Everything You Need to Know When Building a Marketing Team

In the ever-evolving landscape of business, a well-constructed marketing team is quickly becoming the key to success. As businesses strive to navigate the intricacies of customer engagement, brand promotion and market dynamics, the significance of a skilled marketing team becomes paramount. This is evidenced by 63% of businesses increasing their digital marketing budgets in 2023.

In this article, we explore the essential aspects of building and structuring a marketing team, offering insights from defining goals and identifying key roles to the intricate process of recruitment. Whether you’re establishing your first marketing team or seeking to enhance an existing one, this article serves as a comprehensive manual, providing actionable steps and strategies to ensure your marketing team becomes a catalyst for business growth and prosperity.

The Role of a Marketing Team in Business

A strong and skilled marketing team is crucial to the success of any business. Your marketing team can help you identify your target market and find the best ways to reach your ideal customers. Once you know who you are trying to reach, your marketing team can develop an effective strategy that draws customers into your sales funnel. 

How to Build a Marketing Team – First Steps 

There are a few things you need to consider before you begin building a marketing team. In this section, we provide helpful advice to help you establish your marketing goals and determine which marketing channels should be your main focus. 

Define Your Marketing Goals

Before you begin building your marketing team, you should first establish the main goals of your business. This will help you identify the roles that you need on your marketing team and will inform your overall marketing strategy. 

It is important to consider long-term vs short-term goals. Are you looking to build brand awareness? Or are you more concerned with increasing conversions and getting quick wins?  Some examples of business goals that your marketing team can help you achieve are:

• Generating leads to bolster your sales pipeline.
• Driving more sales and closing more deals.
• Improving customer retention and acquisition.

Having a clear benchmark for what you want to achieve allows you to determine the skills that your marketing team will require. You must understand what you want your digital marketing team to accomplish before you consider the channels that you will need to optimise to achieve these goals. 

Prioritise Your Marketing Channels

Now that you have a clear roadmap for what you want your marketing team to achieve, you can start thinking about the customers you are trying to reach and the best channels to convert them. This will form a crucial part of your marketing strategy as 86% of marketers have increased brand awareness using one or more digital marketing channels.  

It can be tempting to utilise as many channels as possible to maximise your outreach, but this can be counterproductive as it takes a lot of time and effort to build content across a range of channels. By honing in on certain channels rather than trying to bolster as many as possible, you can determine what experience candidates will need when building your marketing team. 

To help you get started, consider the following questions:

Where does your target audience spend most of their time online?
What content do they regularly consume? 

These questions can help you establish the best channels to target when building your marketing team. However, you should also attempt to prioritise the channels that will impact your business goals most positively. 

There are 2 main ways to approach this.

First, have a look at your best-performing channels. It can be easier to optimise these channels and get the most value out of them. If your most successful channel is social media, then consider hiring marketers with extensive experience in managing social media campaigns to try and improve these results.

Alternatively, you could focus on your channels that consistently underperform to address your biggest pain points. This will help you build a team based on your current skill gap and will ultimately make your marketing team stronger as they can manage a range of channels. 

Identify the Structure & Key Roles for Your Marketing Team

With a clear set of goals and your channels prioritised, you can begin building a marketing team that specialises in those channels. You should establish a structure for your marketing team that is aligned with your business objectives, available resources and current market trends. Your chosen structure should foster collaboration, promote specialisation and line up with your baseline marketing strategy. 

Having a well-aligned sales and marketing team has been shown to improve revenue by 208%, so your structure must foster collaboration and communication. 

Examples of Marketing Team Structure

In this section, we’ll highlight some examples of marketing team structures that could be useful for your business. It is worth noting that your structure should not be a concrete concept. You should adjust and rearrange the structure of your marketing team to suit the needs of your business and help maintain its effectiveness. 

Product-Focused

A product-focused structure dedicates separate teams for different product lines within a company. This allows marketers to become experts in the products they handle, which means they can develop a more targeted approach to promotion. 

The benefit of a product-focused structure is that you gain the ability to tailor and customise your marketing strategy for each unique product. 

Channel-Specific

These teams are organised based on different marketing channels or platforms, for example, digital marketing, social media, content marketing, PR, etc. By focusing on specific channels, marketing teams can get a deeper and more nuanced understanding of their assigned channel. This allows each channel to be maximised and tuned specifically to its target audience. 

Operational Teams

These teams are structured around the key operational areas of marketing, like campaign management, analytics and creative services. This structure supports a collaborative environment, allowing different teams to come together to implement and improve marketing campaigns. The benefit of operational teams is that they result in an efficient division of labour while also providing your team with a much more holistic view of marketing. 

There is a wide range of structures that you can use for your marketing team to ensure you get the best results. You should also consider the size of your team and the resources that you have available, as this can massively impact the structure of your marketing team. 

Key Roles Within a Marketing Team

Now that you have an understanding of what different marketing team structures can look like, you can start thinking about the roles that you will need to build a strong team of talented marketers. 

Some examples of roles that are needed in a successful marketing team include:

Social Media Manager: This individual oversees all social media accounts and creates content to be published across those channels. They ensure that your customers remain engaged with your brand and devise strategies to improve the performance of your social media posts. 

Content Writer: This role is centred around creating blog posts, ebooks, white papers, and other types of long-form content. This is crucial for SEO marketing and drawing potential customers to your brand. 

Graphic Designer: You want to make sure that your campaigns are appealing to customers and catch their eye, this is where a Graphic Designer comes in. They produce visuals for social media posts, email campaigns and other marketing materials.

