Assessing candidate’s digital marketing skills

Creating the content marketing team of your dreams is a respectable wish of every CEO and HR manager. Although it’s a difficult undertaking, achieving it brings incredible promotional and reputational value to a business.

In this article, we are going to explain why and how to assess the digital marketing skills of prospective talent.

There are many people in different positions working within a content team, each of them bringing unique skills. However, every team member needs to understand a bit of what their teammates are doing, so having even a basic understanding is a valuable asset for a job seeker. Here is a list of skills and who needs to have them.

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SEO knowledge

It’s hard to overstate the importance of SEO for promoting content online. An SEO expert is as vital as the writer in a content team. While they don’t write much themselves, they make sure what your writers create is seen by as many people as possible. Using the best SEO reporting software can further enhance this process by providing detailed insights and tracking the performance of content to ensure maximum visibility.

The first things they need to understand are keyword research and implementation. The expert needs to understand not only how to find relevant keywords but also how they can be organically inserted into the text. This is especially important if you plan to publish brand links, as it might look especially suspicious to the reader. Without this, an expert might start throwing random keywords that are irrelevant to the text and effectively reducing text quality.

Technical SEO knowledge is also paramount for making sure search engines can easily find and index your content. A qualified SEO expert needs to understand the following:

URL structure and hierarchy
Internal linking strategies
Site speed optimization
XML sitemaps
Robots.txt configuration

Finally, mobile phones have steadily gained popularity over the last few decades and are now the primary means of accessing the web. SEO specialists need to know how to optimize websites not just for PC but also for mobile.

Content creation capabilities

The number one solution for gaining new readers is creating high-quality content that search engines will like and users will love. For this reason, modern content writers are in a constant act of balancing between writing for humans and search engines.

Writing for search engines is easy, especially if the SEO team is good. However, writing for humans is more difficult since it requires the writer to understand user intent. It’s one of the skills that needs to be developed over the years.

A good writer also knows how to organize their thoughts into short sentences, succinct paragraphs, and neat subheadings. Adhering to consistent formatting is also one of their concerns, so make sure to look for inconsistencies while checking out a writer’s portfolio.

High-quality posts and articles also include multimedia content. Having a writer who can also do graphic design or video editing is rare and valuable. However, even if they lack these skills, they need to at least understand how to integrate this content into their text and be proactive, suggesting good spots for multimedia, and using tools to create elements like images, infographics, videos, or certificate designs to make the content more engaging media.

Digital marketing fundamentals

Digital marketing expertise is of the highest importance for marketing specialists, but also tangentially important to writers and SEOs, especially if you work in a marketing agency or write a lot about marketing in general.

A digital marketer needs to understand how their marketing channels work and how to get traction through them. The two most important skills for a marketing expert are social media and emails.

For social media, the marketer needs to know how to optimize content for each platform they’re going to be working with. Some platforms need shorter, snappier content, and others require long-form content that offers a lot of value.

They also must understand how to distribute content correctly, listen to feedback, and listen to the general sentiment of the audience without taking it all to heart. People on the internet can be cruel, especially when you mess up. However, a digital marketer needs to extract the valuable message from the hate and relay it to the rest of the team.

Email marketing is a different kind of beast and requires another skill set. Repurposing your content for emails, organizing newsletters, and segmenting your audience are just a few of the tasks they’re going to be doing.

Analytical skills

Team members in middle and senior marketing and copywriting positions, as well as SEOs of all grades, need to possess a degree of analytical abilities. The higher the seniority — the higher the requirements. Professionals in these positions need to:

Identify patterns and trends across multiple data sources
Recognize anomalies and understand their causes
Connect data points to create narratives
Draw conclusions from complex datasets

Most of the time, they will focus on two directions: traffic and campaign performance.

Traffic is their permanent concern. To understand what influences it, they must know what content brings in the users, how they interact with your content, and what potentially stifles your conversions.

On the other hand, campaigns are temporary and require quicker response times. An expert needs to evaluate campaign success across different channels and identify potential opportunities for optimizing this or next campaigns.

Naturally, a business needs to make money, so experts also need to calculate the ROI of their marketing efforts and improve it when needed.

Strategic abilities

This is more applicable for senior positions, such as SEO lead, marketing team lead, or content manager. However, always be on the lookout for junior and middle specialists with the potential to develop strategic thinking.

The most important parts are creating a content plan and calendar, managing other team members, and calculating budgets. This allows your team to roll out high-quality content consistently, which is important both for readers and search engines.

Conclusion

Building a dream content marketing team is more than just filling positions — it’s about finding SEO and digital marketing professionals who possess the right blend of technical knowledge, creative abilities, and analytical skills.

Building your dream team is a journey, not a destination. Don’t hesitate to pick up less experienced candidates and invest in their development. By understanding their potential and improving their core skills, you’re not just creating content — you’re building a sustainable competitive advantage for your business.

Implement structured assessment processes for each role, but remain flexible enough to recognize potential candidates who might not tick every box but show the aptitude and enthusiasm to learn and grow with your organization. After all, the best content marketing teams aren’t just collections of skilled individuals — they’re cohesive units that work together.