Building The Ultimate Marketing Dream Team: A Guide For Business Owners
As a business owner, at some point in time, you will need to have a serious think about marketing. And even if you have a few smart ideas knocking around your brain, the reality is that your efforts are far more likely to be successful using experienced and savvy marketers.
The big question is, given your expertise lies in other areas, how do you even start choosing the right people to help your business get its message out there?
With this in mind, we’ve put together a few good ideas about how you can pull together the expertise you need to succeed. There’s a lot to start thinking about, so let’s get cracking – here’s how you can build the ultimate marketing dream team for your new business.
Is outsourcing a better option?
When you are just starting out in business, there are no guarantees of success. And you are in something of a tricky spot – you need marketing to start making sales, but you can’t risk hiring a full-time team until you are assured you have the income to pay for them.
Nothing can sink a business faster than having to pay regular wages, taxes, National Insurance, and benefits when the work they are doing isn’t profitable.
So, the first step to creating a marketing dream team is to consider outsourcing to a third party in the early stages. They will bring the expertise and knowledge you need to start making a positive impression, and if things go well, you will be able to start thinking about hiring an in-house team. But who should be the first hire?
The Organisational Expert
The first person you hire should have solid knowledge of the marketing scene, but they also need to be a first-class organiser. So, when you are interviewing candidates, what should you be looking for? An ideal candidate will have plenty of experience in marketing, of course, but they also need to have experience of leading a team and critical organisational skills. But they should also ask a lot of questions about your business.
Your first hire has to have a complete and understanding of who you are, what you are trying to do, and what will constitute as a success. Knowledge of these things will be invaluable when it comes to building up the rest of your team.
The Analytical Expert
Marketing, at its core, is all about responding to analysis. There is little point in deciding that your marketing needs to look like X when your customer wants to see Y. And there is a huge array of vital marketing data that you can use to check your message is the right – or wrong one.
Make sure you have someone on your team that can understand analytics and sift through the data to create valuable ideas and split test theories and work. The results they bring you will be much better than the wild stab in the dark that most business owners without marketing experience end up trying.
The Creative Brain
Marketing is all about creativity when it boils down to it. It is essential that you have someone on your marketing dream team that understands how to tell your message in a multitude of different ways. You can easily see how important the creative types are when you consider all the new marketing collateral you need these days. There are blog posts to write, white papers and trade articles.
There is website content that needs to engage customers and make them take action. As /contentmarketinginstitute.com point out, copywriting skills are needed to persuade and compel people to make the switch from casual reader to the active client. And then, of course, there is the need for creative, perhaps humorous, and creative branding and busy storytelling.
The Social Champion
Of course, all these incredible posts that your creative writers are making won’t be worth the web page they are written on if no one ever sees them. And one of the best ways of ensuring that happens is by having a savvy operator in the field of social media. A social media presence that links to your site engaging with questions, compliments, and complaints is essential.
Never assume that you can run your social media channels by yourself, as these days it is a large job that is unmanageable without a professional hand steering the ship.
The Loose Cannon
At some point, you are going to realise you have made a mistake with one of your hires. It happens – a lot – but there is a right and wrong way to deal with it. So, what happens if a member of your marketing dream team isn’t quite working out? They may be struggling to keep up with the pace, or perhaps they don’t quite fit with the rest of the team. Maybe they are disruptive or suck the positivity out of the office.
Regardless, it’s vital that you give them the opportunity to change their ways unless there are disciplinary reasons for getting rid of them. And when it comes to the firing, keep your professionalism to the last.
There’s a good post over at /www.zenruption.com that describes the process of firing someone if things aren’t working out.
You don’t have to be nasty, and although sacking someone is never, ever a pleasant experience, it’s possible to be nice about it. That said, if you want to be seen as a fair manager or business owner, it’s important to give people the chance to improve, get back up to speed, and start making themselves a valuable employee.
The Junior Staff
As your business grows, each of your experts will require some help at some point. And hiring fresh, motivated new blood is essential to the future of your business. Young interns, university graduates, or even enthusiastic types with not much experience could all end up playing a huge role in your company’s future.
And you and your senior marketing team will be able to mould them as you see fit. If you give them the training, progression opportunities and skills the need to succeed, there’s no reason why your junior marketing team won’t stick around for a long time.
Insanely Clever Marketing 