Building and Managing a Remote Digital Marketing Team

The landscape of hiring and managing remote marketing teams continues to evolve. While many assumed that the challenges were resolved in 2025, technology and workforce dynamics keep shifting. These changes compel managers to refine their strategies for finding and retaining top marketing talent.

We’ve been part of remote digital marketing for years — even before the pandemic made it mainstream (not to boast!). We’ve witnessed teams thrive and others falter. There are undeniable advantages to having remote marketing teams, yet companies encounter distinct hurdles that require solutions. So, how can you construct and oversee a global workforce? Let’s explore the precise steps to attract and retain exceptional digital marketing talent.

How to Hire for Remote Marketing Roles

Your digital marketing success begins with recruiting outstanding remote marketers. But what does this process entail? Here’s how to approach it.

De-biased Your Hiring Process

Many organizations claim they hire the best talent. However, if they restrict themselves to local candidates, they’re limiting their talent pool. Hiring remote workers allows you to select the most qualified marketer for the role! Avoid letting unconscious biases undermine this opportunity.

Biases influence how hiring teams evaluate candidates, favoring some while undervaluing others. This not only disadvantages applicants but also distracts your team from identifying the best fit for the job. Bias impacts perceptions of marketers based on factors like:

• Attractiveness.
• Education.
• Ethnicity.
• Gender.
• Name.

An effective hiring process actively eliminates bias wherever possible. This starts with crafting a de-biased job description and carries through the entire evaluation phase. When executed well, the result is a hiring process focused solely on identifying the candidate who will excel in your digital marketing role.

A de-biased hiring process often aligns with broader HR initiatives. If you’re hiring freelancers for contract roles, steer clear of low-quality job platforms. Many companies rely too heavily on cheap bidding sites to find contractors willing to work for minimal pay. While the cost is low, the quality often matches. Offering fair wages attracts skilled contractors.

Identify Barriers

What obstacles might hinder your remote team’s success? Common ones include:

• Self-management struggles, where marketers need more direct supervision to stay on track.
• Technology disconnect, with team members using different digital tools and systems.
• Misaligned time zones, leading to communication difficulties.
• Social isolation, causing disengagement.

Some of these barriers can be outlined in the job description, enabling candidates to self-select. For instance, if your company mandates attendance at a recurring Monday morning meeting and is based in Sydney, Australia, candidates in North America might realize the position isn’t suitable. Proactively addressing barriers benefits everyone involved.

Focus on Soft Skills

Technical skills are essential for every marketing role, but specific soft skills are critical for long-term remote work success. The most successful remote digital marketers are:

• Great communicators.
• Proactive workers.
• Self-sufficient.
• Adaptable.
• Organized.

While soft skills can be nurtured on the job, emphasizing them during the hiring process for remote marketing roles is productive. Emily Justin-Szopinski, a thought leader in professional development and learning technologies, highlighted digital literacy, self-management, and self-learning as significant career trends.

“You must self-manage better in a remote or hybrid environment. You don’t have the vertical infrastructure feeding work to you,” Justin-Szopinski explained. “Workers need to adapt to new tech and be capable of self-learning.”

We’ve been part of remote teams where it was assumed everyone inherently valued these qualities. Predictably, this led to tension and high turnover. These soft skills are foundational for success in remote marketing jobs.

Run a Paid Skills Test/Trial

References and samples of past work provide limited insight into how a marketer will handle your company’s workload. To truly assess the best fit, you need to observe them in action. This is where paid skills tests or work trials come into play.

It’s a straightforward concept. Automattic, WordPress’s parent company, describes paid trials succinctly on their hiring page: “We’ve found that the best way to evaluate working with someone is to do just that!” You can examine their approach to paid trials (or “tryouts,” as Automattic calls them) in this Harvard Business Review interview from 2014.

Though this adds an extra step, it saves time for everyone. When brought in as a contractor, we prefer a trial because it ensures the right fit for both parties. Feedback on the work is appreciated, and clients benefit from seeing the deliverables before fully training us on their company processes.

