Remember: Rome wasn’t built in a day.
You’re finally at the point where you need to hire someone, internally, to help with marketing. You’ve been outsourcing for years, but your instincts tell you that having someone lead your marketing from the inside is the best decision forward. For most businesses moving to the next stage in their growth, this day is inevitable and a good sign of health. But it’s how you go about it – and when you begin the process – that truly makes the biggest difference.
Savvy business owners often start the process of maturing their marketing operation by hiring someone to manage vendors and determine best-fit opportunities to bring marketing functions in house. An issue arises when this key hire turns out to be a “jack of all trades” who tries to do it all themselves. The marketing output quickly plateaus, then becomes chaotic.
Before you begin the in-housing journey, consider engaging a marketing consultant. An outside perspective from a marketing consultant can accelerate your road to hiring and ensure you find the right talent.
A marketing consultant adds value in several distinct ways:
- Providing experienced, and unbiased, feedback on your most vital matters.
- Evaluating your long-term marketing needs through comprehensive strategic planning.
- Identifying potential hiring opportunities and developing core responsibilities of future hires.
- Providing guidance, coaching, and planning to help transition new marketing hires so everyone comes out looking like a hero.
Let’s review the key hires for your marketing team:
1. Skilled Marketing Manager or Director
Should you lack the luxury of waiting for a long-term strategic marketing plan to be developed, we find a skilled director or marketing manager is a great first hire for your marketing team. The ideal candidate should exhibit strong leadership qualities but also have hands-on experience managing your mission critical short-term needs.
This person serves an instrumental advisory role as you take the next step in determining which team members will be essential next hires. At the same time, you improve your team culture – since your marketing function is anchored by a leader who “spent time in the trenches” doing the tactical work asked of other team members.
The marketing manager or director is also essential to managing outsourced marketing providers. As your marketing apparatus matures, the quality of your vendors should go up in lockstep – moving away from ad-hoc freelancers and toward long-term partner relationships, potentially with a full-service marketing agency.
A full-service marketing agency is essentially self-guiding, uniting vision and execution. Unless and until you select a marketing agency, your marketing manager or director will need to carefully orchestrate and coordinate outside vendors, integrating them into your workflow and vision. This strengthens brand consistency so your brand resembles one single panoramic view, not a jigsaw puzzle made of different pieces.
2. Marketing Support
A marketing director can only do so much. Even the title itself implies the need for a team to shoulder many of the day-to-day responsibilities of the department. This is not an oversight or shortcoming of the director, simply a reflection of the most efficient way to deliver on an organization’s marketing needs at scale.
Finding and working with the right outsourced marketing partners is crucial to success. No matter the skill level of your marketing director, they will never be able to completely fulfill all the different complexities and needs of modern marketing. By having a good balance of outsourced marketing support with internal management and quality control, you’ll be able to know how to prepare for next stages of hiring to either expand your efforts or to begin supplementing outsourced work.
Eventually, the next hire to consider is general marketing support staff. Depending on your needs, these in-house support staff can either offer a better cost value on day to day marketing execution or be able to provide better focused deliverables based on availability, inside knowledge, or proximity.
Your marketing director or marketing manager’s time is quite valuable—far more so than the cost of any support personnel or a marketing agency. For businesses in a pattern of growth who need to begin building out their marketing department, this is a very fine line to walk that could either contribute to success or derail your investments. Having a marketing consultant help guide you and your marketing director through these growth steps is vital to protect against blind spots along the way.
3. Chief Marketing Officer (CMO)
A chief marketing officer has the experience, leadership, and perspective to take your team to the next level.
Valuable as a full-time CMO is, not all companies need one. Savvy business owners and executives at growing companies often engage an experienced CMO through fractional CMO contracts to limit liability and expenditures. A short-term CMO can be ideal for evaluating your marketing teams and marketing financials, then optimizing your department’s structure, its vision, and its execution – all of which will prove indispensable on the way to reaching the next level.
Need to Know Who to Hire Next? Growing Companies Need a Strategic Marketing Plan
No matter your industry or market position, a primary goal for any growing company should be to build out a strategic marketing plan. Every company is different, so there is no one “correct” order to hire your marketing team. The hiring order can change significantly based on your needs – which is precisely why you need a roadmap.
To inquire further, email us at info@andrewandwest.com.
