Comprehensive Guide to Hiring a Digital Marketing Manager

Anyone can launch a campaign. A great digital marketing manager builds the system behind it that actually delivers results. Unlike ad templates or off-the-shelf tools, digital marketing managers bring a mix of strategy, creativity, and execution that looks different at every company.

In this guide, you’ll learn how to hire a digital marketing manager who fits your goals, team structure, and budget. We’ll cover the skills that matter most, what salary ranges to expect, where to find candidates, what to ask during an interview, and which hiring mistakes to avoid. 

Whether you’re hiring in-office, within the US, or internationally, this guide will help you make confident hiring decisions without wasting time or budget.

What Do Digital Marketing Managers Do?

Digital marketing managers drive online growth by leading the strategies that attract, engage, and convert customers across digital platforms.

With nearly 64% of the global population using social media, digital marketing is no longer optional. A strong digital presence connects your brand to customers, and your digital marketing manager is the one who ensures that connection actually delivers results.

While department structures vary—some companies separate channel ownership more distinctly than others—digital marketing managers often oversee a broad range of efforts, from SEO and paid media to email, content, and social.

Their role is to bring these elements together into a unified strategy with clear goals and measurable outcomes.

The main responsibilities of a digital marketing manager often include:

• Developing and executing digital strategies that align with business objectives and target the right audiences.
• Managing performance marketing efforts (like PPC, paid social, and retargeting) to drive traffic and conversions.
• Collaborating with content, SEO, and brand teams to ensure unified messaging and strategic alignment across channels. In some setups, they may directly oversee content or SEO efforts—especially in smaller teams.
• Analyzing campaign data to adjust strategies, report on KPIs, and improve ROI.
• Collaborating with cross-functional teams to provide consistent messaging and alignment.

Digital marketing managers are often involved in planning and reviewing assets, but they typically don’t write ad copy, design creatives, or manage day-to-day posting. Their role is to lead the digital strategy and not to do every task involved in executing it.

How Much Does It Cost to Hire a Digital Marketing Manager? 

Bringing on a digital marketing manager is a smart business decision, but the cost of hiring one depends on various factors. One of which is location. 

Based on our current benchmarks, US-based digital marketing managers typically earn $85,000 to $160,000 per year.

Hiring internationally can give you access to equally skilled candidates at much lower salary bands. From our experience placing professionals across Latin America, we typically see salaries for this role fall between $36,000 and $54,000 per year.

That’s up to 70% in cost savings, driven by regional differences in living costs and not a gap in expertise or output.

Digital marketing is a role that naturally fits remote work. Campaigns, performance tracking, and content workflows are already handled through digital tools.

Unless you require in-person collaboration, there’s little reason to limit your search to local candidates. In fact, 68% of managers say remote work leads to higher productivity and engagement. That’s part of why many companies now view remote leadership roles not just as possible, but preferable.

If you’re looking to build a high-performing marketing team, hiring remote digital marketing managers can give you the flexibility to scale without overextending your budget.

What Skills Should You Look for When Hiring a Digital Marketing Manager?

Hiring a great digital marketing manager goes beyond impressive campaign metrics and platform certifications. While marketing expertise is essential, it’s easy to overlook the soft skills that often make the biggest difference in execution, team collaboration, and strategic alignment.

The best candidates bring a mix of both, with some bonus skills that can push them ahead of the pack, especially in fast-growing or competitive industries.

Let’s look into these in detail. 

Hard skills (the must-haves)

Hard skills refer to the technical abilities and specialized knowledge a digital marketing manager needs to plan, execute, and evaluate various campaigns. 

• Data analysis: Digital marketing is rooted in performance metrics. Candidates should be proficient in using platforms like Google Analytics, GA4, and CRM tools to assess campaign effectiveness and optimize results. Ask for examples of areas where they improved ROI based on data insights.
• SEO: Long-term digital visibility hinges on strong SEO fundamentals. A Conductor survey reported that 91% of marketers said SEO positively impacted their marketing goals and website performance. Candidates should understand on-page and off-page technical SEO basics and AI search best practices.
• Social media marketing: There needs to be a strong grasp of platform-specific strategies, trends, and analytics. Marketing experts should know how to grow audiences, create engagement, and manage brand voice across different channels.
• Paid advertising: Candidates should have hands-on experience with Google Ads, Meta Ads, or LinkedIn Ads, from budgeting to bid strategies. Look for ROI metrics or improvements they’ve achieved through campaign management.
• Content marketing: While they may not be the ones writing blog posts, they should know how to lead content strategy and tie it into SEO, brand building, and lead generation. Ask candidates how they’ve led and measured success for content marketing campaigns and how content fits into broader marketing objectives. 

