13 digital marketer skills you should be looking for

Digital marketers play an important role in putting your business in front of potential customers online and converting leads into sales. They’re a revenue engine for your company, so it’s crucial they have the skills needed to effectively advertise your business.

Digital marketing candidates need to be fluent in online ad platforms, email marketing tools, SEO tools, and more. They also need to bring great storytelling skills and the ability to empathize with customers’ pain points. If you hire a digital marketer who lacks any of these skills, your business could be missing out on sales.

In this guide, we’ll examine the 13 digital marketer skills you should look for – and how to test for them when you’re hiring.

Why are digital marketer skills important?

Digital marketers are responsible for advertising your business online. This includes advertising via your website, email campaigns, social media, and more. These channels can be an important part of how your business finds new customers – as well as encouraging repeat sales from existing ones. 

Marketing – and the people you hire to take charge of it – have an impact on revenue generation for your business. Mis-hiring a digital marketer who lacks the necessary expertise can affect your bottom line, so it’s crucial to hire a candidate with the right digital marketing skills.

Essential vs. desirable digital marketing skills

When thinking about what skills you need in a digital marketer, it’s important to differentiate between entry-level and advanced positions.

If your business already has a strong marketing department and clear marketing goals, you may just need someone with basic digital marketing skills to help with day-to-day operations. On the other hand, if you’re looking to expand aggressively and need to develop an online marketing strategy, your business would benefit greatly from a highly skilled marketer.

With that in mind, we’ll break the digital marketer skills you should look for into two categories: essential and desirable.

7 essential skills to look for when hiring a digital marketer

These seven skills should be considered essential for every digital marketer, including junior marketers in entry-level roles.

1. Search engine optimization (SEO)

SEO is the practice of making your business’s website rank higher in search engine results. Good SEO techniques ensure that potential customers click on your business’s website rather than your competitors’ websites.

Digital marketers should be familiar with all SEO basics including:

• Creating internal links between pages on your website

• Optimizing web pages for fast loading

• Ensuring your website includes all keywords that are relevant to your business

• Writing engaging SEO titles and descriptions for your site’s pages

Recommended reading: 100+ SEO interview questions to hire an SEO professional

2. Social media marketing

Digital marketers need to know how to connect with your audience across your social channels and gently encourage them to buy from your company. They should be familiar with all of the major social platforms your business has a presence on, including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and more.

Marketers should also know how to create paid advertisements on these platforms. It’s especially helpful if a candidate has experience creating ad campaigns on social media and can discuss the results of a past campaign.

Learn more: How to hire a social media marketer

3. Data analytics

It’s crucial to know whether your marketing strategy is working or not. Digital marketing applicants should have a strong background in data analytics. This is so they can monitor the impact of advertising campaigns and quantify the results of their broader marketing efforts.

There’s a variety of different analytics tools available for monitoring the impact of your marketing activities. At a minimum, marketing candidates should be familiar with using Google Analytics to analyze web traffic and the built-in analytics tools on major social media platforms. If the role you're hiring for is specifically focused on Google Analytics, use a Google Analytics job description to attract candidates with the right skills.

4. Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising

PPC advertising involves creating online ad campaigns that encourage a user to click through to your site. It’s closely related to search engine marketing (SEM), which specifically focuses on placing ads in the results pages of search engines like Google.

With the PPC model, advertisers pay for each user who clicks on an ad. Because of this, it’s vital that a marketing candidate knows how and where to spend a campaign budget. 

Recommended reading: 32 PPC specialist interview questions to hire a professional

5. Email marketing

Email marketing is one of the most direct ways that your business communicates with potential and existing customers. Digital marketers should have a strong understanding of not only how to use email marketing platforms, but also how to craft emails that your audience wants to read.

Marketers should also understand how to segment your business’s email list into different audiences. This is a powerful way to build targeted campaigns that encourage conversions.

Learn more: 11 email marketing skills to look for when hiring a pro

6. Copywriting

A lot of the work of a digital marketer involves writing compelling copy. Marketers need to write social media posts that keep followers engaged, website text that draws in customers, and snappy ad copy.

So, it’s essential that digital marketers are great writers who can embody your business’s brand in the copy they create. 

7. Graphic design

In an ideal world, your business will have a graphic designer working alongside your digital marketers to provide the visual content they need. But that’s not feasible for every business. Even if you do have an in-house designer, they’ll likely have too much on their plates to create content for every social media post and email.

Digital marketers should be able to handle basic graphic design tasks on their own. They don’t necessarily need to be experts at Adobe Creative Cloud, but they should be comfortable using basic online graphic design tools like Canva and Visme.

Recommended reading: 45 graphic design interview questions

6 desirable skills to look for in a digital marketer

If you’re hiring a digital marketer to lead your online strategy or take your content marketing to the next level, we recommend looking for these six additional skills during your hiring process.

1. Web design

Having a digital marketer take ownership of your website can help your site serve as a platform for sales. An experienced marketer can design the site to streamline your sales funnel and provide gentle nudges like banners and pop-ups that encourage conversion.

