Solving Your Company’s Digital Marketing Skills Gap

The transition to AI-assisted business and marketing represents a key opportunity to save money and improve marketing performance. It’s about more than just automation using AI LLM GPTs.

It’s a beautiful new jigsaw puzzle with fewer pieces and a better services structure. And AI really has brought us a long way from where we were 10 years ago. The power of talent is unlimited because AI can scale up anything.

I’m reminded of a great book I read a decade ago, by Paul Roetzer entitled The Marketing Performance Blueprint: Strategies and Technologies to Build and Measure Business Success. It was an excellent guide to building a successful digital marketing agency.

It covers a lot of ground, and in it, Paul described a strategy to get the very best out of employees by bringing them into the firm as fully involved partners so to speak. It’s even more relevant to a small business that needs to get even more done, with less. He founded the popular MarketingAIInstitute, an organization that helps corporations integrate AI marketing practices and tools. He is visionary, and decided to sell his own agency to progress to Marketing AI.  AI software may solve efficiency issues, but the key deliverables of human judgment, imagination, creativity and marketing strategy are served by human talent.

The question then might be, if I may say, is whether you are honoring top versatile, skilled, and creative talent. Are you designing the right roles with the right people? Or has someone advised you to do differently? It’s time to think virtual and building the most efficient and powerful team possible. Because competitors are.

Finding the Right Talent and Motivating Them

There was a problem with his team concept however, related to compensation and how to motivate top performers. The issue was that 100% upscaled employee dedication and performance requires a corresponding salary. Getting total buy-in, energy and dedication, and creating more value while not upscaling salary couldn’t work. People won’t put it all on the table, if you don’t raise salaries. Employees are the revenue engine. Companies that create top value propositions for their key staff are a compelling entity.

Even after you acquire top talent, their work excellence needs to be motivated by revenue sharing or even equity. In most companies, that isn’t offered unless the talent offers a powerful value proposition through their work. Credentialism and discrimination still plague hiring in America. Credentials create an atmosphere of elitism and arrogance, and lower productivity.

Build the Right Team and Enable them with AI Tools

In this post, we learn that seeking versatility might be the key to building the team you need. Versatile, skilled workers may have better learning skills, see the role through a wider lens, and can fill gaps without having to hire additional staff. With digital worker retention low today, and worker skills apparently lacking (according to employer surveys) companies can’t attract great talent nor keep them loyal. This makes recruiting and selection difficult, creating confusion, using failing selection strategies that won’t work. Companies say they need to hire for 10 to 20-year windows, but most companies don’t last that long, and most employees jump ship fast.

However, great talent could help you get past the first 3 years.

4 Problems That Digital Marketing Surveys Reveal

1. Employers have exalted expectations of current skills, training, retention and proof of performance.
2. Advanced training isn’t easily acquired and employers aren’t willing to enable training (e.g., AI training) to create the performance they need.
3. Employers are discriminating by hiring the wrong people based on traditional university degrees or by youthful.
4. Employers aren’t willing to pay well or scale up with a formula for digital marketing roles.

Two significant surveys conducted recently help to shed light on the problem.  A Robert Half study concluded that:

• 84% of marketing and creative managers report difficulty finding skilled talent in areas such as digital marketing, UX research, analytics, account management, content, and social media management (prefer foreign imports and low wages).
• 60% are hiring for new permanent roles; 34% are filling vacated positions.
• Rising demand for marketing automation, content marketing, web/mobile app, and AI skills.
• A growing reliance on contract talent: 76% of respondents plan to engage freelancers or contractors (flexible based on needs).
• 95% say the hiring process now takes longer compared to two years ago. (poor quality recruiting and too much focus on non-essentials).
• 84% report ongoing difficulty in locating marketing talent (they’re available across the nation in abundance).
• 71% of hiring mistakes often result from unclear job descriptions, with poor assessment of technical skills (58%), and limited candidate pools (58%).

And another survey from Jelly Academy found:

• Declining retention in digital marketing and tech roles (poor job design, technology changes, non-competitive wages).
• Morale and culture strongly influence performance and turnover—but many employers are not focusing on these dimensions (low morale and lack of commitment to employees/contractors).

Creative/Soft vs Technical Skills to Review in Candidates

Technical skills are valuable, yet they won’t be sufficient to create and optimize content and digital marketing campaigns. Consider the imagination, creativity, energy, expertise, strategic skill, and passion that envisions/produces high-quality online content which customers and visitors enjoy. Creativity in all its dimensions is an amazing talent.

Creative Skill	Why It Matters
Copywriting	Fresh, compelling content with fresh stories and events, ranks well on search engines, makes emotional impact, matches user intent, drives exploration and clicks, builds confidence and converts traffic into leads.
Visual Design	Makes emotional impact, attracts attention, matches user intent, supports your brand, boosts engagement.
Social Engagement	Makes emotional impact, establishes compatibility and likability, is relevant, builds trust, drives UGC, boosts reach and retention, and encourages likes and shares (social proof).
Campaign Ideation	Impactful to your audience, generates emotional impact, keeps content fresh, meaningful, and aligned with business cycles, and maintains reach to loyal audiences
Persuasion Psychology	Impactful UVP and promotional offers create interest, engagement, urgency, significant value, and emotionally resonant with target customers
Creative Optimization	Using research and data to take the guesswork away to generate better performance; boosts ROI
Collaboration & Negotiation	Ensures alignment, gets work done, and grows influence inside the business
Experience and Passion	Ensures the candidate is truly interested in your field of business, not just practicing marketing on something they have no feel for or real interest in.

