Building A Digital Marketing Agency


Not all companies have an in-house digital marketing team at their disposal, and not all companies want one. As part of our Digital Marketing Recruitment Guide we've teamed up with senior agency staff to share their experiences and knowledge of how to grow an SEO agency from scratch. A digital marketing agency will develop and implement the marketing strategy on behalf of a portfolio of clients, recruitment for agency roles differ from in-house roles and with the help of our contributor, we'll tell you why.

In this section, Managing Director at R.O.EYE Gavin Male, talks about building a digital marketing agency and the ways in which to grow your staff when expanding as a business. Alongside his Managing Director experience, Gavin also has a degree in Physics and over 15 years' experience working in sales and management. He began forgings his relationships in the new media sector during his spell in IT recruitment; from here he developed great experience in the digital recruitment sector and became a passionate advocate for digital performance marketing.

How to grow your digital marketing agency staff, which roles should you fill first? Advice on growing your business.

As a growing digital marketing agency, R.O.EYE is operating in three of the biggest digital cities in Europe (London, Manchester, Berlin) and recruitment is an on-going challenge. Like most agencies, we grow our staff base alongside our portfolio of clients; as we win new clients we often need new staff with specific skills sets to support the core team we have in place. We have a rolling brief with The Candidate on recruitment of new staff, as we often have to get them on board quickly.

The key positions in any agency are often the hardest to fill, Account Directors, Technical leads etc. These are the roles that you would need to fill first when growing a SEO agency. These key roles are in many cases the lynchpins of the organisation and their knowledge and experience is needed throughout the recruitment process to identify the candidates to lead the Account Managers and Executives.

Because of the changing needs of clients, it's important that your staff have the right capabilities and personalities to go above and beyond the job description to match the clients' expectations. Specialist agencies prove very helpful when there is a specialism or locality (or both!) in the client brief, therefore the agency must look to grow the business with specialist staff suitable to these needs.

When growing the team and going through the interview process I have found that a CV only tells half the story of a candidate. There is nothing worse than getting into a room with an interviewee and knowing immediately that they are the entirely wrong personality for your company. For R.O.EYE, our days of wasting time interviewing unsuitable candidates are now long gone thanks to partnering with recruitment specialists who know our company and understand our recruitment needs. The process at R.O.EYE is now seamless, the trust element makes a major difference and as we now have a track record of recruiting staff from The Candidate, they now know exactly the type of employee we like and they ensure a good fit for the R.O.EYE company ethos.

The Candidate… When growing your digital marketing agency team, Gavin advises partnering with recruitment specialists to streamline the recruitment process. He also identifies the importance of filling the key roles first, as the foundation of the team, then growing from there. You'll be looking for the right personality for your job, not just the right qualifications.

AUTHOR