How to Structure Your Marketing Team
If you’ve ever worked as a one person marketing department, you know how hard it is. You only have 168 hours in your week just like everyone else. Time does not care that you are working alone. Having a team to work with is crucial. Every member you add to your team should increase your production and efficiency by more than just “another 40 hours of work.” There should be a synergy effect that amplifies your efficiency exponentially. But more likely than not you will need to hire a marketing team.
So you know you should have a team but what should that team look like? What roles and competencies should that team possess? Who should you hire first? Second? Tenth?
Well the first thing you need is a strategist.
Most other things can be outsourced in the beginning, pretty inexpensively. Buy a marketing strategy will cost you a lot more. An in-house marketing strategist (which could be you) will drive what needs to be done and therefor what needs to be outsourced.
Next, you will need someone who is adept at doing research and turning that into actionable information.
This person will uncover information about your target audience, find out what keywords will be the most beneficial to your marketing efforts and analyze your progress as you go along.
Then a copywriter.
You can get away with letting your researcher and strategists write the copy for a little while, but eventually you’ll want a professional copywriter who can turn your researchers work into compelling copy for your site, content, ads, etc. They will work closely with the strategist and researcher.
Then a graphic designer.
Up until this point you will outsource graphic design and you’re going to pay a lot for a freelancer. Once you reach the point where you’re ready to hire a full-time designer you’ll be paying more money for design overall. However you’ll get a much higher ROI for all the work and you’ll get a lot more done. So in the long run this way saves money and produces more results. This person will be BFF with your copywriter so make sure the copywriter is in on the hiring process.
Then a digital marketing manager.
To be clear, you’ll need a digital marketing manager the entire time. But until you reach this step the strategist and then your researcher (or copywriter) will perform this role. This role is important. You must find a person who has a working knowledge of everything involved in marketing. He/she must know about copywriting, SEO, social media, email marketing, lead generation, sales and everything else.
Lastly a web developer.
Similarly to graphic design, this is something you’re probably going to overpay for in the beginning while you are outsourcing (at least on an hourly scale) but once you reach the point where you’re ready to hire someone to do this in-house you’re growing at a good rate and you’re about to see a tipping point in your budget and ROI columns.
This is the bare bones framework of a fully staffed marketing team. Of course you also have to have enough sales people to close the leads that this lean, mean marketing unit generates. Once you have all that in place its time to start generating more leads so hire another content creator/copywriter and hire the rest of positions as needed.
What does your marketing team look like?
