How to Hire Your Digital Marketing Dream Team

Do you want to build an all-star digital marketing team? Having the right team around you makes an enormous difference to your business.

It sounds easy enough, right? You analyze the type of staff you need, advertise to find them, employ them, and then your business grows from strength to strength.

Hold on a second.

Every startup would flourish with a dream team powering their marketing efforts if it were that simple. But first, you need to figure out who you need. Then, where to find them and how to assess if they’re a good fit for your business.

That’s what I’m going to talk about today. 

Key Takeaways

• Begin by determining the specific roles needed for your digital marketing team based on your business goals, size, and budget. 
• Prioritize hiring individuals with the right expertise, a results-oriented mindset to drive success, and who are a good fit with the rest of the team.
• Key members of a digital marketing team include a technical SEO expert, paid media marketers, and content marketers.
• Good options for finding employees include marketing events, specialist job boards, and LinkedIn.
• 54 percent of companies say implementing AI has improved productivity, so ensure new digital marketing team members are up-to-date with emerging technologies.
• Content, technical SEO, and algorithm changes are three of the top challenges for businesses, according to Boostability. This highlights the need to employ experts who can help grow your business.

Table of Contents

• Key Takeaways
• Consider Who’s Needed for Your Digital Marketing Team
  • Why a Jack-of-All-Trades Won’t Always Cut it
  • Technical and SEO Specialists
  • Content Marketers
  • Social Media Marketers
  • Paid Media Marketers
  • Other Roles
• Where to Find Your Digital Marketing Dream Team
  • 1. LinkedIn
  • 2. Marketing Events
  • 3. Employee Referrals
  • 5. Specialized Job Boards
  • 6. Paid Ads
  • 7. Beyond Your Brick-and-Mortar: The Rise in Remote Working
  • 8. Mentor Students
• Don’t Hire Based on Experience Alone
• Onboarding Is the Backbone of an All-Star Marketing Team
• FAQs
• Conclusion

Consider Who’s Needed for Your Digital Marketing Team

There’s no rule about the number of people you need to fill common digital marketing jobs, and the type of employees you need will vary depending on your business, goals, and budget. 

Build out your marketing team based on your business needs around these three key roles (but keep in mind, your marketing team may include all of these, some of these, or even additional roles):

• Content team: responsible for creating, sourcing, and managing your content like blogs, podcasts, videos, infographics, social content, content curation, white papers, etc. They will also determine the best marketing channels to promote that content.
• Acquisition team: responsible for the initial acquisition of customers, including the lead generation and acquisition strategies. Aside from overseeing the organic and paid traffic campaigns, these are your go-to people for monitoring analytics and tracking key performance indicators (KPIs) — you need to know which channels work best as quickly as possible for your marketing strategies to be effective. 
• Monetization: responsible for making the business profitable, maximizing the revenue your teams generate, and developing the plan to help you measure success over time. This is where your team comes together to optimize conversions through split testing, improving email marketing strategies for better open and click-through rates, etc.

If you’re just starting out or have no marketing team,  you’re probably wearing many hats like a full-stack marketer, but hiring at least one person for each of the above areas is beneficial. 

A wide skill set is great, but one person can only do so much. I’ll touch on those limitations next (believe me, I’ve been there!)

Why a Jack-of-All-Trades Won’t Always Cut it

·What exactly is a full-stack marketer?

This image from Semrush should help:

Regardless of the organization, they have more experience in virtually every area of marketing and have a broad skill set, making them highly versatile, but there are drawbacks:

• An individual can only be so productive on any given day, even with the time-saving benefits of streamlining processes with AI-driven tools.
• A full-stack marketer might be able to function in various areas, but that doesn’t mean they carry equal skills in every area.

Full-stack marketers can be a smart investment initially, but they fit best with small businesses and new starts. From there, they are ideal candidates for leading digital marketing teams because they understand many different marketing functions and can foster collaboration and communication among your specialist teams.

But who exactly are those specialist teams? Let’s take a look below.

Technical and SEO Specialists

Every business that wants to succeed online needs to get technical and SEO specialists on board. They lead critical areas of your marketing strategy like keyword research, website optimization, and technical SEO improvements like schema markup and page loading times.

According to Boostability’s digital marketing trends report, respondents cite technical SEO as one of the top three most challenging tasks, highlighting the importance of having a specialist team manage this role:

Content Marketers

It’s not enough to just have a website. You need experts to build a complete content marketing strategy around it, which includes fresh blog content, an optimized website, and storytelling that evokes emotions and sells your brand.

