Hiring and Building a Winning Digital Marketing Team

Winning digital marketing teams don’t happen by accident. Instead, they’re the result of consistent, continual investment on the part of your company and departmental leadership.

Whether you’re starting fresh with a new team or trying to turn around an underperforming group, it’s important to know not just how to gauge the current state of your team, but how the recruitment process works and train new members as well.

I’ve shared some of my best team-building tips here, based on years of experience building dozens of digital marketing teams. I hope you find them helpful, no matter where you are in the process.

Evaluating the State of Your Team

You can’t make a solid plan for hiring or building a digital marketing team if you don’t know where you’re starting from. 

Obviously, if you’re starting from scratch, putting a game plan together is going to look a lot different than if you need to think about new hires within the context of your existing structure. 

Give the following tips a read before moving on to my advice for hiring digital marketers and leveling up your team.

Building a New Team

If you’re building a new digital marketing team – either because you’re working with a startup or because your existing company hasn’t had a marketing team – think about your needs relative to the four roles I described in an earlier post

As you think through how to fill the team lead, strategist, creative executor, and analytics roles required for digital marketing success, ask yourself:

  • What kind of budget am I working with?
  • How many seats can my budget support?
  • How should I allocate roles, based on my marketing priorities?
  • Does it make sense to bring on FTEs or to work with consultants, contractors or other non-traditional types of workers?
  • What do digital marketing teams look like throughout my industry?

Really put some time into answering these questions. It’s a lot harder to replace a bad hire or restructure a department than it is to just invest in getting it right from the start. Sidenote: Get inspired by the real-life case of a company that recruited 100 people in just two weeks.


Growing an Existing Team

On the other hand, say you see problems within your existing team that need to be resolved. Maybe you’re growing. Maybe you’re changing your marketing focus. Maybe you just need to invest in up-skilling your existing team members.

In any case, begin with the following questions:

  • Out of the four key digital marketing team roles, which are underrepresented within your company (or missing from it entirely)?
  • Alternatively, do you have the right roles, but the wrong people in them?

If your issues are with people instead of roles, one great tool for identifying and replacing underperformers on your team is the People Analyzer put out by EOS.

To use it, measure each person on your team against your company’s core values, as well as their ability to understand their role (“gets it”), their desire to do their role well (“wants it”) and their ability to perform their role (“capacity”). 

Give each person a rating of “+” “+/-” or “-” and then evaluate the trends you’re seeing. Set a cut-off point that’s unique to your team.

  • If this is your first time assessing your team members, you might identify anyone who receives multiple “-” ratings as a potential underperformer.
  • Once you’ve repeated the assessment over multiple months or quarters, you might set your standards higher, so that receiving any number of “+/-” ratings signals a problem.

Read Traction for more information on implementing the People Analyzer. But don’t be afraid to experiment with it and make it your own. The goal here isn’t to rigidly follow someone’s system. It’s to have a numerical process for understanding the performance and fit of every member on your team.

Hiring New Marketing Team Members

Once you’ve identified roles that need to be filled on your team, you can turn your attention to optimizing your hiring process.

There’s a big difference between posting a job description on a mass-market listing site like Monster.com or Indeed and executing a tactical search. That’s because top candidates aren’t spending time on those websites. They might not even be looking for new opportunities. 

Start With a Clear Job Description

You can’t hire the right person if you don’t have a clear understanding of what the role needs to achieve. 

To some degree, going through the process of identifying the roles you need to fill will help you set your job descriptions. But you need to go beyond that. Think through:

  • What past experiences should a candidate have had to be successful in this role?
  • What personal attributes are you looking for (ex: self-sufficiency or attention to detail)?
  • What tools or technology do you use internally that the candidate should know (or be willing to learn)?
  • What does success in the role look like to you?

Use your answers to these and other questions when you write up your job descriptions. Clarity here matters, because your job description is essentially your map for finding the right candidate. Without a clear vision of where you’re trying to go, you might never reach your destination.

Finding Quality Candidates

Once I have my job description figured out, I’m not going to just sit back and wait for candidates to find me. I’m going to go out and find them, using a number of techniques.

Using my own website


Posting job offers on your own website is the best way to attract valuable candidates. Anyone browsing my site has an interest in what I do and my business. That person could potentially turn out to be a job seeker and the perfect match. Be sure to look into niche job boards like Kickstart Careers, a job board that caters for women in tech for example.

If you’re not a developer, you can use tools like this job board plugin to quickly create a career page on any site. Ask your webmaster to add the small code snippet, then you can freely post and edit your job offers. It takes only a few minutes so don’t leave out this option.

Asking for Referrals

Over time, I’ve built a great network in the SaaS and entrepreneurship communities. So if I need to hire a new digital marketing team member, there’s a good chance one of my contacts will know of someone who’s looking for work.

Yes, I still have to go through the interview process I’ll talk about next. But referrals have a built-in advantage in that my contacts are putting their names on the line to recommend the candidates. They’re generally pretty high quality as a result.

