To remain relevant and competitive in today’s marketplace, virtually all businesses need some vibrant digital marketing resources to drive their digital presence initiatives.

The above statement tells how crucial a function digital marketing has become over the past few years. Though one of the newest professions around, digital marketing is one of the most evolving, and may now appear to be limitless in impact. Its impact is so much that people have asked if it’s bound to replace conventional marketing at some point. While that’s a difficult question to answer at the moment, looking at the astronomical rate digital technology has unabashedly continued to impact the world of business; one may be tempted to incline towards the affirmative.

At the worst, a business must have a strong digital marketing strategy to support and complement its traditional marketing initiatives. The way people shop and buy has changed a lot, and so have successful businesses adjusted their marketing channels to create a big room for digital marketing.

At the crux of every effective digital marketing function is a specialist, or a unit who is responsible for all activities relating to online promotion and selling the brand, products or services of an organisation - The Digital Marketer.

In this article, we’ll consider:

- What digital marketers do
- Categorisation of duties of digital marketers and their KPIs
- What to look for in a good digital marketer
- How to recruit a brilliant digital marketer in Nigeria

What Digital Marketers Do

Digital marketers drive brand awareness, generate leads for the business, and provide timely and reliable market analytics upon which a business can plan and make effective decisions on products/services, pricing and promotions. The domain of digital marketing channels includes the social media, the business’s website, search engines and emails.

The core responsibilities

Typical responsibilities of a digital marketer will include:

• Develop and implement effective digital marketing strategy for the organisation
• Optimize the business for search engine ranking based on the digital marketing strategy
• Research advertising trends and use the results to build/adjust the organisations advertisement direction and placement.
• Pre-empt competitors digital plans and pro-act to counteract them
• Research competitors marketing strategies and initiatives
• Create and deploy digital campaigns
• Publish digital marketing content online
• Implement email marketing campaigns
• Report on the growth and analytics of campaigns
• Conduct digital market research and customer surveys to inform campaigns
• Develop and maintain functionally effective social media presence for the business.
• Analyse and report performances of all digital marketing campaigns
• Utilize strong analytical ability to evaluate end-to-end customer experience across multiple channels

Duties Categorisation and KPIs

Well before employing your digital marketer, it is wisdom to clearly set out the responsibilities and the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). These KPIs must cover all the 4 regions of the quadrant.



1. Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) Management

Responsibility: Ensure the business, products or services rank highly on Search Engines Results Pages (SERPs), particularly Google.
Main KPI: Organic traffic to the website

2. Social Media Management

Manage social media by establishing a posting schedule for the company’s written and graphic content.
Main KPIs: Follows, Likes, Shares, Engagement and Leads from Social Media Channels

3. Content Marketing

Creation and posting of content relating to the business or other matters that may indirectly benefit the business.
Main KPIs: Blog Traffic, Campaign Traffic & Lead Generation

4. Email Marketing

Circulation of campaigns, newsletters and messages through emails.
Main KPIs: Email open rate, campaign click-through rate, lead-generation (conversion) rate

What to Look For in a Good Digital Marketer – The Skills Requirements

We have carefully selected below 7 skills a digital marketer must have in order to be effective and impactful. These skills range from general skills to industry-specific skills. And so, when engaging a digital marketer for potential employment, interviewers must distill the proficiency of the candidate in these competency areas in addition to personality tests (see below also) that may/should be conducted for the candidates.
Essentially, digital marketers should be assessed both on competency and personality traits.

Competency Assessment Areas

1. SEO Optimisation skills

Some of the skills you can acquire under SEO are as follows:
• Proficiency in SEO: Knowledge about technical and non-technical SEO
• Link building skills
• Ability to improve the on-page ranking

2. Social Media Marketing Skills

• Ability to develop effective social media strategies.
• Comprehensive knowledge about social media platforms and how to use them to fulfill your digital marketing objectives.
• Understanding of social media trends and new features and tools.
• Social media analytical skills. Ability to analyse data from social media platforms and use them to develop tactics.