Soft skills (equally important)

Managers need soft skills to lead teams, adapt quickly, and communicate effectively across departments. These skills are often what separates the good candidates from the great ones.

• Leadership: Digital marketing managers oversee junior marketers, freelancers, or cross-functional teams. Ask how they’ve set direction, offered feedback, and kept initiatives moving forward.
• Strategic thinking: Digital marketing managers should be able to align marketing efforts with business objectives, set goals, and translate those into actionable plans. Look for experience building multi-channel campaigns with detailed KPIs.
• Communication: Whether working with designers, developers, or executives, managers must convey complex ideas clearly and confidently. Ask how candidates explain campaign performance to stakeholders.
• Adaptability: With algorithms, platforms, and trends constantly changing, marketers need to shift gears quickly. Look for signs of curiosity and continuous learning.
• Creativity: Crafting unique hooks, campaign ideas, and ways to stand out are all creative assets. Ask candidates to walk through a campaign they led, how the concept evolved, and how they adjusted when something didn’t go as planned.
• Analytical thinking: It’s one thing to pull numbers from a dashboard and another to interpret what they mean and adjust strategies accordingly. Look for candidates who know how to use data insights to pivot a campaign or make a strategic decision.

Nice-to-have skills (the differentiators)

These skills aren’t required, but can give candidates an edge. They make it easier to see who stands out among similarly qualified candidates.

• Email marketing: Some digital marketing managers oversee email campaigns, including newsletters, onboarding flows, and promotions. Experience with tools like Kit, Klaviyo, or HubSpot is a plus.
• Marketing automation: Especially useful in scaling efforts and personalizing customer journeys. Candidates with automation experience can improve the efficiency of your marketing stack.
• Basic design skills: Knowing how to tweak a banner in Canva or give constructive design feedback can save time and reduce the dependency on creative teams for menial tasks.
• Video marketing: As video continues to dominate online content, experience planning or managing video campaigns can be advantageous.
• Influencer marketing: Particularly relevant for B2C companies, candidates with experience in identifying, managing, and measuring influencer partnerships can help level up your brand visibility.

Where Can You Find and Hire Great Digital Marketing Managers?

Finding the right digital marketing manager starts with two decisions:

1. Where to hire from
2. How to find your candidates

The choice between local, US-remote, or international will shape your budget, team setup, and hiring speed.

Deciding between local, US-remote, or international talent

The priorities you set, such as team dynamics, budget, or collaboration style, will influence where you should focus your search. Digital marketing managers can work effectively in a variety of setups, which allows for flexibility. 

Here’s how each hiring location option stacks up:

• Local/in-office: Direct collaboration makes it easier to align goals, brainstorm in real time, and move quickly. It also simplifies things like payroll and legal compliance. However, you’re limited to your local talent pool, and the costs, including salaries, benefits, and office space, can be significant.
• Remote US-based: This expands your reach to qualified candidates across the country, often with the same cultural and business expectations. You don’t get the savings of hiring internationally, but you do get more flexibility within the US salary range.
• International/offshore: Hiring globally opens up access to skilled marketing talent at much lower costs than US-based hires. While time zone and cultural differences may require some adjustment, the top offshore candidates are already experienced remote professionals who offer the same quality as local hires. 

Regions like Eastern Europe, South Asia, and Southeast Asia are known for wide pools of marketing talent and have become popular choices for companies seeking cost-effective, around-the-clock digital marketing support. 

However, Latin America, in particular, offers a strong combination of time zone alignment, communication skills, and market-relevant experience. This makes collaboration easier, feedback faster, and ramp-up time shorter. 

If you’re unsure where to start, take a look at the best countries to hire remote marketing talent, including market maturity, communication strengths, and hourly rates across regions.

Choosing the right sourcing channel

After choosing where to hire, the next step is to determine how to find candidates. Take a look at our comparison for each sourcing channel.

You can combine multiple sourcing channels to speed up hiring and improve candidate quality. For example, start with internal referrals and LinkedIn outreach to tap into your network, then post on job boards to expand reach.

While those bring in initial long-term options, you can also keep a shortlist of vetted candidates from freelance platforms for short-term marketing needs.

Later in this article, we’ll get into why working with recruitment partners can be especially valuable—particularly when hiring internationally. But even if you don’t go that route, there are still plenty of effective ways to find qualified talent, especially when you combine multiple sourcing strategies.

