How to Hire a Marketing Person: 8 Top Marketing Skills to Look For

So, you’re in the market for a marketing maestro? Nice. But what kind of marketing person are you looking for? Someone to manage and grow your social channels? Or someone to identify the best keywords and craft engaging, human-first content around those to connect with your audience?

Not only are there many different types of marketers, but even within the same niche, roles and the skills needed to succeed in them vary wildly (there’s a pretty big difference between a copywriter and an SEO writer, for example).

To make things even more difficult, every candidate seems to sell themselves as a marketing master (hey, it’s what we do). So, the real challenge is identifying those with the skills that truly matter.

As you begin the process of hiring a marketing person, look for these top eight marketing skills that will ensure your new team member is a catalyst for growth and not just another addition to the payroll.

TL;DR — Key Takeaways

• Different types of marketing managers contribute differently to a company’s strategic objectives. Understanding what type of marketer you’re looking for can help you align the right talent with the specific goals you hope they achieve in the role.
• Each marketing position requires a distinct set of skills (aka, not all digital marketers can or should do everything!). By pinpointing these unique abilities, you can ensure that the candidate you choose is well-equipped to handle the demands of their particular role.
• For most businesses, having someone on your team who possesses digital marketing skills is no longer optional. These competencies are becoming increasingly important for maintaining a competitive edge and engaging with your audience across various online platforms.
• The decision to hire freelance vs. full-time marketing managers hinges on several factors, including budget constraints and organizational needs. Each option has its advantages and challenges, and understanding these can help you make informed choices that benefit your company in the long run.
• Implementing digital marketing skills assessments in your hiring process can provide clear insight into a candidate’s capabilities, ensuring you select marketers who not only fit the job requirements but also add value to your team.

It all starts with defining your marketing goals

Marketing is a broad, broad field. In fact, it’s a lot broader than many startup CEOs or business owners think. There are many areas of specialty, such as social media marketing, paid advertising, product marketing, and even communications (who knew?).

Since not everyone is aware of the vastness of the marketing field (especially those with a technical background), most companies misunderstand what they should be hiring for and who might make a ‘great hire.’ This puts a lot of teams at risk of hiring someone specializing in the wrong area of marketing who may not be the right fit for their business—at least not yet.

So, take it from us: finding your first marketing hire starts with determining your business goals. This will depend on what kind of business model you have and how your business will grow.

For example, if your business adopts a product-led growth strategy, you might use PR and content as the main growth drivers. Naturally, you’ll need a person with those specific skills. Or if your organization is sales-led, growth depends on adding someone to the existing team who is strong in creating sales enablement material.

So, before hiring a marketing person, you need to know how your company will grow and then match the marketer’s profile to your growth strategy. This process will also help you answer the question, “Why are you hiring now?”

Understanding the four main profiles of marketing managers

Have you completed the exercise above? Great. You’re one step closer to hiring a marketing person. However, now it’s time to narrow down your ideal candidate profile, and to do so, it helps to understand the four main types of general marketing managers most teams have and hire for.

Product marketing

Product marketers specialize in the activities where product, sales, and marketing converge. Product positioning and messaging, competitor intelligence, and creating sales enablement assets all fall under the product marketers’ domain.

The best time to hire this type of marketer is when you already have a stable product and after you’ve hired a product manager. Product marketers can be a good fit for ‘the first marketer’ role if your product has already found a product-market fit and is showing signs of sustainable growth.

Performance marketing

A performance marketer focuses on driving the performance of digital marketing campaigns, such as pay-per-click (PPC) advertising on platforms like Google Ads, newsletter sponsorship, or native advertising.

When’s a good time to hire a performance marketer? When you already know your product is needed (and it’s not just your CEO saying that…) and who your ideal customer is.

As the cost of advertising is on the rise, you should allocate a marketing budget to paid media campaigns before deciding who to hire. If your budget is small, it might be better to hire a freelance performance marketer or outsource the work to an agency.

Communications or content marketing

The communications side of marketing typically includes PR and media relations, content marketing, and your community or influencer network (although we’d argue these are all pretty separate roles and skill sets when you look at them on a more granular level, but for the sake of grouping these together, sure, they’re related).