But don’t overlook the fact content strategy is more than just building a content calendar. It’s also about:

• Understanding, engaging, and retaining your audience.
• Planning and promoting content.
• Measuring and analyzing results.

Then taking what works and doing more of it.

Social Media Marketers

Today, many searchers head to social media to find out more about brands and do research, so you need a presence there, too. Although you could happily post content yourself, having a specialist build community engagement, create platform-specific content, nurture influencer partnerships, or run paid social advertising can likely get you better results. 

If you want to get inspired by the power and reach of social media marketing, check out National Geographic on Instagram. Their social media marketing team nails it with an active community of 280 million followers:

National Geographic performs so well on Instagram because of its captivating imagery, storytelling emphasis, and focus on a specific audience.

Paid Media Marketers

Ever tried running a paid advertising campaign? Then you know it’s not cheap, especially if it falls flat. That’s why it makes sense to employ or contract paid media marketers who know their way around Google Ads, campaign creation and optimization, budgeting, and ROI tracking. They’ll also know which metrics matter the most, so they’ll keep your campaigns on track.

With social media ad spending set to exceed $88 billion by 2028, paid media marketers are likely to stay in demand.

Other Roles

Depending on your areas of emphasis or changing client needs, it’s likely that you’ll need to consider recruiting other employees for your digital marketing team. These may include:

• Email marketers
• Influencer marketers
• Graphic designers and UX/UI designers
• Video creators
• CRO and data analysts
• Marketing ops and local SEO specialists
• Project, CRM, and community managers
• Marketing automation, brand, and AI strategists to increase productivity

Where to Find Your Digital Marketing Dream Team

Business would be much simpler if you could hire a digital marketing A-Team in one fell swoop.

If only.

You’ll have to piece your team together, which won’t happen overnight; the average hiring cycle is 44 days.

But, knowing how to find and attract talent can simplify the process. I’ll cover your best options next.

1. LinkedIn

If you want to reach and engage top talent for your marketing team, you need to go where those people will likely be spending the bulk of their time. And that’s LinkedIn. You’ll find potential employees by:

• Searching posts
• Looking through profiles
• Posting jobs ads
• Using Recruiter or Recruiter Lite to search for candidates, do basic sourcing,  collaboration,  and send InMails.

Joining groups is also a good way to find staff.  

Target the people providing authentic value in discussions, a solid track record, testimonials in the profiles, and examples of their past work.

2. Marketing Events

Networking can be enormously beneficial when you’re looking to hire digital marketing staff. But where do you start? 

Attending marketing events, workshops, open houses, and local business meetups gives you great opportunities to network with like-minded people and find new staff.  There are also virtual options, like the Gartner Symposium Social Summit or Content Marketing World.

These can all be an excellent way to explain more about your business, showcase workplace culture, and hand out business cards.

These events are also ideal places to collect resumes. 

3. Employee Referrals

You know who knows exactly what it takes to do the job?

Your current digital marketing team. Skilled digital marketing professionals usually have networks of people they can call on who might be actively looking for work, so it makes sense to leverage them.

Why not offer them a bonus for helping you find winning prospects that fit the bill for your open marketing positions? For example, Thermo Fisher Scientific rewards employees for supporting the business with talent acquisition:

Rewards motivate your employees to find the right people because they want to bring in people who can help build the business and reduce the workload.

5. Specialized Job Boards

If you’re looking to hire a digital marketer with a special skill set, then find those specific candidates based on their skills.

Here’s an example. If I wanted to hire a content writer, I might target the ProBlogger community with a specific job post.

You’ll find technical SEO talent on Arcdev, while Digital Marketing Jobs has experts with various specialties, including content, social media, and digital PR.

Niching down like this is a great way to connect with candidates, especially if you’re open to remote workers.

6. Paid Ads

Paid ads may not necessarily reach the passive candidate, but social media encompasses billions of people. Additionally, 70 percent of job searches begin on Google, making PPC ads a good choice for reaching potential employees. If you’re new to using Google Ads for recruiting, this Reddit group has some great advice, like including an attractive employee value proposition, adding strong calls to action, or adding terms like “hiring urgently” for quicker results.

You can use the targeting features of the various ad platforms to appear in the feeds of the people who most closely match the skills, interests, region, and even hobbies you want. LinkedIn’s Jobs Ads are a good example of how you can promote opportunities via targeted ads.

Alternatively, use a tool like Wonderkind to create dynamic, lead, and job ads to automate posting jobs on different social media sites.