Create an Employment Agreement

Unspoken expectations can harm a remote team’s success. Every hiring process should include an agreement to clarify all expectations.

This may sound legalistic, and partially it is. New remote marketing experts should receive a detailed agreement specifying terms on billing, quality standards, production volume, deadlines, etc. This ensures mutual satisfaction and prevents future disagreements.

Beyond the contract, this is also an opportunity to outline exactly how you envision your marketing team operating. How should the team handle:

• Communication (emails, messaging, calls, etc.)?
• Growth, upskilling, and training?
• Project updates and changes?
• Challenges along the way?

While this may seem time-consuming, remember that hiring the right remote teammates from the start saves significant time in the long run.

How to Manage Remote Marketing Teams

You’ve found your ideal candidate, and they’re joining your team. How do you ensure they remain happy and productive?

Get the Whole Team Using One System

Marketers can get carried away with the number of programs they use. We admit to being guilty of this — when vetting new digital marketing tools, it feels like being a kid in a candy store. We want to try everything to find the perfect tool for each task.

This tendency needs to be controlled when managing a team. Having one centralized system that everyone adheres to is far superior to everyone using their preferred methods.

“Get a great tool and stick with it,” shared Kat Smith. As the content manager for the digital marketing agency BuildUp Bookings, Smith oversees a team of remote writers and clients worldwide. She uses two tools: one for organizing the internal team and another for clients.

These tools centralize task tracking, offer messaging capabilities, and include built-in automations. “Find something that meets the whole team’s needs and lets everyone visualize their tasks.”

When evaluating new tools, consider these factors:

• Customer service. Ensure you have a phone number to call when issues arise.
• Onboarding ease. Remember, onboarding is ongoing — every new employee needs to get up to speed as your team grows.
• App integration. Ensure all tools work together instead of operating in silos.
• Scalable pricing. Pay for what you need now, with room to grow in the future.
• Continual updates. Choose software that keeps pace with the digital landscape and advances in data analysis, AI integration, etc.

Document SOPs

Remote marketers need to be more self-reliant than in-office workers. This culture starts from the top down in your organization. Management fosters it through standard operating procedures (SOPs).

“Managing a remote team differs significantly from overseeing contractors in a traditional office setting, as we can’t always respond to questions immediately or provide real-time feedback,” shared Aaron Agius, co-founder of Louder Online.

“To compensate, we’ve developed internal processes and invested in tools that enhance efficiency and ensure our workers can consistently produce high-quality content.”

Agius’s template includes:

• An overview of the general content strategy for each client.
• The content structure writers must follow (including blog post length, tone, format, etc.).
• Preliminary research to help writers get started.
• Recommended headline structures for writers to consider in their posts.
• An overall editorial calendar with deadlines for each piece of content.

Centralize Information

Siloed work is always a risk on any team, but it’s even more pronounced in remote settings. Tools greatly assist with this. Remote collaboration can occur via popular platforms like Canva, Google Docs, etc.

Communicating with clients, customers, and leads is harder to centralize. A single marketer on your team might engage with leads through email, social media, Slack, etc.

Never Stop Refining

All the best remote teams we’ve been part of have welcomed feedback from every level of the organization. After all, if you’re not growing, you’re stagnating.

Since technology and work culture will continually evolve, so must managers and teams. Effective team leaders aren’t afraid of this: They cultivate a culture of continuous improvement and two-way feedback with their teams. This culture saves time and reduces frustration.

Staffing a Great Team From Anywhere

Hiring remotely requires more trust than hiring in-office workers. The distinction between human-generated work and artificial intelligence (AI) is becoming increasingly blurred. Videos constantly go viral, teaching viewers how to cheat in interviews.

We understand that remote hiring can be daunting. However, a proactive, skills-focused, and equitable hiring process will help you find the best people for your roles. Concentrate on building scalable systems, and you’ll be able to manage and retain your team for years to come.