Once you’ve got product, brand, and performance marketers on board, it’s probably a good time to consider hiring a communications person. If you’re not quite ready for a PR or social media manager, hiring a general content marketing manager might be a good fit.

These marketing managers strengthen the business most in the areas of brand positioning, social media and influencer marketing, internal messaging, such as promoting a company celebration or news, and public relations management.

Brand or creative marketing

A brand marketer is a person who creates your brand story and voice. They ensure that every brand decision ultimately leads to improved sales by initially creating a comprehensive brand marketing strategy. Their role also ties in many areas of marketing, such as content, social, design, and research.

Once your product is established and you know who your customers are, you can start to build your brand’s personality with a brand or creative marketer.

These types of digital marketers add value to the business by creating a strong brand identity and events strategy, raising brand awareness, and boosting customer loyalty.

Identify what area of marketing is your main priority

As mentioned, it’s important to get clear on what your current marketing needs are to ensure you don’t hire the wrong person.

To help you gain some clarity, here are a couple of mistakes we often see businesses and hiring managers make (they’re also mistakes many people on our team have experienced while working as marketers themselves—not at Toggl, of course 😉).

Not having clear business goals

If you don’t think carefully about your organizational needs, you could end up looking for an all-in-one unicorn candidate. And in that case, you’re looking for a needle in a haystack, in another dimension. Even the best, most results-driven marketer can’t do everything.

It’s possible you could also be getting ahead of your actual organizational needs by thinking you need particular marketing functions, like performance marketing, when you actually only need those capabilities at a later stage.

Overshooting on role seniority

Another risk with hiring someone without understanding how they fit into the growing team is that you could overshoot on role seniority. In other words, you may hire a VP when you only need a marketing manager initially.

Or, you might be doing the opposite and hiring a junior general digital marketer (who should ideally be gaining job experience under somebody’s mentorship) when you really should be looking for a more senior candidate with a specific niche skill set that can help you fill real gaps to achieve real results.

8 marketing skills to look for when you hire a marketing manager

So, you’ve got an idea of what kind of marketing person you need. Nice! Now, your first marketer will likely be well-versed in many areas, but these eight skills are the core capabilities they should have to quickly begin adding value to your growing enterprise.

1. Writing skills

The ability to create simple, engaging copy is a valuable skill for your first marketer. Heck, it’s a valuable skill for any marketing person on your team, regardless of whether they’re your first hire or not.

What does ‘simple, engaging copy’ really mean, though? It means they can craft content that is free from technical jargon and that connects with your audience in a way that is:

• Informing
• Entertaining
• Inspiring
• Convincing

Ideally, it’s written in your brand’s tone of voice, too, so every customer who interacts with your business feels they’re ‘meeting’ the same brand at every touchpoint.

Writing skills like that can be applied to all aspects of marketing content, including social media, content marketing, and paid advertising, for instance.

2. Research skills

Research is another important skill most marketers should have. This could be customer, market, or general research for content marketing.

The information gleaned from research helps a business better understand its competitors, learn how it’s different from competitors, build a better picture of what customers want, and communicate effectively with them. Research is vital in helping a business grow and build brand equity.

Get closer than ever to your customer. So close, in fact, that you tell them what they need well before they realize it themselves.

Steve Jobs

Here’s a short, helpful video from HubSpot on how to conduct effective market research. This is the kind of work you can expect a great marketing hire to be able to do for you:

3. Analytical skills

The ability to think logically and use data to continually improve outputs, such as social media campaigns or website traffic, is essential in today’s data-driven workplace. In fact, analytical skills are one of the most in-demand skills this year.

What are analytical skills?

Analytical skills are a person’s ability to gather and analyze information and draw conclusions from that data that help solve business problems and improve the result of what’s being measured.

Marketers should have these essential analytical skills:

• Critical thinking
• Data analysis
• Creative thinking (or thinking out of the box)
• Problem-solving

4. Collaboration and teamwork skills

Your first marketer will likely be working closely with other colleagues from different departments, such as the sales and product team, or with external people, like SMEs. So, they’ll need excellent communication skills and experience collaborating with (ideally remote) teams.