How to Hire the Best Digital Marketing Manager: Best Practices

Hiring a digital marketing manager can be tricky. It’s a highly cross-functional role that requires both strategic thinking and technical fluency, not to mention the ability to lead, analyze, and execute.

When you approach the process with structure and clarity, though, you greatly increase your chances of finding someone who fits your specific needs.

Take note of these best practices for hiring a digital marketing manager, from defining the role to making a compelling offer.

Stage 1: Before and during sourcing

Clarify the role based on business goals (and skip the wishlist)

Don’t ask for a jack-of-all-trades who’s a paid ads expert, content strategist, SEO pro, and video producer.

Instead, define what the role needs based on your business goals. For instance, are you focused on lead generation, brand awareness, or retention? That will determine whether you prioritize strengths in SEO, lifecycle marketing, or PPC.

Write a job description that speaks to marketing talent

Your marketing talent job description should clearly reflect your company’s brand voice and goals. If you’re hiring someone to lead performance marketing, include details like budget, channels, and current challenges to help qualified candidates self-select.

Need help creating a remote-friendly job post? You’ll find helpful guidance in our resource on remote worker job descriptions.

Stage 2: Screening and evaluation

Don’t rely solely on resumes—use real-world projects to assess strategy

Anyone can list campaign metrics on a resume, but can they create a strategy from scratch or audit an underperforming one?

A short test project, like outlining a multi-channel campaign for a new product or auditing a funnel, can reveal strategic thinking, attention to detail, and understanding of key metrics in a real-world application.

Ask questions that reveal their decision-making

Exceptional digital marketing managers are part strategists and part problem-solvers. Ask how they’ve adjusted a campaign that underperformed, dealt with changes in platform algorithms, or handled budget shifts.

Take note of how they think through challenges and what trade-offs they’ve made to see if their views align with your business views.

Stage 3: Making the offer and closing the deal

Create an offer that speaks to career growth

Besides an attractive salary and offering work-life balance (e.g., vacation days, wellness benefits, flexible hours), we’ve found that the most successful candidates typically look for growth opportunities. A good job offer for leadership roles includes career-enhancing perks like being able to take on new projects or exposure to new, interesting markets.

Digital marketing managers often value creative freedom, measurable impact, and the chance to experiment. Many want to be challenged and work on projects that push them professionally.

Outline what success looks like early on

During the offer process, set expectations for onboarding and the first 90 days. Define what your digital marketing manager is expected to accomplish, along with metrics or criteria, and who they’ll collaborate with.

A clear plan not only reduces early churn but signals that you’re invested in setting them up for success.

Top Interview Questions for Hiring a Digital Marketing Manager That Reveal the Right Fit

Resumes only tell part of the story. The questions you ask in an interview reveal how a candidate thinks, solves problems, and collaborates across teams.

For digital marketing managers, you’re not just assessing tactical skill. You’re evaluating strategic thinking, adaptability, and leadership potential.

These questions are especially useful when hiring remote candidates or building a distributed team, where clarity, ownership, and proactive communication are essential.

Here are four interview questions we recommend based on our experience finding top candidates for this role.

“Tell me about a time you had to improve an existing digital marketing strategy. What changes did you make, and what results followed?”

What it reveals: This question shows how a candidate analyzes what is already in place and improves it. You’ll learn how they evaluate campaign performance, prioritize updates, and measure results. Strong candidates will explain which tools or data pointed to an issue, what they adjusted, and what changed afterward.

Red flags: Be cautious if answers are vague or overly theoretical. If a candidate can’t point to real outcomes or explain their thinking, it may be a sign they weren’t deeply involved.

“Can you share a time when a campaign didn’t go as planned? What happened, and how did you handle it?”

What it reveals: Things rarely go perfectly in marketing. This question uncovers how a candidate handles setbacks, applies lessons, and communicates under pressure. According to our recruiters, this is a great way to assess emotional intelligence and accountability.

Red flags: Avoid candidates who blame others or gloss over their involvement. If they can’t articulate what they learned, it may suggest limited self-awareness or problem-solving skills.

“Walk me through how you test and evaluate new marketing channels. What factors do you consider before scaling?”

What it reveals: We recommend asking questions that dig into experimentation and analytical thinking. This one highlights how methodically a candidate approaches growth opportunities. Look for structured responses about targeting, budget testing, and KPIs used to decide whether to expand.

Red flags: Candidates who default to trial and error without a process may waste resources. If they cannot describe how they validate fit for a new platform, that is a concern.

“Tell me about a time you worked closely with another team, like product, sales, or support, on a shared marketing initiative. What was your role, and what was the outcome?”

