Hiring Digital Marketing Professionals

Starting a Business: Lesson 7

Mark Bays, the Director for the SBDC at ETSU, will be discussing hiring a digital marketing professional for your small business.

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Video Lesson Topics

- Digital Marketing Professional's Purpose

A digital marketing professional’s purpose is to develop and follow through with a marketing campaign. This campaign can make a business better known and reach potential customers and clients through a wide range of digital methods.

Business owners can fall into the trap of hiring someone who is familiar with personal social media use but not for marketing a business. If this happens, it can result in a lot of trial and error marketing, which can be costly and misrepresent your brand.

- Hiring Options

A marketing firm might be the way to go for your business since it can be difficult to find one person who has all the resources to appropriately deliver all your company’s marketing. A firm can include strategists, creative directors, designer, copywriters, and developers. It can be more cost effective instead of hiring one employee to do it full time. Hiring a firm also eliminates having to retain talent for the position, and you can gain access to cutting edge tools and technology, that the firm uses to stay competitive against other firms.

Hiring an in-house team can be a group or an individual. This can be an asset because you the business owner has full control of who markets for your business and how they go about it. Having your marketing and sales team under one roof can provide ease in sharing information to enhance the adaptability in their campaigns.

When you are considering what is best for your brand, evaluate your marketing objectives. Weight the benefits, drawbacks, and overall cost for each choice. Running a SWOT Analysis can be a great tool to help you evaluate this.

- Identify Marketing Goals

When hiring a marketing professional, be sure to identify your marketing goals first. What do you want to accomplish, more sales, more visits to the website, launching a new product, or more social media followers?

- Things to Consider Before Hiring

Be sure to review their portfolio and note what type of content have they generated.
Have they worked with other clients in your industry?
Do a Google search of the applicant or firm.
Have they taken time to learn about your business?
What marketing channels are they experienced in?
What performance indicators do they use to measure success, and do they align with your goals?
Consider having them submit a proposal of expected results of a marketing plan.
If you are hiring in-house, what type of equipment will they need to capture content?
How often do they research their industry?
What type of budget do they require for their campaign? (typically a business uses 5-10% of their revenues for marketing)

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