Searching Directly on LinkedIn

My next stop is LinkedIn, where I usually start by searching on title. That gives me a pool of candidates that I can narrow down according to whatever criteria I have for the role.

For example, I’ve written before about how certain profile keywords clue me in on how current or appropriate a candidate’s knowledge is. “Growth marketing” tells me that a candidate is aware of current digital marketing trends. “Data-driven” tells me that the candidate is someone with a more tactical focus.

When I review LinkedIn profiles, I like to look for people who have just done the thing I’m trying to hire for. For instance, if I’m trying to hire a strategist whose goal will be to 2X annual recurring revenue (ARR), I’m going to be especially interested in candidates who talk about increasing ARR in past roles in their profiles. That’s a big part of why it’s so important for me to establish my needs before I start looking for candidates. Here are some great email templates for cold outreach to candidates.

Once I’ve found candidates – whether they appear to be looking for work or not – I’ll send a quick message introducing myself and ask whether or not they’re open to new roles, or if they know anybody else who is. A players tend to know A players. So even if the people I’ve found aren’t interested, there’s a good chance they can point me towards other worthwhile candidates.

Researching My Competitors

Poaching from competitors may be a grey area, but I say that it never hurts to ask. 

Say you’re hiring for a content executor role, and you know that one of your competitors has a really strong content program. You can always figure out who’s in charge of the program, reach out to them, and ask if they’re looking for new opportunities or know anyone else who is.

They may not be receptive – and they may have legal agreements in place that prevent them from working with competitors for a set period of time. But they may also be interested in extending their experience to a similar opportunity in their current field. Just don’t be a jerk and ask them to spill your competitor’s secrets if they do come on board with you.

Identifying Guest Contributors or Speakers

One final strategy for finding great candidates is to look for people who are already actively distinguishing themselves in their field through guest articles or speaking positions.

Suppose I’m still looking to fill that content executor role. I could go to the Content Marketing Institute website and look at guest authors who have contributed articles to the site and see if any of them might be good candidates. Similarly, I could go over to the speaker listing for the Content Marketing World conference and see what I can find.

Where exactly you look for candidates will vary based on the role you need to fill and your industry. But take a look. Candidates with public profiles like this may be more expensive to hire, but if they’re trusted by reputable publications and conferences, you can bet they know their stuff.

Interviewing Candidates

Once you’ve got a few good candidates on your radar, it’s time to begin the interview process. I’ve written about my interview process before, but as a review, I typically like to include multiple stages:

  • An email interview with 3-4 questions
  • A 15-20 minute phone screen interview
  • A longer video interview with my business partner
  • A skills assessment interview

I get asked a lot about the kinds of interview questions I use in these interviews, and the truth is that it varies by role and company. Ultimately, my goal with interview questions isn’t to trick people – it’s to understand whether or not they can fill the role I’ve identified. 

To that end, some of the questions I use most frequently include:

  • What’s your strongest channel?
  • How do you keep up with digital marketing?
  • What’s been your most successful campaign, and why?
  • If you had a marketing budget of X, how would you spend it, and why?

You can find plenty of lists of interview questions online – just do some digging, and you’ll find lots of options. Customize them to your interview process, and split-test them in your interviews. If a given question isn’t producing the kind of information you need to make an educated hiring decision, rework it or toss it in favor of something else. Once you have decided on the perfect candidates, create an employee onboarding checklist to help them get up to speed. Make sure to give your new employees the tools they’ll need like a searchable staff directory, project tracking software, and communication tools so they can hop right into their new team.

Investing in Ongoing Team Development

Here’s the thing: You can’t just hire good people and hope they’ll do well. You have to constantly invest in team development. Digital marketing changes too quickly to assume that someone who’s an expert at one point will remain that way if you aren’t regularly investing in training them.

Here’s how we do it at Web Profits and on the other teams I manage:

  • We make it a priority for all team members to spend time understanding what their weakest skills are and where they can improve.
  • We give team members access to mentors on Clarity.fm so that they can get targeted help as needed.
  • We try to connect them with people – either internal or external – who have accomplished what they want to do, so that they can get not just information on how to achieve their goals, but inspiration as well. 
  • We send team members to training courses and conferences as needed to grow their skills.
  • We regularly evaluate people’s investments in self-improvement and consider self-motivation on these topics as a factor when we’re reviewing performance.

The bottom line is that “leveling up” doesn’t happen if you – and all the members of your team – aren’t proactive about it. Make the investment. If your employees aren’t willing to reciprocate, that’s a good sign you’ve got the wrong person in the role.

What other tips would you add to this list for building and growing a digital marketing team? I’d love your insight. Leave me a note in the comments below:

Image: Unsplash

Entrepreneur & Digital Marketing Strategist

I build and grow SaaS companies.

“When it comes to marketing, Sujan is the best. I’ve never met someone with such creative tactics and deep domain knowledge not just in one channel, but in every flavor of marketing. From content, to scrappy guerrilla tactics, to PR, Sujan always blows my mind with what he comes up with.”

RYAN FARLEY Co-Founder of Lawn Starter

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