Digital Marketing Recruitment Agency

Senior digital marketing recruitment for UK businesses — Head of Digital, Digital Marketing Director, performance marketing leadership, and the assessment approach that separates genuine expertise from surface knowledge

Exec Capital places senior digital marketing executives with UK businesses — from Digital Marketing Director and Head of Digital appointments at leadership team level to specialist channel heads in SEO, paid media, content, CRM, and e-commerce where the hire will shape the channel’s performance for years. We run digital marketing searches with the technical assessment rigour that distinguishes genuine expertise from a well-constructed LinkedIn profile. For our broader senior marketing recruitment service, see marketing recruitment. For CMO and Marketing Director appointments, see CMO recruitment.

Digital Marketing Roles Exec Capital Places

Digital Marketing Director. The Digital Marketing Director leads the organisation’s digital marketing function — typically managing a team of channel specialists across paid, owned, and earned digital channels, setting the digital marketing strategy, owning the digital marketing budget, and reporting to the CMO or Marketing Director on digital performance. At businesses where the digital marketing function is the primary commercial acquisition engine, the Digital Marketing Director sits close to the executive committee and carries direct revenue accountability. The brief for this role needs to specify the channel mix, the team structure, and the balance between strategic oversight and hands-on channel management that the business needs from the hire.

Head of Digital. The Head of Digital is a broader role than the Digital Marketing Director — frequently covering not just digital marketing channels but the organisation’s wider digital presence, including the website and app experience, digital product management, and the martech stack. In some businesses the Head of Digital is effectively a mini-CDO without the C-suite designation, carrying accountability for everything the organisation does online. The brief needs to be specific about where the digital marketing remit ends and the digital product or technology remit begins, to avoid the candidate pool confusion that arises when the role description is too broad to assess.

Head of Performance Marketing. Performance marketing leadership covers the paid digital channels — paid search (Google Ads, Bing Ads), paid social (Meta, LinkedIn, TikTok, Pinterest), programmatic display, and affiliate — where advertising spend is directly attributable to commercial outcomes. The Head of Performance Marketing is accountable for ROAS (return on ad spend), CAC (customer acquisition cost), and the efficiency of the paid acquisition funnel. At scale this role manages significant budget and a team of channel specialists; at smaller businesses it combines strategic oversight with hands-on channel management. The assessment for this role needs to probe budget management experience and the candidate’s analytical rigour in managing campaign performance data.

Head of SEO / SEO Director. SEO leadership at senior level combines technical SEO depth — site architecture, crawlability, Core Web Vitals, structured data — with content strategy and the link acquisition programmes that build organic authority. The most commercially valuable SEO leaders understand how organic search fits into the broader acquisition mix, can build a business case for SEO investment in terms a CFO will accept, and can manage the cross-functional relationships — with development, content, and PR teams — that effective SEO requires. The assessment for SEO leadership appointments should include specific review of technical audit methodology and the candidate’s approach to organic performance measurement.

Head of Paid Social. Paid social leadership — across Meta (Facebook and Instagram), LinkedIn, TikTok, Pinterest, and emerging platforms — requires both the creative judgement to brief and test effective ad creative and the analytical discipline to manage audience targeting, bidding strategy, and campaign structure for efficient performance. The most effective paid social leaders understand the interplay between creative quality and algorithmic optimisation — that the platform’s algorithm performs best when the creative is genuinely compelling, not just technically correct — and can brief creative teams effectively rather than relying solely on performance data to determine what to produce.

Head of CRM and Email Marketing. CRM and email marketing leadership covers the management of the customer database, the design of lifecycle communication programmes, and the automation infrastructure that delivers personalised messaging at scale. At e-commerce and subscription businesses, the Head of CRM frequently carries direct revenue accountability for retention and reactivation — the email and CRM function generating a measurable proportion of total revenue from the existing customer base. The assessment for these roles should probe database management expertise, segmentation logic, and the candidate’s approach to testing and optimising email programme performance.

Head of Content and Content Director. Content leadership at senior level covers editorial strategy, content production across formats — written, video, audio, interactive — distribution and amplification strategy, and the measurement framework that connects content investment to commercial outcomes. The most effective content leaders combine editorial quality standards with commercial discipline: they understand which content assets drive SEO visibility, which support paid acquisition, which build email list growth, and which convert — and they allocate production resource accordingly. Content leadership assessment should probe the candidate’s approach to content measurement and their ability to make production investment decisions based on commercial return.

