© Market Motive | | 10 Victor Square #250 Scotts … · 2014. 4. 28. · © Market Motive | | 10 Victor Square #250 Scotts Valley, CA 95066 USA | 831-706-2369 | Toll Free 866-323-9444

© Market Motive | www.MarketMotive.com | 10 Victor Square #250 Scotts Valley, CA 95066 USA | 831-706-2369 | Toll Free 866-323-9444

The New Requirements for Online Marketing Skill Sets How Team Building will Change in 2014 and Beyond

A Constant State of Change

When it comes to recruiting, managing, and retaining digital marketers, it’s as easy to get it wrong as it is to get it right.

Maybe easier.

Best practices for building and training a team of marketing professionals are in a constant state of flux; keeping your team current with marketing trends is a challenge when the tools and culture of digital media are constantly shifting under your feet. So what can you do to hire top quality digital marketing professionals and keep them trained and relevant?

What you need is some sound advice to keep from spinning your wheels trying to understand who to hire, and why.

It doesn’t have to be overly complex. Just a few core concepts set in place can make all the difference.

What Managers Really Want

We polled over 600 digital marketers and team managers, and personally interviewed another 32, to discover what managers look for in applicants, compared to what digital marketers actually do on the job.

What we discovered may surprise you:

Managers don’t hire for the skills they advertise for.

We’ve found a distinct disconnect between the focus on hard skills in job descriptions, and the underlying desire for soft skills in the actual hiring process. In other words, managers write job listings that focus on hard skills, but they’re actually more likely to make hiring decisions based on soft skills.

What can you do to hire top quality digital

marketing professionals and keep them trained

and relevant?

There’s a disconnect between the skills

managers advertise for, and what they hire for.


The Results of Our 2013 Poll and Interviews

It’s easy to see the disconnect: managers write ads looking for hard skills. But the skills we see listed in ads aren’t prioritized the way our poll indicates they should be.

More importantly, when interviewed, managers actually prioritize soft skills over hard skills altogether.

It’s clear that fairly balancing the importance of hard and soft skills in the team-building process will lead to a more satisfying hire all around, a smoother onboarding process, and a stronger team with the skills you need.

In fact, understanding and prioritizing for hard and soft skills, and hiring and training accordingly, is business critical.

So why doesn’t that happen more often?

The skills managers advertise for

are not the skills they end up hiring for.


Why Managers Don’t Advertise for Soft Skills

There’s a lack of qualified talent available with the required hard skills. So when the rubber meets the road, managers won’t wait for the right hard skills to walk through the door. They’ll hire the right personality, a person who fits the team and culture, and then work with them to develop the hard skills they need through training.

The problem is, managers lack a suite of best practices to assess soft skills. So they still write job descriptions, and ads, focused on the hard skills they understand, and then sift through applicants to find those with the soft skills they need.

Understanding the difference between hard and soft skills, building a culture that embraces both, and developing ways to test for and build on them in your hiring and onboarding practices, can mean the difference between just hiring, and building a team.

First and Foremost: Break Down the Silos

Experts and specialists are important. But your team can’t just stick to what they know. You need people with an inquisitive mindset who are interdisciplinary by nature. And you need to develop a culture that supports and rewards those traits.

Build a dynamic job structure that rewards interdisciplinary behavior, and be prepared to provide inquisitive minds with the knowledge they crave.

Then hire and train people who are collaborative by nature and possess the hard and soft skills necessary to serve your marketing needs.

Hire for Soft Skills, Train for Hard Skills

Once you’ve created a culture and job structure that’s focused on cross-disciplinary expertise, passion, and creative thinking, it’s time to fold the concept into hiring and retention practices.

There is a science to understanding – and leveraging – the delicate balance between hard and soft skills needed to build a successful digital marketing team.

Surprisingly, we’ve found that many managers struggle to understand how the two skill sets work together to make for more successful marketers.

Reward curiosity and break down the silos

Solving for hard and soft skills is difficult

but critical.


Building Marketers With Range

T-Shaped marketers

Perhaps best defined by marketing thought-leader Rand Fishkin, the “T SHAPED” Web marketer structure is a useful model by which to evaluate a successful marketing team. It suggests hiring and training teams to have a light level of knowledge across a broad array of skills, with deep knowledge and ability in one or a few specialty areas of expertise.

