channels that are becoming hard to manage?

If you’ve answered yes to any of the above, the chances are you’re ready to hire a dedicated digital marketer.

Check some effective guides that will help you to find the perfect hire.

1. Reference checking: Most employers check references as part of the hiring process. The process of Reference checking includes contacting previous employers, supervisors, schools, and so forth to verify key employment and educational information and learn more about a candidate’s background, experiences, and skills.

2. Resume screening: Resume screening is the process of reviewing a resume to determine if the candidate is qualified for the position. The decision will be taken on based-on education, experience, skills, and any other relevant information that may appear on the resume.

3. Paid trial projects: Once you have your best candidate(s) picked out, you can give them paid trial projects at your company before you turn them into full-time employees. Even after a thorough resume reading, reference check, a test, and an interview, the candidate can prove to be a bad fit for your team. After all, who can guarantee that they will keep the performance from the test task all the way throughout their time as an employee?

4. Cognitive ability tests: Cognitive ability tests ask questions about your mental capacity to work in a position. The answers you provide help employers predict your job performance since they’ll then know more about how you handle complexity. This will help you to understand whether weather candidate is capable of working in different circumstances.

5. Emotional intelligence tests: Emotional intelligence tests analyze your relationship-building skills and your knowledge of emotions. Having high emotional intelligence shows how you can defuse conflicts and relieve the anxiety of coworkers if they’re frustrated or disappointed. Some employers may use the Berke assessment to review the range of your emotional skills to see if they fit the position you applied for.

Note: Wherever you go looking for talent, keep one thing in mind. Do not just hire people based solely on their experience. We’ve all met people with a tremendous resume, but who wound up with bison-like interpersonal skills, unable to mesh with the company culture. Look beyond the resume.

How Much Does It Cost to Hire a Digital Marketer?

I’m sure, this question that must have crossed your mind while reading all the above is – what will be the overall cost to hire digital marketing specialists? And the answer is totally depending on how you delegate the work responsibilities.

The cost of hiring a Digital Marketing Specialist for your team will depend on the project requirements and geographic location you want to hire for. Altogether, the cost of hiring a digital marketer depends on whether you are looking for a long-term dedicated partnership, a contract-based model (Freelancer Model), or just one-time assistance.

If you are looking to hire an agency that can help Scaling-Up Your Business you got the right place. We are a dynamic bunch of Innovative, proactive & creative marketers, fully equipped to handle all sorts of marketing challenges you face. We are everything you need to drive success & enhance business values to the next level.

Absolute Search Media guarantees to Implement a step-by-step Results-Driven Marketing plan for your business. We walk with you from scratch to hatch.

Benefits of Hiring a Digital Marketing Specialist in Your Team

1. You NEED An Expert: Digital marketing is not easy to manage. A marketing expert helps design, create, and oversee a marketing project. This may include a multi-platform marketing campaign, advertising, promotions, and sales. Often, a Marketing Specialist will specialize in a specific communication channel (email, social, digital, etc.) or product area and therefore you need an expert who can help you to tell your business story.

2. Marketing Is Not a Part-Time Job: 1st of all as business owners we must know that marketing is not a part-time job. Marketing is the lifeblood of growth. Business leaders are sharp and savvy, and while you may have a good idea about what is involved in keeping your business marketing plan alive, you certainly aren’t going to be an expert in the subject unless that is your sole focus.

3. Saving Time & Money: Money and time are the two most crucial resources that a company wants to save. A company might think that undertaking the task of digital marketing will save them money. But this notion often gives contrary results. But when you hire a task, results are often surprisingly good.

4. The Chance to Grow with Guaranteed Results: You get the chance to learn more about marketing when you bring a marketing expert into your midst. You will be able to learn and gain valuable insights, find out new techniques and tactics, and new opportunities to help your business to grow.

5. Delivers Fast Results: Marketing professionals work with cross-functional teams to deliver marketing messages that improve brand awareness. And having an in-house marketing team gives your business more scalability and room to grow so that you can focus on the other important aspects of your business.