Head of E-Commerce. E-commerce leadership covers the commercial performance of the organisation’s online retail operation — conversion rate optimisation, product merchandising, site UX in collaboration with development, promotional strategy, and the operational infrastructure that supports fulfilment, returns, and customer service. At pure-play e-commerce businesses this is one of the most commercially critical leadership roles in the organisation; at multichannel retailers it sits at the intersection of digital, commercial, and operations. The brief for these searches needs to distinguish between the candidate who has led e-commerce at scale and the candidate who has managed the digital marketing to an e-commerce platform — these are different roles with different skills and different candidate pools.

Digital Analytics Director and Head of Data. Digital analytics leadership covers the measurement infrastructure — Google Analytics 4, attribution modelling, data warehousing, business intelligence tooling — that enables the digital marketing function to understand what is working and why. The most valuable digital analytics leaders are those who can translate data into commercial decisions, not just generate reports that describe what happened. They understand the limitations of last-click attribution, can explain incrementality testing to a sceptical CFO, and can build the measurement frameworks that give the business genuine insight into the return on its digital marketing investment.

The Assessment Problem in Digital Marketing Recruitment

Digital marketing is the function where credential inflation is most prevalent and hardest to detect through standard recruitment processes. The factors that make it difficult are structural: digital marketing results are usually presented as aggregate channel performance rather than individual decision outcomes; the contribution of any one person to a team’s performance is hard to isolate; and the vocabulary of digital marketing — ROAS, CAC, LTV, conversion rate — sounds credible regardless of whether the candidate who uses it was genuinely making the decisions that drove those metrics or simply reporting them.

The assessment approach that separates genuine digital expertise from surface knowledge focuses on decisions rather than results. Asking a candidate what their ROAS was tells you almost nothing. Asking them to explain the bid strategy decision they made when a core keyword’s CPC rose 40% above target, what data they used to make it, what alternatives they considered, and what the outcome was — tells you a great deal. The same logic applies to every digital discipline: the SEO leader who can explain their crawl budget optimisation logic, the content leader who can articulate the testing methodology behind their headline optimisation approach, the CRM leader who can walk through the segmentation framework behind a specific retention programme.

Exec Capital builds this decision-level assessment into every digital marketing search — both in the candidate briefing, which sets the standard for the level of specificity we expect, and in the structured assessment process, which includes technical scenario questions designed with the client’s specific brief in mind. The result is a shortlist where the candidates have been assessed on genuine capability rather than presentation quality.

Agency vs In-House Background in Digital Marketing

The agency-vs-in-house question matters more in digital marketing than in most other marketing disciplines, because the two environments develop meaningfully different skills and orientations. Agency-side digital marketers typically develop broader channel exposure — managing campaigns across multiple clients, platforms, and industries — alongside stronger technical depth in the channels they specialise in, and the discipline of reporting performance against external client targets. In-house digital marketers typically develop stronger commercial context — closer integration with the product, pricing, and sales functions, a longer-term view of the customer relationship, and more direct accountability for the business outcomes their channel performance drives.

The right balance for a specific role depends on what the business most needs from the hire. A business building its paid search capability from a low base may benefit from agency-side expertise that can install the technical infrastructure quickly. A business with an established digital function that needs stronger commercial integration may benefit from an in-house background. The brief needs to specify which is the priority — and the candidate assessment needs to probe the gap: how has the agency-side candidate managed P&L accountability, and how has the in-house candidate kept up with channel technical development?

Martech and Technical Assessment

Senior digital marketing appointments increasingly require assessment of martech stack competence alongside channel expertise. The Head of Digital who cannot articulate a view on the organisation’s attribution model, the Head of CRM who cannot describe the data architecture that enables their segmentation, and the Digital Marketing Director who is unaware of the implications of GA4 for their measurement approach are all candidates whose strategic leadership will be constrained by technical gaps in the function they are leading.

Exec Capital’s digital marketing assessments include review of martech competence as a standard element — not because senior digital leaders need to configure tools themselves, but because they need to make good decisions about which tools to invest in, how to brief the technical teams that build and maintain them, and how to interpret the data those tools produce. The candidate who can only work with the stack they already know is a more limited appointment than the one who can evaluate the stack the business has and make informed decisions about whether it serves the brief.