Customer Experience (CX) Lead: A Customer Experience Lead in a marketing team is responsible for overseeing and enhancing the overall experience that customers have with a company’s products or services. They analyse the end-to-end customer journey to identify touchpoints, pain points, and areas for improvement.

Data Analyst: A data analyst is responsible for collecting, analysing and interpreting data to provide actionable insights that drive marketing strategy and decision-making. They spend time gathering and organising data from various sources, including customer interactions, marketing campaigns and external market trends.

When determining the roles of your marketing team, you need to ensure that the responsibilities of each role are clear to avoid overlap. This will help your team understand the requirements of their role and will be a vital aspect of communication within your digital marketing team. 

How to Build a Marketing Team – The Recruitment Process

With a clear structure and a good understanding of the roles you need for your marketing team, you can start the hiring process. It is worth noting that hiring for marketing positions is becoming increasingly more competitive. 

Latest trends suggest that demand for marketing positions will rise in the next 10 years, with a 7% increase expected for marketing managers. This means you need to make sure your business stands out among the rest on job boards and social media. 

This section will provide you with some actionable tips to make sure you get the best possible outcomes when building your marketing team. 

Utilise Multiple Channels for Sourcing Talent

If you want to get the best possible pool of candidates for your marketing team, you need to utilise multiple channels. This will help you reach your ideal marketing hires and allow you to source talent from a range of platforms.  

Referrals 

One of the best ways to recruit quality talent is through referrals from friends and colleagues. By reaching out to your network you are more likely to find highly qualified candidates with your desired skill set and can avoid sifting through dozens of applications. 

Job Boards

You can also utilise online job boards like Glassdoor and Indeed, as there is a perfect pool of candidates actively looking for work on these sites. It can be quite overwhelming using job boards to recruit, as there is a wealth of listings and you want yours to stand out. Nevertheless, job boards can be extremely effective for sourcing candidates as 9.8 million employed Brits are actively job hunting each day. 

You should make sure that the job description is detailed and effective, with relevant keywords related to the position you want to fill. This will drive ideal candidates to your role and will help you to source talented marketers. You can also use these sites to determine what your ideal candidates are looking for and tailor your job listing accordingly. 

Social Media

A recent trend that brands have been utilising for recruitment is to post job openings on their social media platforms. This goes beyond listing your role on Linked In and even includes posting on platforms like Instagram and TikTok. 

This is a great opportunity to source talented marketers, as they will likely be following relevant brands and businesses. You also gain the benefit of reaching a much wider pool of talent that could be an asset to your marketing team. This also helps you engage with passive candidates much more effectively as they may not be frequenting job boards. 

Tips for Writing a Marketing Job Listing

Your job listing should include an overview of your company culture, as this is shown to be a big draw for potential candidates. Studies have shown that company culture is an important factor for 46% of job seekers, so ensure that you include this in your job advertisement. 

You should also share your brand personality in the listing, as this will resonate with candidates who are a good culture fit and will succeed in your business. Keep the language clear and emphasise opportunities for professional growth and work-life balance, as this will make your role more appealing to potential hires.  

Consider Culture Fit 

When building your marketing team you will want to make sure that your candidate’s values are aligned with those of your business. This is called hiring for culture fit and is proven to benefit your business by increasing employee engagement, retention and productivity. 

You mustn’t overlook culture fit when hiring a marketing team. Companies with strong cultures are 1.5x more likely to report an average revenue growth of 15% over 3 years. So by implementing values and ensuring that you hire marketers who align with them, you will build a robust marketing team who not only collaborate well but also work towards your grander business goals.  

Hire for Diversity and Inclusion

While conducting the hiring process, it is important to remember the significance of creating a diverse team. Companies with diverse leadership have 19% higher revenue on average, this is the result of having a workforce that has diverse thinking and can tackle challenges in unique ways. Evidence also suggests that average performance in diverse work environments is 12% higher than in homogeneous ones. 

Having a diverse team is not just a box-ticking exercise. By having a team with a range of backgrounds you can avoid issues like groupthink and ultimately future-proof your team since they will be better equipped to approach new tasks. 

Hiring with diversity and inclusion in mind also helps you avoid unconscious bias. We naturally have an affinity for individuals who are similar to us and this is true for recruitment as well. While it may seem like a great idea to have a team of like-minded people, diverse teams are proven to be more productive and generate more revenue.

Speak to a Marketing Recruitment Specialist

One of the best resources you can use when building a marketing team is to speak with a recruitment specialist. It can be overwhelming trying to hire a whole team single-handedly, investing in a marketing recruitment specialist like The Marketists can vastly improve the experience and outcome of the hiring process.

We provide robust recruitment solutions and have a wide network of talented marketers who will be an integral part of your marketing team. 

Summary

Overall, building a marketing team is a very involved process but you can break it down into easy steps. You first need to establish a baseline for your marketing strategy, as this will inform what roles and responsibilities are required within your marketing team. You then need to consider which marketing channels you want to prioritise, whether that be your best performing or improving your pain points. 

Next, you can establish a structure for your marketing team that is in line with your business goals and objectives. This will help you identify what roles and responsibilities are required for your marketing team. Then you can begin your hiring process, utilising multiple channels to source your talent. 

While building your digital marketing team, it is important to consider culture fit and diversity. You want to hire someone who is aligned with your company culture and embodies your key values. However, you also need to consider the benefits that come with having a diverse workforce. 

Are you building a marketing team and aren’t sure where to start? Get in contact with one of our expert marketing recruiters at The Marketists to start building your dream marketing team today.