In my opinion most startups fail not because they don’t have a good product that people want but because they couldn’t figure out a way to systematically generate clients while scaling their sales and marketing team in order to generate more revenue.
You see, marketing and sales are two departments that generate revenue for your business. All other departments are an expense.
Your HR, Payroll, Engineering, UX, UI, Product, – they are all crucial in order to build a good product and a good company but it’s marketing that will ensure that you have the velocity to generate the kind of revenue required to hire more people and generate investor interest.
The goal of this guide is to ensure that you know what you are doing if you are planning to hire for your company’s marketing team.
I have worked with a bunch of startups and well established businesses since 2013. I think I have enough data and experience to share a few tips when you are creating the perfect marketing team.
Start Looking For T Shaped Marketers For Your Startup
In order to build a strong marketing team you need to find and recruit T-shaped marketers. If you are hearing the term T-shaped marketers for the first time, it’s ok.
T-shaped marketer have a wide array of knowledge about all areas of marketing with deeper expertise in one or two areas.
Having a T-shaped marketer in your organization serves two main purpose:
- They can handle a lot of marketing tasks from different areas of marketing like PPC Ads, email marketing, landing page design etc. allowing you to save on cost and time to launch a campaign.
- The other advantage of having a T-shaped marketer is that they will understand the overall marketing needs of your organization and setup systems and process with the broader marketing objective in mind. This is a key step when you are looking to scale your business and land more clients.
Now that you know what T-shaped marketers do the next step is to create the perfect structure of your marketing team so that it’s easier to scale your business.
Content Creators Are The Base On Which Your Marketing Team Is Built
Content creators are more important than even. Businesses need to create content that offers value and adapt to an inbound marketing approach of acquiring customers. There are two main types of content creators that you should focus on:
- Text and presentations – content like blogs, whitepapers, ebooks etc.
- Video content – video is absolutely crucial for all businesses looking to accelerate client acquisition in any industry. If you are just starting out then it’s just you creating all the content. Invest in the right tools to make your videos look more professional. For client testimonials you can even hire videographers and shoot your client success stories and testimonials.
3 Main Content Related Roles That You Should Focus On When Scaling Your Marketing Team
Head Of Content or Head Of Inbound – The goal of this person is to overall all of your content marketing efforts across multiple channels. Ideally this person should be familiar with your product, your offering, market position and a robust understanding of how inbound marketing works. This person comes up with the content strategy, how to implement it as well as the follow up drip emails to move them further down the client acquisition journey.
Content Designer – The role of content designers are often overlooked in most startups. Content designers turn your text and presentation into fully branded assets that you can deploy. Focus on a candidate who is proficient in both video and graphics. This gives you the advantage of turning your video files into multiple formats. The main role of content designers is to ensure that your brand is being portrayed correctly when approaching cold prospects.
Funnel Specialist – The job of funnel specialist is key if you are serious about growing your sales and marketing team. The funnel specialist takes all of the content created by the designer under the direction of the head of content and turn them into live funnels that you can promote using paid and organic channels.
Double Down On Reporting & Tracking To Find Out Which Marketing Channels Are Working
When you are expanding the marketing team for your startup or business, you will launch a lot of experiments. In order to ensure you are spending your marketing budget more efficiently, you need to track everything. This is where people with analytical capabilities come into play.
These people can be yourself or a small team that oversee all reporting across the organization. The important thing to keep in mind is that you need to keep your marketing reports and live dashboards updated.
Three of our reporting softwares include:
- Google Data Studio
- Google Analytics
- Zapier (to connect and make apps talk to each other)
Keep all of your reports as dynamic and automated as possible allowing you to get data in real time.
When scaling your reports and dashboard another thing to consider is to implement utm tracking across your entire marketing department. Once you have a unified utm tracking system that everyone is following you will get data that is not only clean but it will also allow you to generate leads and make better decisions as to which channel is converting better.
Contractors Vs Permanent Employees – The Evergreen Debate For Scaling Marketing Teams
One of the most common question I get as a marketing consultant myself is whether you should go with contractors or build out your own marketing team internally. The answer is that you should do the best of both.
I recommend that you always hire someone who is managing everything when it comes to marketing internally. Contractors are great when you want to increase the amount of content you are looking to create.
Here are some of the most common reasons why you should go with remote workers:
- Extra PPC work
- Need more content writers
- video production and social media posts
- building backlinks
- 3rd party audits and consultation to improve your overall marketing.
Some of the reasons why remote and agency-focussed marketing teams are not good when scaling your team:
- Lack of company culture
- Lack of internal marketing leadership and control
- Long term strategy to build a strong brand depends on 3rd party producers
- Less integration with internal sales team. The concept of smarketing truly works when marketers inside a company work side by side with head of sales and the sales op team.
Systems & Tools Required To Scale Your Marketing Team Inside Any Company
There are lots of collaboration and project management tools out there. Going through each one of them will not only make this guide long but also be counter-productive. Instead, I am going to classify some of these tools into the real value it provides when you are scaling your marketing team.
Slack – If you are planning to grow your marketing team you need a unified communication software where you can group different conversations as their own channel. Slack is an easy-to-use tool for staying in touch with various teams and keep a close eye on various project-based conversation.
Asana – Asana is probably one of the most widely used project and task management tools out there. If you are planning on growing your marketing team inside your startup you need Asana. Asana let you add all your employees, create projects and delegate tasks to them.
Hubspot – Hubspot is a great all in one marketing & sales automation platform that is absolutely crucial for all growing teams. It allows you to better align sales and marketing and improve the overall outreach of your team.
Airtable – Airtable is something that I started using recently and I think it’s a great tool that most marketing teams should look into. Basically it’s like using spreadsheets but with some advanced database features and a much better interface to organize and summarize your campaigns.
Your Marketing Team Is Your First Line Of Attack For Greater Revenue
In conclusion, your marketing team is the first line of attack when it comes to growing your database and getting more leads for your business. It sets the foundation upon which an inside sales team operates to close these leads into customers.
Digital marketing is something that is an evolving process for your startup. Once you figure out your acquisition channels for the top of the funnel you need to create a model and start tracking how many of your marketing qualified leads are qualified for sales. This will give you the rough Customer Acquisition Cost to generate a good sales lead. Once the sales team have a close ratio on these leads you have a complete picture of your acquisition cost.
Your marketing team can now use this data and scale. In fact when you map all of it, your marketing acquisition comes down to a science. I hope you enjoyed some of the tips I shared in scaling your marketing team inside your startup. Now, start implementing these changes and comment below if you have any questions. Happy to help.
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