 

Important Technical Skills

Creative, soft skills are hard to teach and acquire, while technical skills are more achievable. This is likely why employers are weighting tech skills so strongly. It may be an overcompensation for the fact, that creative genius and imagination are hard to acquire. Yet, in the end, technical skills will not be able to elevate content/campaigns that are emotionally weak and ineffective.

Leaning on AI LLM GPTs may not be a good enough solution. The need for creative talent won’t subside. Instead the bar is raised.

The Digital Marketing Sector Council (DMSC) 2024 study of Canadian employers found:

• Most important technical skills they seek:
  • Organic social media management – 71%
  • Paid social media advertising – 60.2%
  • SEO (Search Engine Optimization) – 60.2%
• Top technical skills missing on resumes:
  • Use of AI tools – 32.3% (platforms may not be workable/affordable requiring ingenuity in piecing together an ad hoc solution for your company – patience and support needed)
  • Influencer management – 28.0% (requires social and negotiation skills and content creation to garner support, along with reaching journalists with credible value propositions)
  • SEO – 26.9% (SEO is ultracompetitive, so this skill needs to be more important)

SMB Employers Lack Insight into High-Performance Marketing

The key issue is that SMB owners/managers lack deep understanding of digital marketing concepts, practices and how to build a powerful team. The average owner may not comprehend what advanced content strategy, advanced SEO and advanced social media strategies are.  And some owners are trying to patch together an operation using long-time staff who lack competence, interest or who are difficult to train for the AI road ahead.

The right approach might be for employers to take some time to educate themselves on advanced digital marketing techniques and strategy. For instance, creative content generation, social influence, SEO, and lead conversion strategy are very complex. Best practices won’t win markets. Excellence requires unique campaigns that win. Hiring young people out of college and expecting sophisticated output is entirely unrealistic. It’s also a slap in the face of those freelancers who have significant skills to help you compete well.

Advanced SEO, especially when you add SGE, AEO, and GEO to traditional search engine optimization, is complicated. The SEO specialist in a small company may need to be more involved in creating text and visual content, optimize it, improve rankings, and advise other content creators and marketers on how to improve their work vs the needs of high-ranking SEO.

I had one client who needed to compete with the market leaders who enjoyed massive marketing budgets and had 20 to 40 times the ranking power their website possessed. That challenge is always underestimated by SMB owners. Budget enables the creative and promotion power needed to compete today.

Employers Need to Focus on Skills, Creative Potential and Actual, Real Performance

SMB owners need to focus on strategy to compete well – guided by analytics. You’ll need versatile talent who have expertise/skills in multiple areas, while being patient and supportive in capturing more needed skills. If you have to hire two more workers at $50k each, it ruins your marketing and advertising budget. Versatility is essential, because advertising/promotions costs are signficant. Without them, a team of specialists won’t get far.

And with AI tools today, there is a lot one or two AI powered marketers can do for you, if they’re willing to be flexible and progressive.

By training and rewarding (and using best freelancers), retention is higher for long-term value. Few digital marketers today will leave a company that appreciates them and will support their growth in skills and income.

What Employers Really Want in a Digital Marketer

Top technical/role-specific skills:

• SEO (on-site and technical)
• Organic and paid social media campaigns
• Marketing automation & email tools
• Advanced analytics & attribution modeling
• AI tools proficiency for content, bidding, modeling
• Multi-format content creation (text, video, graphic)
• Platform-specific expertise (e.g. TikTok, LinkedIn, programmatic ad systems)

Soft skills and mindset:

• Excellent communication & collaboration across teams
• Adaptability to rapid change
• Problem-solving and strategic thinking
• Curiosity and data-driven experimentation
• Strong cultural/team fit and growth mindset

Why Versatility Matters

Small and mid-sized businesses can no longer afford large, siloed marketing teams providing various skills, even if they are freelancers. Instead, you can win by hiring fewer, highly capable marketers who blend technical execution with creative strategy—producing measurable results across the full marketing funnel.

Why This Model Works for SMBs

• Fewer hires = leaner budgets with more funds for paid advertising and promotion
• Cross-skilled marketers = higher output and less gaps, better integration of campaigns at lower cost
• AI-supported workflows = faster content production and smarter decisions
• Unified strategy = no siloed departments or message misalignment

Audits, theories and big plans are great, but would it be better to begin with an initial campaign and use analytics to learn and optimize it?

Making a Practical Approach a Powerful Advantage

An improved approach to building a great digital marketing team is to start practically, by focusing on essential skills/resources that ensure your immediate to 3-year window. Does each of your staff really need an MBA?   Once a workable creative campaign theme is set up, we move to optimize it with analytics and use AI tools to improve it. You can add elements of your strategy as able. This cuts risk of all-in-one strategies which tend to waste money and time.

Please do review these articles on creating AI content campaigns and ppc campaigns, how to use advanced SEO, and how to make your content strategy truly awesome.

Be confident of the economic road ahead. The tariff battles will ease and US companies will surge in performance. I wish you well in 2026 and beyond, and if I can be of help, please do contact me.

See more on SEO services and travel marketing services.