How To Hire A Digital Marketer

A digital marketer manages digital marketing channels to increase the visibility and reach of a new product or service. They are tasked with increasing the traction and engagement the marketing content receives, in hope that this translates into a higher volume of sales for the company or brand.

This article will cover the tasks of a digital marketer, explore the soft skills, abilities and technical knowledge needed for the role and review the best pre-employment tests to include within your hiring process.

Embedding pre-employment testing provides invaluable insight, allowing you to make informed and objective hiring decisions that ensure the best candidate is recruited for your vacant role.

What should a digital marketer be able to do?

A digital marketer works to optimize the promotion of a new product or offering via digital platforms. An effective digital marketer needs to be able to research and analyze relevant search query behaviors and user activity across engines and websites.

They then need to apply this insight to ascertain the best digital marketing strategy for each product they are responsible for. They are in charge of the execution of strategy delivery through appropriate digital marketing channels and the monitoring of its efficacy.

Digital marketing involves understanding user mindsets and behaviors to appropriately tailor messaging and to target outreach so it has the greatest impact. Digital marketers often work as part of a larger team, so need to have strong team working skills to work collaboratively on designing and executing marketing strategies.

A digital marketer's tasks include:

• Creating and implementing a content strategy
• Managing social media channels
• Optimizing website structure and updating content
• Utilizing Google Ads and email marketing
• Writing engaging and persuasive marketing messages
• Tailoring content to specific audiences
• Using images and visualizations effectively to increase engagement
• Overseeing search engine optimization (SEO) to drive traffic to product websites
• Managing Pay-Per-Click marketing (PPC)
• Translating views into sales through optimizing the online sales experience
• Monitoring and evaluation - capturing data to demonstrate the effectiveness of each campaign
• Writing reports on the Return On Investment (ROI) of their campaigns
• Giving presentations on campaign performance
• Managing the company or brand's online presence by utilizing online networking tools through LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter, etc.

Skills to look for in a digital marketer

A digital marketer requires a number of key skills to be successful in carrying out their everyday tasks. Testing for the presence of the following skills is recommended when hiring a digital marketer:

Oral communication: digital marketers tend to work within digital marketing teams or alongside other marketing roles. For collaborative working, good communication skills are vital. Digital marketers need to be able to share their ideas for content and marketing strategy with their colleagues, and to deliver presentations reporting on campaign progress and effectiveness.

Software skills: digital marketers must be able to engage effectively with social media and marketing platforms. This means they need to be comfortable using post-scheduling platforms, data insight and analytics platforms, and multiple social networking and marketing applications.

Attention to detail: an eye for detail is important, as digital marketers need to ensure their posts are free from any mistakes. A typo in a marketing campaign impacts the overall impression created and can damage the high-quality and professional image of a brand.

Design skills: good design skills are a useful addition to a digital marketer's skills set, as they need to be able to create engaging campaign web pages, visualizations and social media tiles.

Useful abilities for a digital marketer

To be successful in their role, digital marketers need to have abilities that complement the key skills above. These should include:

Problem-solving: a good problem-solving ability gives an employee the tools to overcome issues that may arise during a digital marketing project. It also helps them to think about new and innovative ways to reach untapped audiences and sales potential.

Problem sensitivity and social perceptiveness: these abilities are useful for a digital marketer as they enable them to understand the perspective of the end-user or customer. This understanding means they can tap into and speak to their values through their marketing strategy.

Flexibility and adaptation: the ability to be flexible and adapt to changing deadlines is a key ability for digital marketers, especially as they may well be responsible for the marketing strategy of more than one product or service. This means they will need to juggle multiple responsibilities and overcome challenges swiftly by using intuition and creativity.

Which soft skills tests could I use to hire a digital marketer?

Pre-employment tests can be used to assess the soft skills of your applicant pool, not just aptitude and technical ability. Soft skills are important indicators of a candidate's ability to integrate into the workplace and effectively produce high-quality work.

