A guide to hiring a digital marketer
Online marketing covers a lot of ground: search, paid ads, email, social media, content and the numbers that tie them together. Large companies split these across many people. Most smaller businesses cannot, so they look for one marketer who can cover the ground and know when to call in a specialist. This guide explains what to look for when you hire a digital marketer, how to test the skills, and how to set the person up so the work shows in your results.
Start with the goal, not the channel
Many hiring posts begin with a list of tools. A better start is one sentence about the goal. For example: more qualified enquiries for a service business, more first orders for an online shop, or more trial sign-ups for software. With a clear goal, a candidate can show how they would reach it and which channels they would try first. Without one, interviews turn into a list of buzzwords.
Generalist or specialist
A digital marketer who covers several channels suits a business that is still finding what works. As soon as one channel brings steady results, a specialist can take it further. If search is your main source of growth, look at our SEO specialists. If paid search is the main driver, see our Google Ads specialists. If you need a plan more than daily work, a marketing strategist is the closer fit.
What to test
- Planning: a one-month plan with goals, channels, tests and how success is measured.
- Execution: samples of ads, emails, pages or posts they wrote, and what happened afterwards.
- Measurement: how they set up tracking and how they would tell a real lead from a click.
- Judgment: which channel they would drop first, and why.
- Communication: whether a non-marketer can follow their report.
Interview questions to try
- Tell me about a campaign that did not work. What did you change?
- If I gave you a small budget and one month, what would you do first?
- How do you decide when to stop an ad or a test?
- Our leads fell last month. How would you find out why?
- What do you measure beyond clicks and opens?
Listen for specific answers with numbers from the candidate’s own work, and for honesty about what went wrong. Be wary of anyone who promises fast results without asking about your offer and your customers.
Run a small paid sample
Ask finalists to produce one useful piece of work for your business, such as a plan for the first month, three ad drafts with targeting, or an audit of your tracking. Pay for their time. Review the result together and ask what they would do with more access and more time. You learn more from this than from any resume.
Match seniority to the job
A newer marketer can run email, social and basic reporting under someone’s guidance. A marketer with several years behind them can own a channel mix and a budget. If you want one person to set direction, run the work and report to leadership, look for someone who has done that before in a business of similar size. Titles vary a lot, so judge by what they have done.
Give them access and a rhythm
A new marketer needs access to your website, analytics, ad accounts, email tool and customer relationship system, with permissions set carefully. Meet weekly for the first month to agree priorities and review the numbers. After that, a short written update each week and a monthly review is often enough. Keep ad accounts in your own name so you keep control if staff change.
What the first three months can look like
In the first weeks, a good marketer audits what you have: the website, the tracking, the ad accounts and the email list. They share what they found and fix the gaps that cost you the most, such as broken forms or missing goals. In the next stage they start two or three tests tied to your goal and report what each one showed. By the end of the third month you should see a clear picture of which channels bring leads and a plan for how to spend the next quarter. Ask candidates to describe this path in their own words.
Working with the rest of your team
A marketer does well when sales and the website owner are part of the loop. Ask sales which leads were good and which were not, and pass that back to your marketer so campaigns aim at the right people. Agree who can approve new pages and ads, so work does not wait for days. Small habits like these save more time than any extra tool.
Mistakes to avoid
- Hiring for a tool list instead of results from similar work.
- Starting on five channels at once, so none gets enough attention.
- Judging marketing only by clicks, likes or opens.
- Not setting up tracking before spending on ads.
- Expecting instant results from search work that takes months to build.
Need help with the support side of marketing? See our marketing virtual assistants, or read about digital marketing outsourcing if you would rather buy a team’s time.