You can’t grow your business without increasing your customer base. That's why you need a marketing department to improve your reach with expertly crafted marketing initiatives.
As a business owner, it’s important to recognize the value a successful marketing team can bring. They're crucial for providing your sales team with leads, producing marketing materials to communicate what you stand for, and finding and managing creative services for your whole business.
Whether you’re a startup looking to establish your brand or a well-established company looking to expand, let’s dive into the essential steps you need to take to build a winning marketing team.
What is the role of a marketing department?
A marketing department is there to help you promote your business, find new customers, bring in more leads, and make more sales. It developpes the overall message of your company and coordinates and produces all materials that represent your organization.
A marketing team works to create an image that represents your company in a positive light through their marketing initiatives. Their specific marketing functions will vary depending on your business goals and the structure of your organization.
Both traditional and digital marketing teams need to complete a broad range of tasks. None of these happen in isolation, a marketing department needs to support the work of other teams to help support the business as a whole. Coordination is key.
How do you identify your business's key marketing needs?
Before building your marketing team you need to consider your current business needs. To make things easier, we've broken down the process into 10 easy steps.
Understand your business goals
Begin by clearly defining your overall business objectives. Are you looking to build brand awareness, or improve lead generation and customer retention? For example, your business may want to increase revenue by 20%, and to meet this goal you may set a marketing objective to increase your customer base.
Determining your marketing KPIs will help you better understand the best steps to take and the marketing roles that need to be filled first. A strong marketing department uses SMART goals to help ensure that the objectives are clear and actionable.
Conduct market research
Market research is a great way to understand current trends, the industry landscape as a whole, and potential growth opportunities. Conducting a competitive analysis helps you identify who your competitors are, what they’re doing well, and where you could be doing better.
Not only does this help you get ahead of your competition, but it also lets you stand out in more saturated markets. This can go a long way towards improving conversation and increasing brand awareness.
Know your target audience
Understanding your target audience is essential for effective marketing. It’s impossible to properly align your marketing strategy without first knowing who you’re trying to target and developing a detailed ideal customer profile (ICP). You need to understand the demographics that encompass your target market as well as their needs, preferences, and pain points and use this information to influence your hiring decision.
Gathering customer data is essential for gaining insight and using data-driven decisions to direct your marketing efforts. Investing in customer relationship management (CRM) can help you collect and store this data more effectively making strategic planning simple.
Assess current marketing efforts
Before starting the hiring process, you need to conduct a marketing audit to assess the effectiveness of your current marketing strategies. Look at who is currently in your team and the roles they are taking on, this could be social media, email marketing, or content marketing.
Analyzing key performance indicators (KPIs) helps you determine what is and isn’t working. This foundation helps you make better decisions when planning future marketing strategies, and where you might need resources.
Identify gaps and opportunities
Before building a marketing team, you need to conduct a SWOT or PESTEL analysis to identify your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats to your current marketing strategy. This analysis is crucial for understanding where your strategy stands and what internal and external factors could impact its success.
By identifying these elements, you can pinpoint the gaps and discrepancies between your current performance and desired outcomes. Consequently, this helps you find specific areas that need attention and improvement, ensuring your marketing efforts are well-directed and effective.
Determine budget and availability
Understanding your marketing budget is vital for the success of your marketing efforts. You need to ensure that your marketing strategies and hiring plans fit within the constraints of your business’s budget, to avoid overspending and ensuring financial stability.
Proper budget management allows you to allocate resources efficiently, ensuring that every dollar spent contributes to achieving your marketing goals. Having all the necessary resources in place is key to effectively executing your marketing operations, enabling smooth implementation, and maximizing your return on investment (ROI).
Set priorities
A modern marketing team needs to distinguish between short-term needs and long-term goals to help them better allocate their resources. Prioritize marketing activities that have the biggest impact on meeting both your marketing and business objectives.
Focus on high-impact activities that maximize the effectiveness of your marketing efforts to achieve the best results. This could be digital marketing efforts like optimizing social media platforms or utilizing email marketing.
Leverage technology and marketing tools
Identify tools and platforms that can streamline and enhance your marketing efforts. Marketing automation and data analytics tools can provide valuable insights, allowing you to track performance and understand customer behavior.
Leveraging these technologies helps marketing teams make informed decisions, ensuring your strategies are data-driven and effective. Utilizing these tools helps you improve efficiency and outcomes both effectively and significantly, boosting your marketing success.
Stay agile and adaptable
Agility and adaptability are essential in the ever-changing marketing landscape. Creating a continuous feedback loop allows your entire marketing team to respond quickly to new challenges and capitalize on opportunities. Stay updated with industry trends by following relevant publications, attending webinars, and networking with peers to keep your knowledge current.