7. Beyond Your Brick-and-Mortar: The Rise in Remote Working

According to Pew Research, a third of Americans who can work remotely do so full-time. It’s an option that works well for both sides as it can increase productivity and improve the work-life balance.

As a recruiter, that means taking a more flexible approach to finding new employees and there’s no reason your digital marketing team needs to reside within the physical walls of your business.

Countless organizations hire digital marketers from around the world, and you should, as well.

I have people working remotely for me in locations around the world, and you can, too.

Not only does this broaden the talent pool, but your overhead cost is greatly reduced as you’re not paying to physically house the employee (desk, office space, hardware, software, supplies, utilities, etc.).

8. Mentor Students

You can benefit from ambitious marketing students who might need or want that internship before graduation.

Paid internships are always possible, but don’t turn your nose to unpaid apprenticeships or contracted workers.

Work with a local community college or or university to set up an apprenticeship or internship program.

I love the idea of getting someone who is hungry, impressionable, and keen to develop their career skills. In return, you can snag bright, innovative talent for your digital marketing team.

And hiring someone younger can give you a nice glimpse into the younger generations. They know what’s hot among their demographics, the kind of content they like to see, and which platforms people in their age group prefer. These are invaluable insights that can significantly benefit your digital marketing.

Don’t Hire Based on Experience Alone

We’ve all met people with a tremendous resume, but may not end up being a good fit at a company for other reasons.

Look beyond the resume. Instead, hire digital marketers who will make up the best team to help you achieve your goals.

For example, if your top priority right now is lead generation, you want to invest in inbound marketers and people who bring their A-game with top-of-the-funnel content.

Outside of that, consider these points for building your all-star team:

• Consider culture and skill. Hiring someone with tremendous results and extensive achievements is so tempting. But what if that person doesn’t mesh with others? Simply put, your marketing team will never be able to reach its full potential if the team doesn’t mesh.
• Results are still important. Marketers are much easier to hire than other professions because you can look at real numbers. When talking to candidates, take the time to ask them data-driven questions like how much they improved sales, ROIs for specific activities and campaigns, etc. Everything your all-star team does will be measurable and trackable, so they should be able to present you with hard and fast numbers that show they walk the walk.
• Balance strategy and tactics. Nothing is written in stone with marketing, so you need to build a team that carefully balances tactics and strategy. Doing this ensures that your team is looking ahead over the next 12 to 18 months and developing long-range campaigns with eyes on the future. Balance that with tactics and a team that stays on their toes, so they’re ready to pivot if needed.
• Hire hungry. The marketing landscape changes so fast that hiring based on experience alone can leave you holding on to people with obsolete skills. You want to hire people eager to grow, learn new marketing certifications, and share their knowledge. Promote those who show an ability and willingness to do just that. They are the people you want on your team.

Onboarding Is the Backbone of an All-Star Marketing Team

How much money are you willing to invest in unproductive employees who don’t understand their job?

Not much, right? However, Gallup research shows only 32 percent of employees are engaged at work. 

Why? Poor onboarding is one factor that leads to disengaged employees.

To build your all-star digital marketing team, you need to plan how to introduce them to the company and how to keep them (employee retention).

Yes, you’ll need to help them find their place and explain what’s expected of them. But research shows that keeping employees happy also includes:

• Offering training and development.
• Social support.
• Autonomy.
• Development opportunities.
• Providing work-life balance.

Basically, look after your employees, and they’ll want to stay with you. 

And if you need some extra help, turn to onboarding tools like FreshTeam, HiBob, or WorkBright.

FAQs

How to hire the best digital marketing team?

Begin by assessing your business and where you want it to be. Then you can determine which staff you’ll need to take you there. After that, you have plenty of options to look for employees, including LinkedIn, specific job platforms, and running PPC ads on social and search engines.

What to look for when hiring a digital marketer?

Look for staff that have a proven track record and testimonials. They should be able to demonstrate the difference they’ve made to their previous clients’ businesses, which will give you an idea of what they could do for you.

You’ll also want to ensure your employee is a good culture fit for your company.

Conclusion

Wearing all the hats or hiring a jack-of-all-trades might get the job done for a startup.

But as business ramps up with the desire to grow, you’ll need to hire a digital marketing team with the specialized skills to help you scale your business.

Aim for acquisition, content, and monetization skill sets as you grow your team.

Leave no stone unturned when sourcing talent on a global level. Invest in your company culture to attract those talented marketers motivated by more than just a paycheck.

With the right cultural fit and a strong onboarding program, you can build that all-star marketing team that will hold its ground and grow with your business.