This is What Recruiters Are Looking For While Hiring ‘Experienced’ Digital Marketers

Digital Marketing can easily be called the Holy Grail of marketing in this digitalised age. The internet is no longer the space it was when it began. Back then the chances of getting your content noticed was easier. To put it in simple words,

“There weren’t many fishes in the sea.”

But now, the number of fishes is so high that it could clog the water. Apparently, number of fishermen have also increased and they are hungry for new and unique varieties.

Source: Shutterstock

As history has shown us, any field when facing complex elements at play needs a specialized body of knowledge to maneuver it. Digital Marketing plays this vital role for “fishes” in the overcrowded sea to capture the attention of their target “fishermen”.

If you truly believe that helping the “fishes” meet their “fishermen” is what you were born for, then the following pointers will throw some light to get you started.

Let’s start by saying that there is no shortcut to being good at digital marketing. It is a tough task and being mentally prepared would be a good start. When it comes to recognizing the right talent, only a hands on campaigner can recognize another campaigner. Incorrect approach, wrong fundamentals and poor campaign execution abilities is a big no-no. Here, experience can be your biggest and the only teacher you’ve got.

Source: Dilbert Comic

Then again the quality of the experience gained is important too. It helps even more when you have worked under a skilled manager. A good digital marketer can suffer

1. At the hands of a poorly skilled manager
2. Opaque business practices
3. Restrictive environment.

When there is no integration and co-ordination between different teams, you won’t understand the importance of your work and how it eventually affects the entire organization. You do the work you are assigned because that is what is told to you. No use of actual intelligence here.

Bottom line:
Experience counts but what matters more is the what that experience has taught you.

The next element affecting the growth of a great digital marketing talent is equally great senior talent. You can’t expect someone who has never driven anything to teach you how to drive. You need to have trainers, mentors, managers & seniors who actually can launch successful campaigns, who can handle dashboards, structure, optimize, analyze huge rows and columns in an Excel sheet AND be good as well as kind enough to share that experience.

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This tip is an old one and applies to any field that you want to get into.

Candidates have been seen fumbling at questions like –

“What is the maximum membership duration for a re-marketing list?”

This is a simple but tricky question. Candidates have been caught not answering separately for display and search. Some say 30 days, 60 days while some say its one year. Whereas the right answer is – “The maximum duration allowed for the Display Network is 540 days and for Google Search 180 days.”

It is a fact that this question can be answered correctly by careful theoretical study of AdWords. Experienced candidates feel that, there is a lot on their plate and fail to get the fundamentals in place before going for an interview.

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Its true that the basics are a must, but there are some practical questions which can only be answered with ample experience in your arsenal.

E.g. How do you structure a campaign for a small B2C business with a budget of Rs. 25,000 per month?

Here, candidates can demonstrate their experience by stating some assumptions while making a hypothetic structure to answer this question or come up with a campaign structure drawn from a case study they may have encountered in the past.

Fielding interview questions can be a daunting task for many. Here is when the experience plays a vital role. But it is also important that you as a digital marketer are aware of the fundamentals as well. There are agencies in Pune who are keen to actively hire super bright digital marketers but are failing to do so due to lack of talent.

Here are few questions that could be asked –

• Write an ad copy for a real estate residential project in Baner, with product details given to the candidate.
• Do a keyword planner, display planner exercise for an e-commerce website’s product page.
• Analyze a landing page and give your inputs.
• What is the average industry range for CPL of ABC business at XYZ location?
• Guess the estimate amount spent on display ads in Pune on Christmas/Diwali/other holidays.
• What works best when it comes to Search vs Display ads?
• What questions would you ask if you are given a budget of Rs. 5 Lac a week?

We at Pune Digital Marketers are trying to take a step towards bringing better talent to the fraternity – by organizing an advanced course on digital marketing. A once a year activity that we are looking to commit ourselves to, and we hope that it helps in improving the talent hunting scenario in Pune. We urge freshers, marketers wanting to get into digital marketing and folks looking to make themselves better at digital marketing to attend this course.

Our trainer – Abhishek Agarwal, has more than 100 people certified in Google AdWords and has managed AdWords spends of $20M+ per annum. He has over 8 years of experience in Digital Marketing and E-commerce in India. With a 4 year stint at Google India and a successful exit from a Digital Media Start Up in Pune. He is the man any organization/start up planning to launch their e-commerce venture should approach. This course includes the opportunity to get certified in AdWords. We cordially invite Pune’s agencies, marketing heads, entrepreneurs and businesses to nominate their team members for this course. For more details check out –