How to hire great Inbound Marketing talent for your business
Inbound Marketing is one of the most sought after Digital Marketing skills today, and most companies are willing to go to greath lengths in order to hire the best Inbound Marketers available on the market.
This trend is due to the fact that new generations of consumers no longer blindly rely on aggressive advertising messages that ony appeal to people's emotions.
Rather, consumers in the digital age often make informed decisions after reading articles and viewing videos on the Internet. In this way, they have the feeling that their purchase is based on neutral and objective criteria that they found in blogs and social media.
However, winning the trust of consumers through digital content is by no means an easy task. In this post, we propose some guidelines to follow in order to spot genuine Inbound Marketing talent that will take your company's content strategy to the next level.
Hire someone who can write
Although Inbound Marketers aren't always directly responsible for writing content, it's a good idea to pick someone with a strong journalistic orientation and good writing skills to look after you company's Inbound strategy.
Many companies decide to outsource the writing of blog articles, and only hire Inbound Marketing Managers to look after the implementation of the inbound processes required for getting those articles out. Even so, our Inbound manager will need to be able to understand if a text is written in a professional manner, or if on the contrary an article lacks form and style.
A good way to understand if our candidates meet this first requirement is to read a blog post they have written to get an idea about their writing ability.
Hire someone who understands your business
A fundamental rule of Inbound Marketing is that the contents that we publish must be relevant. What do we mean by relevant content? Simply that our blog articles and our videos must focus on the doubts our target audience has. Better yet, that our content offers solutions to real problems that our potential customers have...
An Inbound process usually starts with a Google search about a doubt or problem we have. The simple fact of finding content that provides answers and solutions makes us start (albeit unconsciously) to trust the company that publishes it. It makes us begin to perceive that company as an authority in the matter, and possibly as THE company that can solve our problem.
Therefore, it is fundamental to ask ourselves to what extent our Inbound candidate understands our business. That is, we need to make sure that we are talking to someone who is well aware of our customer's doubts and specific problems before we go ahead and decide to hire a candidate.
Hire someone who understands SEO
Inbound Marketing has a close relationship with the organic positioning of content in search engines. Although it is true that you can take potential customers to your blog through Google paid ads, if we want our content strategy to be profitable in the long term, we must make sure that our articles receive free traffic from search engines.
That's why it's important that our Inbound Marketing Manager has good SEO knowledge. For example, that they understand the importance of meta tags when positioning an article for certain keywords. Or that they know SEM Rush type tools that allow you to discover which are the most searched topics in Google. Or also that they understand Link Building, that is, obtaining links from other domains to your articles so that your blog posts get positioned in search engines.
Hire someone who knows how to use Inbound Marketing tools
Many Content Marketing professionals know how to write eye-catching articles, and yet lack the necessary technical knowledge to push that content to our audience through Lead Nurturing processes.
An Inbound Marketing manager must demonstrate a mastery of the most popular Inbound Marketing tools such as HubSpot and SharpSpring. Although it is true that these tools can be learned, top-notch platforms such as HubSpot are quite complex to implement, hence the importance of interviewing candidates who already have prior experience if we want them to be able to take control of our Inbound strategy right from the start.
As we have seen in this post, a good Inbound Marketing professional needs to have an all-rounder profile, with literary abilities for writing content, as well as technical skills such as SEO and Inbound tools knowledge. This will be key to our company getting new leads through blog and video content, and progressively gaining trust through Lead Nurturing processes to transform those leads into customers.
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