If you are not an expert in the field, it would be tough to hire a digital marketing expert to help you with your project. Recruiters and entrepreneurs need digital marketing experts to grow their businesses and target their online audience in a way that provides an outcome.
Before hiring anyone, it would be important to evaluate the capabilities and expertise of the candidate so that you know the person you are hiring is the right fit for the job.
Today, we will be talking about how you can filter out the right candidates for the right role of digital marketing experts for your company’s needs. Here is all you need to know about hiring a digital marketing expert.
Responsibilities Of A Digital Marketing Expert
Before we move on to the assessment process, it is important to understand the responsibilities of a digital marketing expert and follow digital marketing guidelines. Here are some of the channels that a digital marketing expert should have hands-on experience in. They should be able to set up and optimize the below-mentioned marketing elements:
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
- Email Marketing
- Content Marketing
- Social Media Marketing
- Pay Per Click (PPC)
- Affiliate Marketing
- Native Advertising
Your candidate should have experience in not only the technical aspect of these elements but also in the creative aspect. They should be able to conceptualize campaigns, work with designers for campaign images and videos, work with writers to write content that sells to the target audience, set up campaigns on various platforms, and track and report those campaigns.
Now that you know what a digital marketing expert should be familiar with and experienced in, it’s time to assess them to see if they are right for your needs.
Marketing Channels They Have Worked On
Your first question to your potential digital marketing expert candidate should be about the marketing channels they have worked on. It will help you understand how many marketing campaigns they can operate on various platforms. You should ask your candidate about:
- The channels they have worked on, how they set up the campaign, and how they manage, optimize, and report about it.
- The number of years they have used that channel.
- The results they had been able to achieve.
- Any certifications related to these channels.
With new platforms getting added every now and then, a digital marketing expert should be willing to learn them gradually. If they don’t know certain channels, it is not the worst thing in the world.
However, learning about their expertise and potential regarding certain channels will help you make a better decision when hiring a digital marketing expert.
Experience & Role in Marketing Campaigns
Your candidate may have experience spanning multiple projects, however, it is essential to understand their role in those projects. This is where it’s time to fill in the gaps in what their resume tells you and what they actually can do in the real world.
It will also tell you how much responsibility you can put on their shoulders with marketing campaigns with the experience they have in executing the strategies in the past. You should ask your candidate about:
- Their role in a marketing campaign and the tasks they were responsible for.
- If they joined a campaign later on, or they were working on it from start to finish.
- The scope of their task; were they planning the campaign themselves, or their role was to just execute the tasks?
- The result of their involvement in the marketing campaign.
- The collaboration experience with designers and writers.
KPI Tracking & Campaign Optimization
The thing about marketing campaigns is that setting them up with proper digital marketing guidelines and getting them to run is just the half job done. You need to track them continuously and improve your campaigns based on tracking data as well.
When hiring a digital marketing expert, your candidate should be aware of which key performance indicators (KPIs) should be given priority keeping in mind the goals to be achieved. With varied goals like re-targeting the leads, brand awareness on social media, or something else.
A good digital marketing expert should be able to outline these KPIs and measure them by tracking the campaign. It is also important for them to make changes according to the tracked data, in short, optimize the campaign that is not performing as per the expectations to get better results.
Here are some pointers to keep in mind:
- Reporting the campaign is important. An ideal candidate should be able to analyze the importance of daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, and yearly reports and what to include in those reports.
- Knowledge of some common analytics tools like Google Analytics, social media analytics, SEMRush, Moz, and other tools should also be there. Once again, not knowing one or two of these tools is not a red flag, but a hands-on experience and how to create reports using their data would help you choose the right one.
Short & Long-Term Expectations
More than your candidate, this part is about the recruiter. If you are hiring a digital marketing expert, it is better to set expectations before you hire the employee. It would be a mistake to set them when you are on-boarding them. This will help you in a more efficient hiring process since you would be hiring for a candidate with a clear set of expectations in mind. It will also help the candidate be prepared for the work and responsibilities they are handling. In the long term, this will help both the candidate and the company grow.
Coming back to the candidate, you can ask them to project what they can achieve in the short-term and long-term. Of course, they will not have all the information about your company or goals, but since digital marketing is number-driven, they might be able to give you an idea about how they will approach certain goals to get desired results while abiding by certain digital marketing guidelines. Of course, they can change once the candidate will get the job, with all the information and data in their hand. This step would just allow you to gauge their ability to plan and execute those plans effectively.
The Assignment
Every recruitment process ends with an assignment that will help you seal the deal. This is the part where you will get to see if the digital marketing expert that you are hiring can actually walk the talk. Here are some of the tasks you can assign to your potential candidate.
Pick a marketing campaign (which your company did in the past, or they have worked on in the past) and ask them if they had to do it all over again, what will be their approach. Moreover, you can ask them to identify the KPIs of that campaign, what are the likely achievable goals, and what are the weaknesses of that campaign. Lastly, you can ask them to create an action plan about how they will execute their campaign and achieve its goals.
Conclusion
Going through this screening process will help a recruiter choose the right candidate for their organization. For the successful achievement of your business goals, hiring a digital marketing expert that shines through all of the above-mentioned trials is a must!