A way to achieve this is by creating a continuous feedback loop that allows you to continuously gather information from your marketing campaigns and audience. This ensures that you have real-time data to inform your decisions helping you make changes based on results and new insights.
Practical implementation steps
Engaging with your customers through surveys, interviews, and focus groups is a great way to gather direct feedback. Analytics tools like GA4 and CRM systems, like Capsule, gather and store data and insights. Competitive analysis tools like SEMrush, Ahrefs, or SpyFu can analyze your competitor’s strategies and performance.
Hold regular meetings with your marketing team to discuss the progress of ongoing projects, challenges, and new ideas. Create customer journey maps to visualize the path your customers take from awareness to purchase and beyond. These allow you to identify key marketing needs and develop a strategy that aligns with your business objectives.
Common marketing team structures
The organizational structure of your marketing team will depend on a few factors. You first need to decide whether to hire an in-house team or contract freelancers or marketing agencies. There are pros and cons to both, so you need to make your decision based on the consensus of your entire team and your marketing needs.
Let's explore the most common marketing team structures.
Segment based
A segment-based structure divides the marketing team based on their audience. For example, the team could be split into B2B marketing and B2C or you could have a traditional marketing team and a digital marketing team.
Alternatively, the team could be divided based on geographical locations, for example, local, national, and international units. This segmentation helps your team ensure that each market strategy is precisely aligned with the particular needs and characteristics of each audience.
Customer based
With this approach, your team is divided by each conversion funnel stage. You could have one team that focuses on raising brand awareness through outreach and engagement, while another works on driving customer interest through content marketing, and a third on improving conversions by optimizing the customer journey.
With this approach, each unit can specialize and optimize its efforts for a specific stage of the customer lifecycle. This can help you enhance the overall effectiveness of the marketing strategy.
Product based
A product-based marketing approach requires you to split your marketing team according to specific products or product lines. This helps your marketing team members to take a specialized focus and create strategies for each product’s target market.
This structure is particularly beneficial to businesses with diverse offerings. To be successful you will need a central marketing director to oversee the entire department to ensure strategic alignment and brand consistency. Each product team, led by a product marketing manager, has sole accountability for their product’s marketing success.
Functionally divided
A functionally divided marketing team is organized based on specific functions or areas of expertise. This could be marketing skills such as content creation, social media, SEO, and analytics. Each team member or marketing sub-group focuses on their specialized role, ensuring that all aspects of the marketing strategy are covered.
This marketing team structure allows for deeper expertise and efficiency within each function, allowing individuals to hone their skills in a particular area. Collaboration and communication between these specialized functions are crucial to ensure a cohesive and effective overall marketing strategy.
Hybrid
A hybrid marketing team is a team that includes both specialists and generalists. While some focus on specific tasks others handle more general roles. This setup allows the team to be flexible and quickly adapt to new challenges.
Specialists bring deep knowledge of their particular skills, while generalists ensure all tasks get covered. Good communication and teamwork are key to making this mix work effectively.
Key marketing team roles
If you’re building a marketing team from scratch, it’s a good idea to go back to basics. Before you start hiring, consider your marketing department’s responsibilities and the key people you need to meet those needs. Entrepreneur Gary Vee believes that you only need four people to start seeing results.
These are:
- Art person - to create eye-catching graphics and design
- Math person - to handle the numbers on ROI and other key metrics
- Video person - to both shoot, record, and edit footage
- Written word person - to develop different forms of marketing copy
Filling these essential roles is a great way to get started. But eventually, you will need to look at hiring more marketing professionals with specialized expertise.
Team leader
A marketing team leader is a crucial part of your marketing department’s and business’s success. Their role is to oversee planning and executing marketing strategies and requires a blend of creativity and analytical skills.
They manage the digital marketing team, oversee campaigns, handle hiring and onboarding, and conduct weekly meetings with employees. The position is highly collaborative, involving close work with team members, other departments, and external peers.
A marketing team leader is sometimes also referred to as:
- Chief Marketing Officer
- Marketing Director
- Marketing Lead
- Head of Marketing
- Marketing Manager
SEO strategist
The goal of a search engine optimization (SEO) strategist is to increase the organic visibility of, and in turn traffic to your website. An SEO specialist will research keywords, analyze competitor sites, monitor Google’s algorithm updates, and optimize your site to keep your content at the top of search results, ultimately attracting more customers.
They also work with other blogs on backlink campaigns and guest posts. These strategies aim to boost the number of people who find your site through organic search and engage with your business.
Content marketer
The role of a content marketing team will vary greatly depending on your marketing strategy. At a minimum, you’ll need someone who can write impactful copy for email campaigns, blog posts, long-form content, and website copy.
