For many businesses, a marketing team is essential; however, assessing the skills needed for marketing can be tricky when you’re not a marketer yourself. In fact, if you’ve never worked in the sector, knowing the necessary skills for marketing can seem almost impossible. It’s such a broad industry, and the variety of applicable skills is seemingly endless. From digital marketing skills to print marketing abilities, squeezing a marketing professional into one box of skills just isn’t achievable. To make your life a little easier regarding marketing recruitment, we’ve devised a handful of marketing skills examples.

What key marketing skills do you need to assess potential hires or employees?

Some of the most sought-after skills for digital marketing include:

  • Collaboration – marketers are required to liaise with the wider team, as well as clients, to deliver on goals.
  • Critical and analytical thinking – marketing is all about crafting goal-driven campaigns. Therefore, analytical thinking is required to ensure audiences are being reached most effectively.
  • Communication – marketers are required to communicate with all types of people, including company leaders, major stakeholders, team members, and audiences.
  • Listening – a marketer’s role is to deliver the message the client wishes to portray, meaning it’s essential to listen to their intentions and feedback.
  • Research – the purpose of marketing is to develop campaigns that encourage customers to do something. Therefore, data collection is essential to making this happen.
  • Creativity – marketing is all about working with ideas and optimising them to extend their reach; creativity is an essential quality for this.

How can you determine if someone has those skills, even if you’re not a marketer yourself?

Even if you’re not a marketer yourself, identifying these marketer skills doesn’t have to be taxing. Firstly, you can assess someone’s collaboration skills by simply watching how they work with others. Regarding critical and analytical thinking, you need to see how effectively they handle problems. Communication is one of the easiest things to assess; how clearly do they articulate themselves in all capacities? In terms of listening, if your clients are mostly happy with their marketing campaigns, it suggests that the marketing team has actively listened to their requirements. When it comes to research, you need to assess whether they’re able to back up their campaigns with facts and figures. Lastly, their creativity can be evaluated via the uniqueness and innovativeness of their campaigns.

What are some resources that can help you better understand and assess marketing skills in potential employees or hires?

To better understand and assess the skills needed for digital marketing, you might use various resources. This may include the idea of presenting them with a hypothetical problem during the recruitment stage to see how they’d handle certain scenarios. Similarly, you might present them with a client and ask them which route they’d take in crafting their marketing campaign. These tasks are a big teller of how the candidate will perform in the company.

How do you train someone who doesn’t have marketing skills but needs them for your business?

Not everyone has the skills required for marketing; however, some roles will demand these abilities. As with anything, practice makes perfect, so setting your team members’ tasks that will help mould these skills is essential.

Are there any other factors that you should take into account when assessing marketing skills in potential employees or hires?

Finally, when assessing marketing skills in potential employees or hires, it’s important to bear in mind that these skills aren’t one-size-fits-all. These skills will present themselves differently in different individuals, meaning flexibility is crucial. In fact, if someone challenges your perception of these skills, their uniqueness could be incredibly valuable to the company.

Are you looking to recruit marketing professionals? Upload a vacancy today!