How to assess marketing director skills

Hiring a marketing director with sufficient skills allows your company to easily capitalize on new markets. Thus, it’s important to find candidates with the leadership, search engine optimization (SEO), marketing, and motivation skills to help your business grow.

What’s the best candidate evaluation approach? Create a talent assessment using the recommended marketing skills tests in this article and read our in-depth advice to easily identify the most skilled marketing directors from your applicant pool.

What is a marketing director skills assessment?

You can use a marketing director skills assessment to evaluate key skills and traits, including:

• Leadership and people management 

• General SEO abilities

• Marketing development knowledge

Your assessment will provide a fast, efficient way to compare the competency of several marketing directors, such as the ability to perform market analysis. 

A few other skills your assessment should review include mobile marketing knowledge and email marketing skills. These are essential for developing the perfect mobile marketing strategy to make digital content more accessible and optimizing email marketing campaigns to increase open rates and clicks. 

Since you can include several tests in your overall assessment, it’s also ideal for analyzing soft skills, such as communication and problem solving. Using a skills assessment to screen candidates for applicable skills has several advantages:

• Save time by reviewing every candidate simultaneously

• Commit to bias-free hiring using statistics to enhance hiring validity

• Remove unskilled candidates from the hiring process

Why are marketing director skills important?

Industry experts expect the global marketing and digital advertising sector to reach $1.5tn by 2030. To manage this market growth, your company needs expert directors with skills such as growth marketing. This skill can ensure your company is ready to meet changes the marketing industry may bring.

Testing your candidates for crucial marketing director skills like growth marketing has the following benefits:

Improves marketing team management

Key skills, such as leadership, people management, and project management, help the director to:

• Coordinate their team

• Assist them with setting priorities 

• Allocate resources

• Monitor progress

Research shows that efficient project management skills enable cross-functional teams to work and coordinate well. As such, skilled marketing directors who facilitate such collaboration will be able to:

• Achieve market business objectives

• Reduce repetition in marketing tasks

• Complete performance reporting

Your new hire requires delegation skills to manage workloads and deadlines effectively. This ensures they complete scheduled work promptly and allocate sufficient time for quality-checking tasks. Delegation helps them establish crucial project milestones and identify project risks to sustain steady progress.

Overall, leadership and project management skills help marketing directors maintain team morale by establishing shorter objectives that contribute to a long-term goal. Beneficially, they’ll keep everything to schedule, supporting broader success.

Assists with brand awareness

If your candidates have relevant marketing skills, such as product promotion management, you can trust their abilities to create promotional plans for your business with minimal training.

For example, a marketing department in a software development company may need to advertise a new application. For this, the marketing director should understand how to plan product promotion with the following approaches:

• Note the current level of app awareness

• Use strategies such as guest blogging

• Maximize the company’s organic social media methods

• Advertise in the right places

• Prioritize a consistent visual identity for the brand tone, color, and app

The outcomes of these strategies are a better company reputation, increased word-of-mouth promotion, improved brand equity, and greater brand awareness.

Contributes to marketing budget management

A skilled marketing director can ensure your company manages its marketing budget and resources efficiently across multiple activities, such as market research, content creation, and advertising.

With efficient budget management, your company will be able to:

• Measure your return on investment effectively

• Allocate funds in the right places for various marketing strategies

• Avoid overspending on each marketing strategy

Which skills and traits are important for marketing directors?

Many skills and traits, such as market analysis, leadership, people management, and critical thinking, are fundamental for marketing directors. 

A marketing director may not need to be an expert in technical SEO or website development, but top-line knowledge will be useful so they can oversee projects effectively.  

Hiring someone with industry-relevant skills and analytical traits ensures they bring value to your team and business. Review some crucial skills and examples below.

Market analysis 

Although your marketing director doesn’t need to be a data scientist, the best candidates can apply market analysis skills to set achievable goals.

A marketing director who understands market analysis can lead teams toward understanding trends and customer behaviors. As part of these actions, they can analyze customer feedback to set targets to improve customer satisfaction. 

An industry example of this could include clothing retailer product promotion. In this case, the marketing director would use market analysis to measure the success of a social media campaign.

They can review information like customers’ rates of engagement and consumer feedback. The results help them choose suitable actions to tweak the campaign.

These acknowledgments, reviews, and skills can help your company adjust its marketing goals and key performance indicators accordingly. As a result, your business may experience higher levels of customer satisfaction, leading to greater revenue figures.

General SEO knowledge

Despite the constantly evolving nature of SEO, skills in this area are important for marketing directors who need to manage SEO teams.

For example, marketing directors with SEO skills recognize the importance of this expertise and the positive impact organic traffic has on the company. They will be able to oversee people handling the following duties for the company:

• On-page SEO work

• Indexation and crawlability

• Google Analytics

• Keyword research

• Content calendar creation

An understanding of SEO enables marketing directors to support the team in making decisions, such as content directions and appealing to the target audience’s demand. Good SEO leads to greater digital traction that drives commercial value and informs online users.

Leadership and people management 

With leadership and people management skills, your new marketing director can inspire your company’s team members to achieve challenging marketing goals and pursue professional development opportunities, like taking on new tasks. 

A candidate with leadership skills like motivation and delegation can achieve this by setting a clear vision for your team. For example, if your company has or hires a team of content writers, the marketing director you recruit may:

• Delegate content writing projects to team members evenly

• Set deadlines and project aims for content writers

• Provide sufficient training and resources to inspire quality writing

Writers who feel motivated and supported are more likely to produce high-quality content. The result of these actions includes greater engagement on your company’s websites, and boosting reputation and brand awareness. Increases in website visits lead to opportunities for the business to:

• Generate qualified leads

• Share their brand

• Build relationships

Leadership and people management skills also help marketing directors communicate constructive feedback to their teams. Clear and actionable guidance could empower team members, helping them improve the quality of their work. It also fosters a culture of support and growth, which improves employee morale. 

