Hiring a digital marketer—6 ways your digital marketer needs to rock

TL;DR

• Digital marketers are creatives who can do math—and boost the bottom line
• The best digital marketers are writers or creatives first
• You need a digital marketer who doubles as an expert in your field

So your business—perhaps a web3 or blockchain company? 😅—needs digital marketing. That’s understandable. You have many options to meet your digital marketing needs, ranging from hiring in-house staff to commissioning an agency to working with yours truly (ahem, a digital marketing consultant).

No matter how you choose to meet your organization’s digital marketing needs, you require talent that puts you ahead of the competition. Ideally far ahead. But what constitutes an exceptional digital marketer? Keep reading to understand six ways that your digital marketer needs to rock.

1. Your digital marketer aligns strategy with key business objectives

What matters most to your business? That’s the first thing that savvy digital marketers want to know. A digital marketer who clearly understands your business priorities is best equipped to map a digital strategy to those objectives.

How can a digital marketer learn about your business to create a tailored plan? Here are some tactics that marketers use to produce relevant digital marketing strategies—

• Conduct a content audit: Completing a digital content audit is usually a marketer’s first step to developing an impactful digital marketing strategy. A digital content audit is a lot like a wellness check for the content on your website and other digital platforms.
• Identify available resources: Effective digital marketers seek to match digital strategy output with the available human, time, and financial resources. Getting clarity on the resources available is crucial to creating a digital marketing strategy that can be successfully executed.
• Define the target audience: Who’s your tribe? Another early and important step for digital marketers is to define your target audience—the group of people who most benefit from your product or service.
• Meet the team: High-EQ digital marketers know the importance of face time—or, let’s face it, Zoom meetings—and want to meet your team! Synchronous meetings with engineers, product managers, community builders, and other marketers are all important as primary research for a digital marketer.
• Research your competitors: Who are your primary competitors? Digital marketers always research your competitors—both the business and digital kind—to guide the development of your organization’s digital marketing strategy.
• Listen to your users: What are your users saying about your service or product? What pain points do they have? Empathic marketers hang out on all the right platforms to learn what your users need.

As your business evolves, so should your digital strategy. Your shrewd digital marketer updates your digital marketing strategy to constantly match the most important needs of your business.

2. You want to consume what your digital marketer creates

What’s the last content that you enjoyably consumed? When’s the last time that you read or watched something especially informative? You need a marketer who produces content that genuinely educates and entertains your target audience. 

Let’s look at some examples of digital marketing done right—

• Chainlink: The decentralized blockchain oracle network uses a tone that is informative and also slightly silly. Case in point—a 2022 blog explains the “reason why your grandma is probably not yet an active Web3 user.”
• Nexo: This crypto exchange and lending platform has digital marketing on lockdown, using a tone for its newsletter that makes it hard to stop reading. The company describes itself as “disrupting the financial system, one bit at a time.”
• Slack: You may live on Slack all day, but do you ever read the platform’s blog? The Slack team uses content to show that, professionally, they’ve got your back. A February 2023 blog (for example) commiserates that “a meeting is just as likely to be a total time suck as it is to be a productive gathering of the minds.”

3. The bottom line matters—a lot!—to your digital marketer

Your exceptional digital marketer is committed to using diversified digital strategies to maximize the profitability of your business. Digital marketing can be fun—it usually is!—but ultimately is a business function like any other of your professional activities.

How can a digital marketer show that she cares about your return on investment? Check out these tactics that marketers can (should!) use to maximize your digital marketing ROI—

• Choose content types carefully: Some types of digital content—like email—have historically high ROIs. Other types of content—like short-form video—have historically high engagement rates with certain user demographics. You can choose to produce only the most cost-effective types of content that are best suited for your audience in order to maximize your digital strategy ROI.
• Prioritize distribution channels: Just like with content types, some digital platforms and channels are more cost effective than others—and your audience doesn’t hang out everywhere. Meet your audience where they’re at (only there!) to maximize the profitability of your digital marketing.
• Repurpose and refresh: Your content, especially evergreen content, can have a long shelf life and grow your business significantly over time. Digital marketers can stretch your marketing dollars and boost ROI by repurposing and frequently updating your existing content. This tactic is especially important as your digital marketing strategy matures and your mountain of diversified content continues growing.

You care a lot about your bottom line—so hire a digital marketer who does, too.

4. Your digital marketer can do math

You might love the creativity and style of your digital marketer, but how strong are his quantitative skills? You can hire a digital marketer with robust analytical capabilities to ensure that the impact of your digital marketing strategy is being thoughtfully measured.

What exactly does it mean to thoughtfully measure and analyze a digital marketing strategy? You need a digital marketer who can—

• Get data: Is your digital marketer a master of Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and at least a few SEO tools? Your digital marketer’s first quantitative strength should be procuring relevant data.
• Analyze the data: Analytical digital marketers review data, often from multiple sources, to identify strategy weaknesses, strengths, technical issues, and other focus areas for your digital strategy.
• Ask questions: A good digital marketer can gather data and use it to make a decision—but a great digital marketer understands the “why” behind the data. Your ideal marketer asks questions until she understands the why.
• Make data-driven decisions: Your numbers-loving digital marketer is comfortable with—and even prefers!—using data to help drive business and marketing decisions.

5. Your digital marketer doubles as an industry expert

Is your digital marketer an industry professional? Many—not all—digital marketers have a niche, which often coincides with their professional work history. You can hire a digital marketer who already knows a lot about your business, boosting the odds of your company benefiting from a digital marketing strategy.

What’s so great about hiring a digital marketer who body-doubles as an industry expert? Let’s take a peek—

• Total know-it-all: Your digital marketer a.k.a. former industry professional understands many nuances of your highly technical business. She relishes in producing factually correct content that hits all the right angles throughout the buyer journey.
• Known by all: With so many years of experience in your industry, your digital marketer is known (and valued!) by many. This social capital is what you need to get valuable backlinks and find guest blogging and podcast opportunities.
• No shortage of ideas: A good digital marketer develops a strategy—but a great digital marketer devises many. A marketer with extremely deep industry knowledge can develop a customized digital strategy that’s well suited to meet your specific business needs.

6. You feel cherished by your digital marketer

Are you getting undivided attention from your digital marketer? Marketing is important to your business, not to mention expensive—meaning that you deserve the best from your digital marketing provider. 

What are some ways that a digital marketer can show the love? Let’s name a few—

• Allocate top talent: Your digital marketer may be a team of one, or perhaps operates as an agency. Whatever the organizational structure, you need top talent devoted to the success of your digital marketing strategy.
• Prioritize deadlines: A digital marketer is only as good as her last deliverable. You need a digital marketer who never (ever, ever) misses a deadline.
• Communicate well: In good times and bad, your exceptional digital marketer stays in contact. You need a digital marketer who excels at communicating as much as she thrives on producing innovative digital strategies for your organization.

And the best way to show the love—show results. What better way to feel cherished than by getting what exactly you need from your digital marketer? Your go-to digital marketing wizard knows just how to uplift your business, again and again.