When is the right time to hire a marketing team?
When you reach a certain stage of business growth, or a certain maturity as an entrepreneur, you may decide that you want to hire a digital marketing team. Maybe you want to focus on research and development, or service delivery, or maybe you are running out of time to follow up as you should.
Yet, before you hire a digital marketing team, you should have a few structures in place:
1. Goals
You need to set goals and track your progress towards them in order to be able to hire the right people for your team and determine how successful they are. This is easier if you’ve been in business for a bit, and have at least a couple of years worth of data as far as growth, conversion rates, and other data like this.
2. Good communication
Everyone working for you needs to understand their role and what is expected of them every day, and this must be communicated from you. If you don’t like managing people, you may not want to build a team.
3. Analytics
You need to have a command of the essential metrics related to your business in order to track your success. You should be able to use Google Analytics and understand how to pull sales data and other reports from your various online platforms. If you don’t know how to read these reports, learn how. Otherwise you will run your business based on what you’re told, not what you can see.
4. Project Management
When you first hire a marketing team, unless you hire a done-for-you agency- you will have to manage and prioritize projects. This will involve a range of marketing activities that will need to be done by the product launch date, and beyond. You need to be able to prioritize tasks, and assign the right people to the right tasks at the right time.
6. Strategy
You need to have a strategy for reaching your target audience and offering them the kind of content and products they need most. Strategy is all about keeping your eye on the bigger picture and then choosing which tactics to implement, which means choosing marketing team members to use these tactics.
7. Strong written communication skills
The head of an online content marketing business should be able to write reasonably well in order to communicate their ideas and help keep the content flowing that their target audience will be most interested in.
In terms of hiring, being a good writer means you can spot that talent in others and hire the right people to ghostwrite. In terms of job descriptions for hiring more people for your digital marketing team, the more accurate and clear they are when you post them, the more likely you are to get candidates who are a good fit.
8. A Good Understanding of Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
You don’t need to be an expert in SEO — sooner or later, you will want to hire one. But it does help to know the essentials yourself and what the current Google algorithm (formula) is ranking highly these days. In this way, you will be able to tell if the people you are interviewing are the real deal and genuinely know what they are talking about and can get good results.
9. A Good Understanding of Email Marketing Basics
As your business grows, you might consider hiring an email marketing specialist to help you manage your growing number of lists and campaigns. A basic knowledge of how the email marketing platform works, and how to write subject lines that will get the emails opened, can help you hire the right person and track their success.
10. A Basic Understanding of the Top Social Networks
There is so much to do when it comes to getting free traffic from social media that it can easily start to take up all of your time if you are not careful. This is why many business owners decide to outsource their social media marketing.
They might also decide to do so because there are people out there who claim to be Facebook or LinkedIn experts who can get you great results. But you won’t be able to determine their skill and level of success unless you understand the basics about how each network operates.
Even though you are hire a digital marketing team, you need to know enough to be able to understand if they are doing a good job. Otherwise, you run the risk of investing a lot in marketing with very little to show for it.
Do you have some questions about hiring a digital marketing team, and don’t know who to ask? Why not ask me? I can help you with both with the big picture and implementation to help you find the right people to grow your business. We can do this together in 75 minutes; though my whiteboard session. Learn more about it!