What it reveals: Digital marketing managers often need buy-in from other departments. This question shows how a candidate handles cross-functional projects. This is especially useful for identifying strong communicators who can navigate feedback, timing, and team dynamics.

This is also a great interview question to ask remote marketers, relating to how they handle remote work communication. 

Red flags: Be cautious of candidates who cannot describe the collaboration clearly or only highlight their individual work. Marketing is rarely a solo effort.

Common Mistakes to Avoid When Hiring Digital Marketing Managers

Digital marketing managers are hired with high expectations, and rightfully so. This role is expected to lead strategy, drive growth, manage tools and platforms, and often coordinate with multiple teams.

But even with a thorough interview process, key details can still be overlooked. Here are the common mistakes companies often make when hiring digital marketing managers and what you can do to avoid them.

Prioritizing years of experience over actual skill

We’ll start with the one our recruiters say they see most often: focusing too much on years of experience.

It’s easy to default to candidates with a long marketing resume, but years alone don’t always translate into strong results.

Solution: Focus on proven capabilities by reviewing specific projects, asking for campaign results, and checking how they made decisions. For example, a candidate who led a product launch with measurable engagement lift shows more potential than one with a decade of vague digital marketing experience.

Overloading the role with unreasonable expectations

Some employers have a tendency to overstack job responsibilities. But stacking too many responsibilities into one role often backfires. Doing this can result in burnout, shallow execution across the board, and a frustrated hire who can’t meet expectations because the role was never manageable in the first place.

Solution: Define core priorities for the role. Do you need strategic leadership? Paid performance expertise? Content coordination? Once you’ve identified what matters most to your business, shape the job around those core needs.

Neglecting collaboration and communication fit

Digital marketing managers rarely work in a vacuum. They’re constantly coordinating with designers, product teams, leadership, and external partners. A technically skilled marketer who can’t clearly communicate or work with others will slow things down and create friction.

Solution: Ask how a candidate handled cross-team projects, presented campaign results, or navigated disagreements. For example, how did they present performance data to leadership, or respond to pushback from a creative team? If they struggle to walk you through a campaign without resorting to jargon, they’ll likely struggle with real-world stakeholders, too.

Dragging out the hiring process

A drawn-out process with endless interviews or technical assessments can turn top candidates away. Talented marketers, especially those in demand, won’t wait around. Long gaps between steps, unclear timelines, or too many hoops to jump through can make your company look disorganized or indecisive.

Solution: Keep your process tight. Conduct 1-2 interviews, a short assignment if needed, and always communicate in detail what happens next to keep candidates engaged. 

Why Working With a Recruiting Partner Makes a Difference

Many companies hire digital marketing managers on their own. And that can work just fine.

However, when the stakes are high, the timeline is tight, or you’re hiring outside your usual network, a trusted recruitment partner can help you avoid delays, missed opportunities, and misaligned candidates.

Here are some of the most common reasons companies turn to expert help. This is especially true when exploring hiring globally.

• Marketing-specific screening: Experienced recruiters understand what makes a digital marketing manager successful, so you’re not wasting time on generalists who won’t move the needle.
• Faster access to strong candidates: Expert recruiters already have vetted digital marketing talent in their pipeline and know how to attract candidates beyond your typical job boards.
• Shorter time-to-hire: Recruitment partners take on the heavy lifting of scheduling, follow-ups, and assessments, keeping the process moving without slowing your internal team down.
• Better candidate engagement: A consistent, well-managed process helps qualified candidates stay interested and less likely to ghost or accept another offer.
• Support with global hiring: If you’re hiring outside the US, a specialized recruitment partner can handle compliance, contracts, and onboarding to help you tap into top global talent without the extra headaches.
• Less internal strain: Your existing team can focus on their actual work and not get bogged down reviewing a mountain of resumes.

A recruitment partner can help you make stronger hires faster, without draining internal resources. And while there is an upfront cost, it’s often offset by better candidate alignment, faster ramp-up, and fewer hiring missteps.

Final Thoughts

The right digital marketing manager doesn’t just execute campaigns. They align your strategy, lead with clarity, and turn goals into measurable outcomes.

Taking a thoughtful hiring approach means your next hire won’t just fit the role—they’ll contribute lasting value across your entire marketing operation.

If working with a recruitment partner sounds like the right fit, Near can help. 

We connect US businesses with pre-vetted digital marketing managers in Latin America who bring channel expertise, strong English communication, and real-time collaboration, all at rates that fit your budget.

We’re ready when you are. Book a free consultation call to get started.