As a business owner, you are probably juggling many responsibilities including marketing, finance and HR - and, at the top of your mind, revenue. With COVID shifting more traffic away from retail stores and towards online platforms and eCommerce, it has become even more important to be digitally savvy, and to get a strong digital marketer onboard to tap on new growth opportunities.

With the everchanging landscape of digital marketing - digital marketers need to be willing to adapt consumer behavior on social media since this changes rapidly. With a social media manager, they can help you with your digital marketing strategy to attract new customers and retain existing ones by tapping on different avenues that are best suited for your business. Relying on freelancers and part-timers is unlikely to succeed for the long-term for they will be less invested in your business. To nail social media, we suggest hiring full-time digital marketers where you can hold them accountable on KPIs.

With this in mind - how do you hire the best social media manager? Let's dive right in.

1) Identify the overall goals of the business, and tie it together with trackable key objectives.

The key goals of any business is to grow. If it is to grow profits, decide on what the best strategies with the most ROI. What are the easy targets for you to optimize? Would it be to increase customer retention rate, and to upsell, or to reach more target audiences to grow the business? Or will it be to grow through building a community? Once you have decided on the overall strategy, this will help you identify the key metrics to track growth. For example, if it is decided to grow by increasing customer retention rate and upsell - look at your current customers who are on social media so that these can be targeted for better communication with them through engaging posts or sharing content about their needs.

If it is to grow market share, hire someone who has experience in conducting market research and can help you identify your target audience, and has experience running engaging and low cost targeted ads.

Once the overall goal are determined, it's time to tie down key metric(s) that can help achieve this goal by using social media channels as tools to accomplish them. What measurable results do you expect? Set reasonable results - the number of qualified marketing leads, number of post engagements, number of link clicks etc. to measure success in the role.

2) Interviewing Social Media Managers - what to look out for During the interview, we tend to ask generic questions on their experience and their achievements.

It helps to sieve out good talents by asking specific questions. Give scenarios to get a glimpse of their thinking process, such as “If I gave you 100 dollars how would they spend them in order to increase our brand awareness and engagement on Facebook?” Some other questions that you can consider asking:

• What makes one post more effective than another?
• What are the keywords would you suggest for XXX company?
• What are the key ingredients of a good social media post?
• What growth hacking strategies would you recommend to XXX company to increase sales, and why?
• How would you define "success" and what metrics are important?

The best social media managers will be able to provide you with a clear and detailed explanation of how they would meet your company's campaign goals, as well as being able to outline their strategies from start to finish. In addition, the ideal hire should have an excellent grasp on industry trends and what other companies are doing in order for them to stand out among competition. When hiring any marketing professional it is best that you hire someone who has worked specifically in your field before so they know exactly what challenges there are in improving visibility for your brand online (and offline).

Good luck out there with finding an awesome social media manager to join your team! If you'd like help on finding a digital marketing hire, feel free to get in touch with our friendly team - we can help you find the best fit to grow your company within your budget and help you save time with the screening. Till then, happy hustling!