I-Shaped marketers

But with our research showing soft skills ranking high on the wish list of managers, perhaps the “T-SHAPED” marketer should be reimagined to embrace a broader range of both hard and soft skill sets. Moving forward as educators and professional marketers, we need to employ a more “I-SHAPED” marketing model, based not only on overlapping hard skill sets but a deeper level of knowledge and commitment to learning, strategic thought and problem-solving.

A multilayered “hard skill” set and more cooperative, inquisitive “soft skill” set will build a better

marketer whose organic thinking and general nature leads to innovation and growth.


How To: Interviewing For Hard and Soft Skills

If at first you find it difficult to separate hard skills from soft skills, don’t worry. That’s natural and there is some overlap.

Based on the results of our poll and interviews, we see a consistent list of the hard and soft skills most often mentioned in digital marketing.

SOFT SKILLS most desired for online marketing teams include:

Ability to persuade

Set a strategy based on company goals

Derive tactics from a marketing strategy

An overt obsession with quality

An ability to establish social voice of company

Innovative thinking

Problem-solving tendencies

Ability to represent concepts visually

Ability to derive decisions from masses of data

Soft Skills include thinking patterns, work habits, passions, talents, and more. Soft skills are tougher to train for, so finding candidates who demonstrate great teamwork skills, decision making abilities, and big-picture vision will put you on the fast track to a stronger team.

Interviewing with purpose for soft skills

Ask candidates to walk you through a specific time where the soft skill was in place:

1. “Tell me about a specific scenario when you showed _[work habit or soft skill]_ “

2. “First describe the Situation, then your Actions, then the Results.“

3. When the candidate generalizes or wanders, interrupt and get back on track (above)

4. No complete scenarios? Candidate is unlikely to have the soft skill you need

Great resource: High Impact Hiring: How to Interview and Select Outstanding Employees (Third Edition) by Del J Still (Aug 15, 2006)

Planning & Scheduling

Planning & Scheduling

Influenced another team for SEO

Created new marketing process

Represented products visually


HARD SKILLS in online marketing include quantifiable excellence in:

Social Media Marketing

Web Analytics

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Content Marketing

Email Marketing

Paid Search Advertising (PPC/SEM)

Mobile Marketing

Writing Skills

Conversion Rate Optimization

Landing Page Testing (AB Testing)

…and other related skill sets

When you choose hard skill training resources for your company or institution, look for courseware that adheres to standards set by prominent associations such as OMCP®, the DMA, or other well-established universities. Courses from vendors, agencies and freelancers may be helpful but need to be checked for accuracy and relevance. Use a placement test from an established institution like OMCP®, Market Motive® or The DMA®.

At Market Motive we use these industry-defined hard skills to design and organize our training curriculum, and to measure proficiency.

Interviewing: for “Hard Skills” Ask anecdotal questions when you meet candidates face-to-face:

How would you describe Web Analytics to an eight-year-old? What did you learn in your OMCP® course?

Use exercises to determine Hard Skills

Ensure your exercises are: 1) generally undisputed, 2) represent “generally accepted” practices, 3) solvable in less than10 minutes and 4) require no “company insider” facts. Examples:

SEO: Build an initial keyword list SEO: Name three KPIs to evaluate the performance of an SEO consultant Analytics: Name three segments that would help us communicate with our web visitors Analytics: List four questions you would ask in a site poll Analytics: 94% of visitors using internal search for “Fed-EX” exit the site. What should we do? Writing: Pick a paragraph from our website and rewrite it to be better… and shorter Writing: Pick a Topic you are passionate about and write three paragraphs (have candidate use WordPad or

any editor without spell check)


The answer to building the best team you can is sophisticated yet incredibly simple.

Education is key. There is no better way to empower your employees to innovate.

Hire great, creative, inquisitive people.

Feed their insatiable learning appetites with a strong dose of knowledge across a wide range of all the critical disciplines.

And the strong will thrive.

Follow these principles and you will grow effective digital marketing teams.

Digital marketing is survival of the fittest.

Darwinism as applied to professional development.

Natural selection happens so fast, you might not even know you’ve been thinned from the herd until it’s too late.

The best way to keep your marketing DNA vital is by supporting your marketers and managers with the tools they need to adapt to the rapidly changing ecosystem of digital marketing.

“It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change.” - Charles Darwin

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© Market Motive | | 10 Victor Square #250 Scotts … · 2014. 4. 28. · © Market Motive | | 10 Victor Square #250 Scotts Valley, CA 95066 USA | 831-706-2369 | Toll Free 866-323-9444