3. Content Marketing Skills

• Ability to create high-quality, relevant, and SEO-friendly content. This skill will include effective use marketing through textual content, graphics and videos.
• Ability to research relevant keywords and smartness to cite them in the content.
• Ability to attract attention, generate interest, provoke desire and facilitate action in the content.
• Post-content engagement skills.

4. Creative Thinking and Problem Solving Skills
Developing strategies, creating good content and effectively engaging digital audience require a high level of creative thinking and problem-solving skills. A digital marketing must be able to think out of the box to predict or in some cases respond to the strategies and actions of the competitors. Also, unique content ideas that’ll give competitive edge come from creativity.

5. Effective Communication Skills

Interacting with digital audience requires a high level of communication skills. The digital marketer must ensure that the content and messages are delivered in concise and impactful manner. All content and communication materials must be aimed at attracting the interest of the audience and creating a desire for them to take positive action, within the shortest time.

6. Data Analytics Skills

The digital marketer must be skillful in the use of tools that can help him/her track various metrics such as engagement, likes, comments, website traffic and leads. These are important metrics for future planning and decision-making which can help them make effective decisions. With the advent of this data-driven mentality, we need to upgrade our digital marketing skills as well.

Some of the essential Data Analytics tools are as follows:

Google Analytics
Google Tag Manager
SQL


Recommended Personality Assessment Areas

Like, many other roles, the competence of the digital marketer may not be enough, more so now that the role digital marketers play in organisations have become so crucial. You therefore want to be sure that the potential employee aligns with the values of your organisation and he/she has the right disposition for the work and the role. The following qualities/skills are vital.

1. Integrity

Digital marketers will by virtue of their role have access to many information relating to the company, the products, the services and policies. The digital marketer should be someone who can be trusted and is circumspect, and at the same time must avoid deceptive practices, false representations and misleading claims.

2. Team-spirit

Digital marketers work with many other professionals including; visual artists, web developers, conventional marketers, customer service etc. They must therefore be good team players working for the good of the common goal.

3. Industry knowledge

Though for a smart individual – especially if a good team player - industry knowledge can be gained in a little time, when you want your digital marketer to hit the ground running, it’s important to have someone who’s got a fair knowledge of the industry and its dynamism. The experience and portfolio of the candidate may be a good reference for this.

4. Organisational skills
Must be organised and have excellent planning abilities. Digital marketing involves a lot of planning for adverts, campaigns and engagements.

5. Research Skills and Teach-ability

As digital marketing evolves, the tools, methods and platforms evolve too. It’s therefore important that digital marketers are research-oriented. He must be open to learning and unlearning based on what works now, and what will work in the future. They must be willing to learning from knowledgeable colleagues and veritable information from the internet.


Tips for Interviews of Digital Marketers

Below are few tips on what you may test for while recruiting a digital marketer. This list is by no means exhaustive but it is decent enough to give you a good start.

i. Test for cognitive skills - Ability to think out of the box. Critical thinking and problem solving abilities.
ii. Test for understanding of digital marketing field – Basic and advanced terms. How to develop and implement digital marketing strategies. Understanding of the peculiarities of various platforms open to digital marketing. Test for current trends in digital marketing.
iii. Test for digital advertising skills.
iv. Check portfolio – How have the candidates done with the brand they have managed before or currently managing?
v. Test for SEO skills. How grounded is the candidate in on-page and off-page SEO. Knowledge of keyword research and keyword use. Use of directories.
vi. Test content creation skills. Can the candidate develop full blogs? Knowledge of infographics and visual enthusiasm.
vii. Check for the candidate’s social media presence and engagements.
viii. Test for understanding on digital sales process. Test for understanding of sales funnel.
ix. Test for ability to engage audience. Test for how to use and leverage customer feedback.
x. Test personality. Test for preferred work environment, preferred management style and other behavioral matters.
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An article of Teoaris Consulting.

Teoaris Consulting is a Recruitment and Business Consulting Firm in Consultant in Lagos, Nigeria. Visit [url]www.teoaris.com [/url]for more blogs.