This could be an email marketer, a social media manager, or a general content marketer. As your needs grow, you may need to expand your content marketing team to include creators who specialize in specific types of content such as videos, podcasts, white papers, infographics, and photography.
Ads specialist
Ads specialists develop and manage advertising campaigns on social media platforms, online marketplaces, and search engines through services like Google Ads, focusing on performance marketing. They likely manage a range of ad campaigns including Google Shopping campaigns, display ads, Facebook, Instagram, and even Amazon PPC ads.
Performance marketing requires constant optimization, so you need to hire someone who can keep track of new trends and updates to ensure your ads always appear where your audience is. Depending on your industry and target audience, you should consider hiring an ads specialist for other traditional channels, like TV, radio, or print.
Analytics and operations
A marketing operations specialist works to identify problems, investigate causes, and develop solutions to help streamline and optimize your company processes. An analytics specialist works closely with marketing operations to measure and analyze metrics to improve efficiency and customer retention.
A key part of their role is to deeply understand your data systems and analytics tracking tools to help your marketing team make informed decisions and achieve business success.
Social media marketing
The role of a social media marketer is to create content, manage your social media schedule, and grow your audience across a range of platforms. Your social media team needs to develop strategies that increase brand awareness, drive traffic, and generate leads.
They make these decisions based on performance metrics that help them optimize campaigns and ensure alignment across the rest of the marketing team. It’s also crucial that they stay up to date on social media trends, platform updates, and algorithm changes to help your business maintain a competitive edge.
How to build a marketing team
As your company grows so should your marketing team - but when should you pull the trigger? Some experts say marketers should make up about 10% of your total employees, but this doesn’t factor in budgets, goals, or specific roles that need filling.
Before you take the plunge, let's explore the steps you need to take to build your own high-performing marketing team:
Study your target audience
Where do your ideal customers spend their time? Identify the social media platforms they use, the events they attend and the pain points that they most often face.
Before building out an entire team, start by hiring marketers who are proficient in specific channels. Doing so can help you identify specific needs and improve your overall conversion rate.
Define your business goals
Ask yourself what you want your business to achieve. Try not to think too far ahead, instead break your goals down into quarterly or yearly achievements and use these to guide your hiring strategy.
If you want to expand your social media presence, then you likely need to invest in a content marketing team and social media management. If you want to try and unify your department maybe it’s time to hire a marketing manager.
Create a hiring strategy
Before hiring anyone, you need to establish a strategy for building your marketing department. This involves gaining a clear understanding of your marketing department structure and the specific roles that need filling.
Consider how these roles will overlap and interact with your current marketing department to ensure seamless collaboration. A modern marketing team often includes a mix of both freelancers and an in-house marketing team, so consider who would be the best fit for this new role and how this will affect the day-to-day operations.
Begin hiring
Once you’ve established your strategy you can begin the active recruiting phase. This includes writing job descriptions and posting them on job boards like Indeed and LinkedIn. Once the applications come through you can start interviewing and vetting candidates based on their relevant skills.
Don’t overlook the value of your own personal and professional network, encourage people within your teams to refer friends and connections that they believe will be a good fit. Remember to share more than just the hard details of the job, things like company culture are important to job seekers and are often the difference between a candidate saying yes or no to a job offer.
Onboard the team
The hiring process doesn’t end once the candidate accepts the job. The onboarding process is a crucial part of building a marketing team and can be the difference between a successful marketing department and a failing one.
It’s here that your new marketing specialist will gain an understanding of how your marketing team members collaborate, your current marketing campaigns, and the subsections within your marketing departments. Your new marketing team member will likely have a lot of questions, so make sure to set aside time to help them get acquainted with your day-to-day operations.
Focus on continuous improvement
When expanding your marketing department, it’s important not to set unrealistic expectations. It’s unlikely that a new marketing specialist will be able to achieve immediate results regardless of their previous experience or the support of your successful team. Instead, you should prioritize helping them build an understanding of your company’s audience, brand voice, values, and USP.
By focusing on building a strong foundation of understanding and alignment with your target audience, new hires can contribute more meaningfully over time, ultimately driving sustained engagement and growth.
Wrapping up
To build a successful marketing department you need to focus on the essentials that make up any great hiring strategy. Building marketing teams shouldn’t be a daunting task, it’s an opportunity to improve your current operations and reach even more potential customers.
With clearly defined roles and thoughtful recruitment, you can identify potential marketing hires with the skills you need to take your business to the next level - whether hiring a junior exec or looking for your next marketing leader. A well-planned hiring strategy is crucial for achieving these goals.
