8 steps to improve your digital marketing team

Whether you’re a large corporation, a startup, or a small business, digital marketing is critical to success. Many companies are now trying to hire the best possible digital marketers to help with their brand message, ads, and conversion rates. While your company might already have some great marketing strategies – you might still be asking what you can do to improve your online marketing initiatives.

Every company needs digital marketing of some kind, and the sector continues to grow year over year. Global digital ad spend is expected to be worth $495 billion by 2024, and more companies are trying to hire the best digital marketers to ensure that they have a healthy online presence. Even if your marketing is working, how can you improve on existing strategies? Here are steps that you can take to improve your digital marketing team today.

Establish the right KPIs

Technology now allows companies to track all sorts of data, whether they are interested in finding out more about bounce rates, click rates, or customer lifetime value. If you want to improve your marketing team, it might be time to start thinking about new metrics important to future success. 

If your company is offering a free trial, but you aren’t converting website visitors: it might be time to take a look at your landing page or feature unique benefits more prominently. Similarly, it might be time for your business to start looking at more important KPIs as you scale (such as monthly recurring revenue, for example). Establish several critical KPIs and focus on improving them if you genuinely want to improve your marketing team. You may also want to establish new KPI time frames – such as moving from a weekly target to a monthly target.

There should be a discussion about what KPIs might be outdated. These KPIs should be replaced by better ones that more accurately measure marketing success. Once these KPIs are established, focus on improving them only. Of course, this is a constantly evolving process: some KPIs may prove to be more important in the future than others, and adjustments will need to be made accordingly.

Broaden your horizons

There are probably some great digital marketers that live in your city, but why not consider interviewing outside of your city, state, or even country? The remote work boom of recent years has allowed many marketers to work from home or while traveling and has opened up the employee pool for companies who are willing to hire remote staff. Companies of all kinds and sizes are ready to hire remote workers from all over the world.

Some companies may even consider hiring individuals that aren’t typical “marketers” to add to their marketing team. A journalist or a PR professional may be able to land your company in high-profile publications, for example. Similarly, someone who is talented at design might also be able to contribute significantly to your overall marketing strategy.

Clarify your culture

One of the facts about the modern job market is that many candidates are attracted to companies because of their company culture. Some organizations can attract talent because they stand by specific causes, such as sustainability, diversity, or transparency. Your company should go out of its way to ensure that its company culture is the kind of culture that attracts the best marketers.

Your website can help clarify your company culture, as well. The website can feature content that elaborates on your organization’s beliefs and principles. The careers page can also feature digital marketing positions and streamline the application process for maximum convenience.

Testing before hiring

If you want to hire the best digital marketing team, then you have to have the right hiring and recruiting process. This might involve several interviews to find out whether they fit your company culture, while also reviewing their portfolio and asking for tangible proof that their marketing ideas led to actual cash flow. It’s also important to make sure that candidates are as qualified as they say they are.

It is worth giving them a skills test relevant to their potential role on the team, such as Facebook advertising or email marketing to ensure that they understand the right decisions to make when it comes to marketing campaigns. This can help offer some peace of mind that the candidate has the technical skills necessary for the role.

An example of a question from TestGorilla’s Email marketing test

Recruit the best talent

If your company wants to take digital marketing seriously, you can’t just hire the first marketer you interview. It can take a lot of time, effort, and money to find and assemble an incredible digital marketing team. If you want excellent results, then you will have to find the best digital marketing talent that you can find. 

Does this mean that your company has to shell out several hundreds of thousands of dollars to find the best possible digital marketers in the world? Not necessarily. However, you should go out of your way to offer the best incentives possible, because it will attract the best talent. If your network isn’t offering new talent, it might be time to consider posting on specialized job boards to attract new digital marketers.

Balance campaigns

Every organization has to think about both short- and long-term marketing campaigns. Your short-term marketing campaign might involve an incredible blog that references current events and trends. In contrast, your long-term marketing campaign might be an overall evergreen content strategy that will improve SEO rankings over the next several years. A company has to successfully balance both of these kinds of campaigns to be successful.

Many businesses can tap into a “moment” to increase traffic, such as an influencer endorsing their business or a Linkedin post about your company that ends up going viral. These are great results, but the focus should remain on the long-term strategy to provide a foundation for more leads and revenue in the future. Ideally, your short-term marketing campaigns can create enough cash flow to fund the more long-term campaigns. 

Long-term marketing campaigns can be essential to cementing your brand. It’s great to spend time and money on an intense month-long marketing strategy, but keep a 12-month content strategy in place to provide a solid base for future revenue. 

Lean into your strengths

Your business might already have a lot of information about what it’s doing well. For example, you might have data that suggests that your landing page sends a clear message about your product or services. There also might be certain blog content that performs very well when it comes to explaining your unique benefits. If you know what’s working, consider doubling down on these strengths.

Let’s say that you have decided to hire a social media marketer and notice that there is much more return on investment there than you had previously thought. Consider figuring out how and why that approach is working, and speak to the marketer about ramping up campaigns. If you have hired that marketer part-time, it might be time to offer them a full-time position. It may even be worth hiring more social media marketers if that approach seems to be uniquely successful.

If you have always had solid website traffic and email marketing, continue to build on these strengths and make sure those numbers only improve. The beauty of leaning into your strengths is that it often takes less time and effort. Since these efforts are already working, your digital marketing team can focus on tweaking and optimizing them. If it’s working, then commit it entirely to your overall marketing strategy.

Keep experimenting

Marketing isn’t always exact, and there can be surprising trends that shock marketers worldwide. One of the keys to marketing is to constantly try out new things while remaining loyal to your brand. Your digital marketing team shouldn’t be afraid to try out new experimental marketing campaigns that can end up providing insight even if they aren’t as successful as expected.

Many marketing experiments can produce data that tells you something about your customers that you didn’t realize. You might figure out more about why your brand is perceived a certain way, or find that your “target customer” has a different persona than you initially thought. You can also find out more about what new marketing channels your customers prefer, for example, which can help inform a future advertising campaign.

You might find that one social media platform is a better marketing channel for your company than another, or that a podcast can generate lots of leads in the future. Devote a specific percentage of your budget to market experimentation so that the results can help inform future marketing decisions.

Some of the most successful marketing campaigns in the world have involved a certain amount of risk. Your digital marketing team should constantly be working on new ideas and testing concepts to figure out what can improve, why it’s working, and how it applies to the overall bigger picture.