Having a high emotional IQ can also be a helpful asset when dealing with diverse teammates from across the globe. Though some marketers prefer working creatively by themselves, your first marketer should be someone who plays well with others, too!

5. Technical skills

Today, marketing is all about using online software to perform marketing tasks, from planning and strategizing to communicating and collaborating with the team. Any marketer you hire will need to be tech-savvy to keep up with the pace of digital marketing deliverables.

Familiarity with online document sharing, communication, CMS, inbound marketing, and basic analytics tools is a definite advantage.

Though every marketing role requires different technical skills, a few core skills stand out for each main type of marketer, such as SEO, content optimization, storytelling, and research for creative or brand marketers.

Understanding AI will also be increasingly important in 2024. Just see what marketing guru and content professional Neil Patel thinks about AI and the future of marketing.

6. Demand generation

What is demand generation exactly? We’re gonna pass the mic back to Neil to see what he has to say about this important and often overlooked aspect of digital marketing.

Demand generation is creating interest in your products or services to build a healthy pipeline of qualified leads for your sales team.

Neil Patel

Basically, it involves targeted marketing efforts that help potential customers know what problem exists and how you solve it for them.

Any kind of thought leadership content that promotes a company’s strategic narrative (podcasts, conference speaking opportunities, LinkedIn posts, or panel debates, can help brands build a future pipeline of qualified leads.

Check out this demand generation checklist by Chris Walker.

7. Paid marketing

This particular skill involves managing paid digital media campaigns, including channels like Google Ads and paid ads on social media. If this is an area you want your company to grow into, you’d want to hire a digital marketer with this skill set to help create a seamless user journey and increase your web traffic quickly (faster than SEO strategies).

8. Project management

Marketing generally involves a lot of moving parts. Any great marketer should have project management experience so they can prioritize tasks and projects—especially since the scope of their work will grow quickly if they’re on a small team or working at a fast-paced startup.

When they take on a new project or big task, they should be able to:

• Provide basic guidelines
• Answer questions
• Break projects or bigger tasks into smaller tasks
• Manage deadlines
• Oversee everyone involved to ensure they deliver

Plus, being able to remain calm under pressure is a key skill they need to get the necessary cooperation when they need it.

Deciding between a full-time vs. freelance marketing manager

Now that you know more about the various digital marketing skills out there, the next thing is to establish if you need a marketing manager on a full-time or part-time basis or whether you should consider roping in a marketing agency.

Budget usually plays a big part in this decision-making:

• For startups, working with a freelancer (or multiple freelancers if needed) offers flexibility while helping with cost-saving as you can ramp your spending up or down as needed.
  
• A full-time person may cost the company more, but can also offer stability, as well as a valuable resource with intimate knowledge of the company. With an in-house marketer, you’re also investing in the future, as any insights tied up to marketing tactics, marketing tools, or your target audience will be easily accessible for future marketing hires.
  
• Finally, while getting support from a marketing agency may seem costly, it offers a wide range of expertise that would cost several times more to develop internally.

Using skills assessments to hire top marketing talent

If marketing isn’t your area of expertise, filtering out the best candidates from the best talkers is a mammoth task. Frankly, it’s a recipe for hiring the wrong person. Instead of placing so much trust in a resume or an interview, we’d recommend zeroing in on the proof of competence.

To fast-track your search for top marketing pros, try using skills assessments as a candidate shortlisting tool. By focusing only on potential candidates with the right skills and relevant experience, you’ll help your team speed up the hiring process, too.

Start hiring good digital marketing employees

While we could write a whole book on digital marketing skills and what’s needed in today’s market, you should now have a better idea of what the ‘right’ marketing person means for your organization.

Remember to match the marketing profile to your growth strategy. Then, streamline the hiring process by moving away from embellished CVs as your main screening tool to assessing which candidates actually have the right skills. That way, you get a good match from the start and avoid the high cost of a bad hire.

Need help achieving all of this? Toggl Hire is the only full-cycle hiring platform that’s purpose-built for skills-based hiring. Customize your hiring pipeline, assess candidate skills, and offer a great candidate experience all in one place.

Hire a marketing person confidently by creating your free account now.