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Nothing counts until someone makes a purchase. This is the mantra of marketing specialists all over the planet. While they may have lots of smaller goals throughout the process of bringing customers to the table, the ultimate measure of their success is sales.

Any company with a digital presence understands the critical importance of having the best marketing specialist/manager on board – someone who knows, loves, and has mastered online marketing in all of its diverse and correlated parts.

Are there such experts out there? Absolutely. And while they are becoming easier to find, the demand is great.

The job of an HR manager becomes significant when there is an opening for a marketing pro. He must develop a job description that does two things:

•     Specify all of the skills (hard and soft) that the position demands
•     Present the company as a place where a marketing pro will want to work

Let’s unpack these two elements of a marketing manager job description.

Essential Digital Marketing Skills

There is a long and complex list of skills that digital marketers must have.

•     Content Creation: Digital marketing is wholly dependent upon the type of content marketers produce. This may be in the form of blog posts, direct advertising, multimedia projects, white papers, podcasts, surveys and quizzes, humorous memes, and of growing importance, suitable social media platforms. Marketing pros have to know their audiences, where they hang out, what tone and style resonate if they are to create web content that will engage who needs to be engaged.
•     Email campaigns: Capturing attention in a time when inboxes are full requires a lot of work – finding and nurturing those targets, crafting amazing subject lines, focusing on a single message that will resonate, etc. This requires lots of research into the data science that is now available.
•     Mobile responsiveness: The digital marketer must stay on top of the latest mobile technology, as well as Google algorithm changes related to that technology so that all mobile marketing efforts meet those new “rules.”
•     SEO: This is always on the minds of marketing pros. How do their messages contain the type of content and long-tail keywords that search engines need to see in order to get ranked well? This has become a highly “scientific” endeavor, and marketers must have the wherewithal to dive into that research.
•     Social Media: If one marketing platform should be foremost on the minds of successful marketers, it is social media. In fact, 2.6 billion consumers are on at least one platform. While different audiences will choose different platforms on which to hang out, they will be hanging out somewhere and looking for messages that will resonate. It has become so important to marketing that companies like the National Institute for Social Media (NISM) are offering online training coursework and certifications that marketers are finding important to add to their resumes/portfolios.

Essential Management Skills

A digital marketing manager will often not be working solo. Mid- to large-sized companies often have a marketing team because the tasks/projects have become so critical to their bottom lines.

Job descriptions should address these management skills:

•     Analysis: Business analytics is part of data science. And marketers must be able to use the research tools that will provide the information they need about their niches and the consumers who patronize them. Another part of analysis involves the ability to measure campaign results and make adjustments as called for.
•    Communication: Marketers must get “buy-in” from their own staff and from other “stakeholders” in the company – the sales department, the budget and finance managers, and other level C executives. This is in addition to the communication skills to craft and distribute the perfect content for their audiences. Without such messages, the brand languishes.
•     Creativity: This is going to require staying current with the latest advances in marketing delivery. It will certainly include multimedia approaches, as well as the use of augmented and virtual reality technology. “Consumers demand to be engaged, entertained, and inspired, and old-time walls of text will just not “cut it” today. One keyword here – cleverness”, says Dorian Martin, a writing expert at the paper writing help service.
•     Empathy: No marketer can hope to design campaigns based upon what the company wants. Marketers must be able to see their products or services through the eyes of the consumer, not their own. When they can put themselves into the “shoes” of their audience members and craft messaging based on that, they will have a winning message.
•     Leadership: The best marketing managers lead their team, not as dictators, but as collaborative members who believe they have ideas and opinions that are valued. When such collaboration exists, team members are far more likely to buy into decisions that are made and will focus their efforts on implementing those decisions.
•     Strategic Organization: Everything from designing and implementing/scheduling campaigns to analyzing the results of individual campaigns, to using all of the best and most current software tools to do all of these things.

All of these elements should be present in a job description that is going to separate the real pros from the more amateurish applicants.

But, attracting those real pros means that there are parts of that job description that make the company and the position itself attractive to top marketers. Here are some of those key elements:

•     Presenting the company, its history, its mission, and its principled values. Digital marketers want to see a company that will appeal to today’s discerning and demanding consumer, one that provides value in product/service, but that also has a strong sense of social responsibility. Consider, for example, the many companies that have a one-for-one giving policy – when a consumer buys a pair of shoes from Toms, for example, a pair is donated to a needy child somewhere in the world. Other companies are major supporters of social causes throughout the world. An additional presentation element must speak to diversity in the employment process. Top marketers understand the importance of this element.
•     Budget is important to marketers. They want to see something in the position description that reflects supporting marketing budgets that are based on good reasoning and justifications.
•     Flexibility. One thing that marketers want is the right to design and implement new and unique strategies, to test them, and to have flexibility in developing their campaigns. These may even include using influencers, affiliate marketing, as well as the latest technology, that engage consumers. They also want the power to recruit, screen, and employ their own team members.

Crafting the Description is Not Easy

To ensure that all elements are present and that the description itself is creatively written to engage and attract the right candidates is a tall order. HR managers tasked with creating this job description should also use the tools available to them to get it right. This includes using data science and digging into the competition and how they are presenting their companies and writing up those marketing manager job descriptions. It’s a competitive marketplace for top marketers, and every detail in that job description must be just right.

Author: Helene Cue

Helene Cue has been around the digital marketing atmosphere for a long time as a writer, editor, and content marketing blogger. On the side, she also provides custom paper writing help that students must produce in their business, marketing, and related coursework.