Hiring a digital marketing leader can be a very difficult task. More companies are starting to dedicate their resources to inbound marketing which means a greater demand for leaders with digital marketing experience.
Unfortunately, there seems to be more demand than supply right now, and if you’re not strategic about your search, it could take months to find the perfect person or you could end up making the wrong hire.
Use these five tips to help you hire a digital marketing leader with the right experience and skills needed to execute successful digital marketing initiatives and strategies.
Digital Marketing and Leadership Skills
Digital marketing best practices and channels are constantly changing as new technologies are developed and consumers change how they buy products and services. It’s important to hire a marketing leader who has experience implementing current best practices and who also works to stay up with industry and future trends.
A digital marketing leader in today’s world should be able to lead the strategy development and delivery of digital marketing campaigns to audiences across different channels. These channels might include mobile, email marketing, social media, SEO, SEM, video, marketing automation and paid advertising. Ask for specific examples of how the candidate used one or more of these channels to drive customer engagement and make sure they have the numbers to back it up.
When it comes to specific skills they should possess, that will depend on the exact role and requirements of the position. However, digital marketing leaders should have a mix of technical, creative and soft skills. These skills can include the ability to measure and prioritize, attention to detail, analytics, UX understanding, lateral thinking, and expert knowledge of Excel.
And most importantly, the candidate should also have extensive leadership skills and experience managing people on a digital marketing team. The positions and organizational structures on digital marketing teams vary greatly and the marketing leader should know where they need more resources in order drive the business strategy. Also, the marketing leadership candidate should know how to manage people in a variety of digital marketing roles and have the interpersonal and communication skills needed to make the team work.
Understands Personas
One of the biggest challenges marketing leaders should be able to solve for your business is being able to understand your target audience and how they move through the buying process. No longer is the customer journey a linear path. There are many ways potential buyers can get to your website and make a decision to reach out or purchase your product or service.
Strong marketing leadership candidates will have experience developing and using audience personas to create future marketing strategies and meaningful connections with buyers. New tools and platforms give marketers access to audience insights that they never had before and can then use to very specifically target potential customers. For example, creating ads used to be focused solely on keywords, but now you can create ads and target them to people with specific demographics, interest, and other factors.
The ability to understand buyer insights and personas is critical for a marketing leadership candidate to have. This allows for consistency across the entire company including positioning, communication, services, sales, and support.
Methodical Hiring Process
Using a proven hiring process is important when hiring for any position, but becomes even more important when hiring for such a critical and business changing role. An ideal hiring process would include a thorough job description, years required, distinguish between paid and organic, and multiple interviews with different employees from your company.
Creating an accurate job description will help attract only candidates with the right level of skills and experience to the job. Oftentimes, marketing professionals will have very diverse backgrounds and education. Unlike hiring for positions like accountants or healthcare professionals where you can require certain education and training, marketing leaders may have various degrees and experience.
Also, having candidates perform multiple interviews with different people from HR, leadership, and the marketing department will help reduce hiring bias and make sure the candidate has both leadership and marketing qualifications.
Ask for Client References
Many hiring processes will include a reference check where candidates will give you a list of 3-5 previous employers or coworkers to verify their employment and skills. You can take this a step further by talking to past clients the candidate has worked for.
If you’re interviewing candidates from a marketing agency, then you can ask the candidate for past examples of work they have done in your industry. Then, find the contact information for the businesses and call to ask them for feedback about the candidate’s work and management skills. You can ask them about their working relationship, whether or not the candidate ever missed any deadlines, and how the candidate contributed to the project.
How Do They Measure Success?
Many digital marketing leaders lack is the ability to measure the success of digital marketing campaigns and how to measure the ROI of social media and other marketing initiatives. This is a major problem because marketing leaders should be able to measure the results of their efforts and how the money they spend directly results in sales.
One way to determine whether a candidate has been able to measure success in the past is to first ask how they define success and how they communicate this to their superiors and company executives. Keep in mind that how they determine success will depend on the business and the industry.
For example, success can be measured by the amount of subscribers to social media or newsletter, qualified leads, or how much traffic is generated to the website depending on what goals make sense for the company.
The most important part of asking the candidate about their success is making sure the candidate knows how to use the tools to identify, manipulate and understand data. Make sure you’re able to ask questions about Google Analytics, email metrics, PPC campaigns, etc and know the right answers.
Hiring digital marketing leaders is one of the digital marketing trends for 2016 and doesn’t seem to be letting up anytime soon. Another digital marketing trend is using contract and freelance marketers to supplement your current marketing team or to manage all of your marketing activities. Find out how Naviga’s marketing recruitment services can help you fill your digital marketing leadership position on a contract or full-time basis.
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