Six things you should do before you hire, or grow, your marketing team

So you’ve reached that critical point when you know you need to let go of running all the marketing yourself, or you’ve decided to increase the size of your marketing team.

Before you do here are six steps to ensure that your new marketing team are super effective, and require less day to day input from you;

1. Define your purpose and values
   This will ensure that your marketing people speak in a language consistent with your strategy, giving them a clear framework for all the marketing messages they will create. It will also save you time in checking every social media and blog post.Your purpose should be the aspirational goal of the business. It should explain how the people in your teams are making a difference to your customers.Values guide how an organization thinks and behaves as it delivers its purpose. So effectively they are the ‘How’ after the Purpose ‘Why’.

4. Shape your ideal customer avatar
   Write down a profile of your ideal consumer. Get into as much detail as possible so that when your new people create content they will be shaping something which is highly relevant, and useful to your ideal audience. What are their demographics? What products do they consume? What are their pain points? This will ensure your marketing team attracts the consumers you really want.
5. Map out your ideal marketing processes and guidelines
   As soon as your marketing team grows it’s useful to embed processes at the heart of what they do. There are various online tools that are ideal places for your team to collaborate in, and seamlessly create marketing campaigns that work. This could be platforms like Asana, Trello or Hive. Setting up templates for emails, social posts, brand and tone of voice guidelines will embed consistency and should be easily accessible here.
6. Conduct an audit of existing marketing skills
   The most successful marketing teams include individuals who can create content; written, audio and motion, design assets, project manage campaigns and analyse the data from the results. Recognising where the gaps in your existing teams are will help you to recruit someone whose skills will add to your success and be complimentary.
   If this is your first hire then hire content creators
   Recruit marketers who can create high quality, engaging content. Content will be the central hub around which all your other marketing activity will hang. This will also save you the most time if you’ve been the person creating it up until now. It’s easier to teach a content creator how to use marketing channels than the other way around.

5. Set out the KPI you wish your marketing team to achieve
   This will mean that your team has absolute clarity around what they need to generate. These should be a combination of inputs – frequency of posts, number of events etc, and outputs; audience reach, engagement, conversion, revenue generated etc.

6. Set up a regular review of results
   Don’t just rely on a regular skimming of your social posts and ecomms to tell you whether your team is successfully marketing your business. Get into the detail of who is following you, opening your emails and how frequently. What content are they most engaged by, and when in the week are the most responsive? Having a detailed, analytical review of your marketing is like a window into the mind of your existing and prospective customers. Don’t miss this opportunity to gain invaluable customer insights.

 

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