Considering embedding the following soft skills tests into your recruitment process to ensure your candidates are well-rounded in their abilities:

Communication: digital marketers need to be excellent communicators - able to devise the best way of communicating to diverse audiences whilst communicating effectively within their own teams. A communications skills test presents hypothetical scenarios and asks candidates how they would respond. Proportional and professional responses indicate high levels of empathy, appropriate etiquette and good people management skills.

Teamwork: digital markers often work as part of a digital marketing team, so will need to work well collaboratively - this involves good listening and people management skills. A teamwork test consists of hypothetical team working scenarios and asks applicants to answer a series of multiple-choice questions. These questions relate to navigating common hurdles when working, and ask what the best next step is in the situation presented.

Interpersonal skills: interpersonal skills are vital for good teamworking and for building strong client relationships. The latter is essential if you are hiring a digital marketer to work at a marketing agency, rather than for an in-house company or brand position.

An interpersonal skills test is a handy way to assess communication, social interaction and teamwork in one - touching upon emotional awareness, empathy and conflict resolution. Candidates are presented with a series of theoretical scenarios and asked to select the most or least effective way to deal with the situation described from a list of multiple-choice options.

Time management: good time management is important for digital marketers as they must work to deadlines whilst managing their workload effectively. A time management test is a great way to assess whether your prospective employees possess the time awareness and organizational skills needed to fulfill their responsibilities by delivering high-quality work on time.

Adaptability: as mentioned above, the ability to adapt is highly useful for digital marketers. Test this ability through an adaptability test, which features hypothetical scenarios and asks candidates to select the course of action that is closest to their own from a multi-choice list.

The results of the test give insight into each candidate's ability to manage pressured and unexpected situations and adapt rapidly - to changing product launch dates, an amended operational strategy or to reaching additional target audiences.

Which technical or aptitude tests could I use to hire a digital marketer?

Alongside soft skills tests, assess your candidate pool for technical skills and aptitude. A comprehensive testing round aids decision-making by providing objective insights across all skills areas and highlighting career potential.

When hiring a digital marketer, consider using the following aptitude and technical tests:

Verbal reasoning: digital marketers work with the written and spoken word - through social media posts, blog posts, web copy, videos and podcast audio, for example. A verbal reasoning test assesses a candidate's grasp of the written word, through presenting a series of passages and asking them to review statements related to the text. The test assesses the ability to understand, analyze and interpret text under time pressure, and measures attention to detail around the content and impression of passages.

Logical reasoning: a logical reasoning test is a good way of assessing observation skills, the ability to think laterally and problem-solving ability - all qualities that are useful for a digital marketer. A logical reasoning test features sets of patterns involving shapes and symbols (and functions such as rotation, translation, transformation and mirroring). Prospective employees need to deduce the rule(s) governing the patterns and select the next element in the pattern sequence from an options list.

Error checking: digital marketers can't afford to make embarrassing mistakes in campaign posts reaching large audiences. An error checking test presents candidates with multiple data sets and asks them to highlight any discrepancies between them.

Our recommended test battery for a digital marketer

To increase the efficiency and effectiveness of your recruitment process, use pre-employment testing to give insight into soft skills, aptitude and technical ability. The data gathered is easily interpreted and helps to ensure the strongest candidate is hired for your vacant role.

We recommend embedding the following tests within your digital marketing recruitment process, at a minimum:

Communication: as we've covered, digital marketing is integrally all about communication. Good communication understanding and strong communication skills help digital marketers to produce tailored and engaging content as well as execute campaigns effectively as a team.

Logical reasoning test: a logical reasoning test is a good way of testing mental dexterity, lateral thinking and problem-solving. If a candidate scores highly, they are more likely to possess the ability to rapidly grasp the nuances of the task at hand and come up with creative ways forward.

Error checking test: digital marketers must write accurate, engaging prose - free from all mistakes, however small. An error checking test ensures the candidates that progress in your recruitment process are detail oriented and can catch any errors before they are published online.

View our digital marketing testing guide to find out more about using pre-employment skills tests within your hiring process.