New Skills Alert: Digital 'unicorns' and where to find them

The last few years have seen a monumental shift in digital marketing strategic trends; gone are the days where marketers were solely valued for creativity and content skills. Use this blog to build your team with the most in-demand digital skills, via an effective and efficient hiring strategy!

Marketing leaders and Heads of Digital looking to build out their teams are now looking at skill sets beyond conventional online copywriting and content. Where advertisers seek to better understand consumer behaviours and meet the evolving demands of their customers, the science of data and analytics has grown significantly in importance. There are more tools than ever before measure the success of digital marketing campaigns – and every business needs well-rounded digital professionals able to leverage them. There’s a new breed of digital ‘unicorn’ everyone wants to hire: a truly digital-savvy, analytics-driven marketer.

The most sought-after digital skills:

• - Data and Analytics

Data and analytics refer to a broad understanding of many different software and platforms that provide detailed reports into the activities of online users as they interact with websites, apps, paid campaigns, and social media. Being able to accurately track and examine this data is a new skill that empowers marketing teams to create better-optimised content and deliver highly targeted, personalised messaging.

If you can manage this data to understand your key audiences, how and when they interact with your digital touchpoints, and for what purposes…you can more accurately position your products or services to meet customer needs in the way they want them to be met!

Before insights, interpretation, and action, a level of technical proficiency will be required in first managing large volumes of data, including data cleansing for precision, and the isolation of anomalies and outliers to assess and determine relevance. While marketers may not need first-hand expertise in Python coding or using Power BI, becoming Google Analytics-certified reveals a data-driven appreciation of traditional marketing activities.

•  - Technical SEO

Similarly, exhibiting an understanding of how customers use websites and optimising to better address their ‘pain points’, marketers with a deep knowledge of organic search, both on and off-page, will set your digital strategy apart in the months ahead.

Technical SEO goes beyond keyword research by reaching deep into the structure of your website and the strategic placement of content. To have a profound impact on organic website traffic, you need to find the right SEO expert when you are creating your website, or engage them to perform a full audit of your pages and keyword rankings when the site is live.

From there, they will enhance any underperforming pages with on-page targeted and structured keywords, ensure tags are applied for maximum page ranking, and develop a content strategy to complement it. Setting up effective tracking and analytics is also vital and forms a wider part of the Technical SEO skill set.

• - Paid Social and Performance

With a multitude of social media channels available and so many brands competing to be seen and heard on them, organic social strategies have the best likelihood of success when supported by a paid social programme. Finding someone who is well-versed in campaign building, content creation, design, A/B testing, and optimisation will be invaluable to ensuring your brand is seen on social – but also converts those audiences into customers.

• - Design-oriented thinking and planning

Design-based thinking and planning is an approach that has become more popular with the rise of optimisation and better customer empathy within digital marketing. It allows digital marketers to approach all tasks with a fully optimised user experience design in mind. Making blog content more readable, web pages more accessible, and your products and services focused for customer conversion - and truly created with the intended audience in mind.

• - Exceptional communication skills

Whilst focus may be shifting from being content-oriented to a more data analytics-driven mindset within digital marketing, effective copywriting and communications will always have a place of prominence within any strategy. This means digital talent still need to be exceptional communicators both verbally, whether client-facing or working with colleagues across the digital department, as well as across written formats.

What digital marketing hire would suit your needs best?

It truly would be a digital marketing unicorn-like person to be proficient at all these combined skills, however finding a candidate with several of the above digital skills is more than possible with specialist staffing talent support.

Considering the current size and requirements of your digital strategy and team, you may need to think about what kind of hire would best suit your requirements. Do you have sustained, long-term increased digital needs? Or are you looking for agile support on time-specific projects? These questions will determine whether you would benefit most from:

• - Hiring permanent digital marketers
• - Hiring digital freelancers

What’s more, how you source and recruit would be different depending on your answer. Fortunately, Energize Digital has plenty of experience and knowledge of the current talent market and can support you on either!

How can Energize Digital help you find the right digital professionals?

From leadership and strategy right through to implementation and analysis, you should look to build your marketing team with the most sought-after digital skills and experience. With a talent network of over 100,000 digital marketing professionals, Energize Digital is a preferred supplier to many of the world’s leading agencies and brands. As true channel specialists, the expertise of our highly-experienced team has allowed us to consistently deliver market-leading staffing solutions  since 2009. Whether building out entire departments or providing a strategic sole hire, a partnership with Energize Digital assures you of a high-quality, customer-centric approach, and access to an unrivalled professional network.

For expert guidance, contact Energize Digital today