For example, a marketing director might review the performance of a recent social media campaign. The director would outline the successful factors of the campaign and identify elements that didn’t perform as expected. Next, they’d explore reasons for the outcome and encourage team members involved in the campaign to share ideas, fostering collaboration.

Following discussions, the director could set action points for individual members to help them improve the campaign. Good leadership here helps team members feel confident in their tasks and inspires people to achieve mutual goals.

Critical thinking 

Critical thinking is at the core of a marketing director’s role, helping them evaluate data, identify opportunities, develop marketing strategies, and solve problems. Marketing directors are likely to use critical thinking skills to do things like:

• Identify new social media platforms

• Analyze data 

• Review customer feedback

For example, if a marketing director needs to develop new strategies, they might use critical thinking to analyze customer data first. With this analysis, the marketing director can help their team identify the most effective marketing channels to extend their reach. 

The same is true if a marketing director needs to analyze customer feedback. They can use critical thinking to identify key action points detailed in the feedback and improve the service to satisfy the customer.

Marketing director skills and traits tests

Evaluating your candidate’s marketing skills can make a significant difference to your company. You will find candidate evaluation easy by including the skills tests listed in this section in your talent assessment. 

Marketing Analytics skills test

Using our Marketing Analytics skills test, you can assess your candidates’ ability to review existing marketing strategies and use data analysis processes. Candidates with these skills can determine which actions to implement to optimize marketing efforts. 

This test will help you review how well your candidates analyze campaigns or review audience segments. It also helps you evaluate your candidate’s marketing knowledge and experience related to:

• KPIs and marketing metrics

• Data-based decision making

• Data presentation skills

• Data collection skills

While this test is ideal for evaluating marketing strategist skills or marketing analyst abilities, it’s also relevant to include in a marketing director skills assessment.

Technical SEO skills test

Including our Technical SEO skills test in your assessment will help you know how well your marketing director understands general SEO concepts in copywriting. It’s also ideal for checking if they know the role SEO copywriting plays in generating traffic for a client’s website.

This test will tell you more about your candidates’ general understanding of the following skills:

• Keywords and search behaviors

• Optimization of website content

• Knowledge of on-page SEO elements

While they may not complete any copywriting duties, they require knowledge of these skills. Include this objective assessment method to evaluate your candidate’s SEO competency.

Leadership and people management skills test

Before you interview your next marketing director, it’s worth using this test to determine if they can influence and guide your marketing team. Selecting the Leadership and people management skills test for your assessment will help you review candidates’ leadership skills like idea generation.

If you need to hire a marketing director who can encourage others to follow your company’s marketing vision, this is a crucial test to include. Some of the other skills you can review with this test include:

• Task management

• Feedback and guidance skills

• Team member development and support skills

Critical thinking skills test

The Critical thinking skills test focuses on deductive reasoning skills. It shows if your candidates understand the cause of marketing outcomes and how this affects clients and customers.

Using this test will help you determine if candidates can:

• Solve syllogisms

• Spot and challenge assumptions

• Use analytical abilities to evaluate numerical and written facts 

With such skills, your marketing director will have no problem analyzing the relationship between your company’s marketing strategies and the outcomes they yield. Directors will be able to tweak your current marketing strategies to achieve excellent results for your business.

Marketing director skills assessment FAQs

Searching for more information about marketing director skills assessments? Look no further than this section’s frequently asked questions and answers for all you need to know before making an assessment.

How do you evaluate a marketing director?

The easiest way to evaluate a marketing director is to combine up to five pre-employment skills tests in one assessment. 

You may select soft skills tests for your assessment, such as our Communication skills test, and task-specific options, such as the Marketing Analytics skills test. These tests will review many skills, helping you understand your candidate’s knowledge and choose the best talent for an interview.

What custom questions should I ask a marketing director?

Use custom questions to ask candidates what they know about your competitors to evaluate whether candidates have researched your company. You should also ask them how they would increase your customer base and what SEO and technical SEO practices they are familiar with. This will help you learn if their marketing strategy evaluation methods match your expectations.

How are candidates assessed?

You can assess your candidates by using a marketing director skills assessment after they apply for your vacancy and then interviewing the most skilled candidates. It’s also important to complete reference checks by contacting chief executives. This process helps you check whether your top candidate’s performance has been exemplary in their previous role.

How TestGorilla can help you find a skilled marketing director

TestGorilla provides a range of skills tests that target personality, culture, cognitive ability, soft skills and technical skills. You can trust TestGorilla’s assessments to help you evaluate several candidate skills and enhance your hiring process. 

We make candidate evaluation easier by offering skills assessments compatible with applicant tracking systems. This compatibility ensures you can monitor your candidates’ performance in one software. 

You’ll have full visibility over each candidate’s status in your hiring process and data on how long your candidates took to complete the tests. This information helps you make informed decisions throughout the hiring process.

All the results of your candidates’ assessments are percentages and star rankings, so you can use these as a clear guide when selecting candidates for an interview. If you’d also like to learn which specific traits your candidate will bring to your marketing team, we offer a Culture add test for valuable candidate insights.

Hire proficient marketing directors with TestGorilla

Do you want to begin the marketing director hiring process? Our skills assessments will make your task easy. We have more than 300 tests in our library and a few tests you can try for free when you sign up for TestGorilla.

Hiring a marketing director can be a complex and important decision. Choose TestGorilla to determine which candidates have the appropriate soft, technical, and cognitive skills you need to help your company grow and succeed.