Importantly, marketing applicants don’t necessarily need to have experience using the platform that your website is built on. As long as they know what marketing elements are valuable for your website, they can work closely with your web development team to optimize your site.

2. Strategic planning

Your business is likely to reach more customers and land more sales if you have an overarching digital marketing strategy – rather than a piecemeal approach. It’s important for a senior digital marketer to understand all the channels available to your business and how they work together. 

Strategic planning skills are especially important if you’re hiring for a marketing director or similar position. The main task of these employees is to lay out a marketing strategy that can then be executed by more entry-level marketers.

3. Automation development

Automation plays an increasingly important role in digital marketing. Hiring a candidate who has experience using marketing automations – for example, to personalize emails sent to your customers – can increase productivity in your marketing department.

Focusing on automation skills can also position your company for success in the future. Artificial intelligence (AI) has the potential to deliver highly personalized online experiences for customers. Your company could benefit greatly from hiring a digital marketer who’s knowledgeable about AI and Automation tools and is excited to embrace them.

4. Photography

Engagement on social media platforms like Instagram is dependent on delivering high-quality photos with every post. So, it can be helpful to hire a digital marketer who’s adept at photography to ensure your business can generate a steady stream of new visual content.

Digital marketers with photography skills can also work more effectively with in-house and contracted photographers. These candidates know what makes a photo great, so they can provide detailed instructions to get exactly the content your marketing team needs.

5. Video production

The content that your target customers require won’t always be written. If your marketing team can produce videos, it will open up a lot of new ways to connect with your audience. You can maintain a presence on emerging social media platforms like TikTok. You can also supplement blog posts and product pages with videos to better capture attention.

Digital marketers don’t need to be Hollywood-quality directors, but it can be very helpful for your content creation process if they know how to shoot and edit basic videos. 

6. Influencer marketing

Influencer marketing involves collaborating with social media influencers who can share your brand with their audiences. It can be a powerful way to help your business reach more people and build customer loyalty.

However, this type of marketing requires a level of coordination with multiple influencers that can be challenging to pull off well. If you already have an influencer marketing program or are thinking about launching one, it’s important to hire a marketer who has experience with these types of campaigns.

Digital marketing tools candidates should know how to use

Many of the skills above are enhanced by using purpose-built tools. Here are some examples of common digital marketing tools that all candidates should have at least some experience with.

• SEO: Ahrefs, SEMrush, Google Search Console, Moz, AlsoAsked

• Social media marketing: Hootsuite, Sprout Social, Hubspot, Bitly

• Data analytics: Google Analytics, Meta Business Suite

• PPC advertising: Google Ads, SEMrush

• Email marketing: MailChimp, Constant Contact, ConvertKit

• Copywriting: Grammarly, ChatGPT

• Graphic design: Canva, Visme, Adobe Express

Many of these tools are similar, so it’s not necessary for a candidate to know how to use all of them. However, they should have experience with at least one platform in each category.

How to test candidates’ digital marketing skills

When hiring a digital marketer, it’s important to go beyond candidates’ resumes and actually test the skills they’ll bring to your business. Pre-employment testing can help you rank candidates based on their marketing skills and decide who to invite for in-person interviews.

TestGorilla makes it easy to evaluate candidates’ digital marketing skills with pre-employment tests created by subject matter experts.

Our library includes tests for hiring digital marketing analysts that cover SEO copywriting, PPC advertising, social media management, email marketing, and much more.

We also have more advanced tests for hiring digital marketing managers that cover branding strategy, mobile marketing, and growth marketing.

Customize pre-employment tests to your needs

You can add custom questions to any TestGorilla test. This is a great way to ask applicants about their experience with specific marketing tools that your business uses.

For example, if you’re hiring for a senior marketing position, you can assess candidates on their brand strategy experience or even ask them to describe their top initiatives for improving your marketing strategy.

You can mix-and-match up to five tests in TestGorilla to create a custom assessment for your hiring campaign. It’s easy to include personality and culture fit tests that offer insight into whether a candidate will mesh well with your existing marketing team. 

Our reporting tools enable you to benchmark candidates against one another and against your current marketing staff. This allows you to see at a glance who has the most fluency in the marketing tools your business relies on – so you can invite them to the next step of your hiring process.

Hire the best digital marketers with TestGorilla

Hiring a skilled digital marketer is critical to ensure your business is capturing as much revenue as possible. Marketing candidates should be fluent in essential skills like SEO, social media marketing, PPC advertising, and email marketing. Ideally, candidates will also bring strategic planning, automation, and videography skills to help grow your business’s online presence.

TestGorilla helps you hire the right digital marketer every time. Our pre-employment testing platform makes it easy to assess candidates’ digital marketing skills across a variety of campaign approaches and tools. You can also evaluate applicants’ personalities and work motivations to ensure they’ll fit in at your business.

Sign up for a free TestGorilla account today or schedule a free demo to ensure you hire the best digital marketer to grow your business.