No matter the size of your organisation, you can’t be successful without a really great digital marketing strategy. And finding the right people to create and effectively execute that strategy is key. But where to start, especially if your marketing team is a team of just a few, or even no one at all? We put together a guide to finding the right people and fitting them all together so you can reach all your marketing objectives with the best talent leading the charge.

What does a good marketing team look like?

Typically, a solid marketing team is broken out into two subsections: content and acquisition. Those two groups sit underneath the team lead, or director, and they are respectively responsible for creating all kinds of content and generating and transforming leads. Keep reading for all the necessary positions within those teams you should look to fill.

Hire an editorial director

This person will be in charge or creating the content and social media strategies, connecting brand awareness to conversion. They should understand how all of the different touch points throughout your user journey fit together, and how they can best optimise the content within those journeys to convert users into customers. They will also line manage the following three people.

Hire a content manager

As the title suggests, this person should be responsible for ideating, creating and scheduling content across all mediums, including blog posts, video, podcasts and whatever else they might want to create that fits in with your strategy. This person should have a strong understanding of SEO, and know how to manage an editorial calendar.

Hire a community manager

Also called a social media editor, this person will work with the content manager to dovetail the social media strategy with the larger content strategy. They will then maintain your brand’s public social media presence and may also help maintain any kind of private community involvement, too.

Hire an acquisitions director

This person will direct and manage lead generation and your customer acquisition strategy, as well as campaigns. They will also work on maximising the revenue things like customer lists and web and media properties generate. They will guide the acquisitions team on the paid and organic traffic strategy and campaigns, and as such, will line manage the following three people.

Hire an analytics manager

Responsible for tracking marketing analytics and KPIs for internal departments, this person will compile and communicate on the results of their tracking to all the necessary parties. They will also be responsible for executing the organic and paid traffic strategies.

Hire a graphic designer

This person will create graphics for all your channels, including paid media, social media, newsletters and your blog. At Avado, we have an entire team dedicated to design, but if your organisation is smaller, you might just need one or two people. This person (or multiple people) could sit among the acquistions team, but it also makes sense to put them on the content team, too.

Hire an email marketing manager

Last but definitely not least, this person will be responsible for executing your email marketing strategy and campaigns, and manage the testing of those campaigns to keep those conversion rates on an upward trajectory.

How will this team of people help your organisation be successful?

At the beginning, you might have one person covering the responsibilities that fall under a few of these roles, but as your organisations and your teams grow, it’s important to understand that each of these elements is super important to success. When you’re hiring, a great way to drive this home is by carefully outlining every team members’s key performance indicators (KPIs), and be sure to include those KPIs in the job description for each role. A good marketing job description has:

• All the basic stuff, like title and hierarchy info
• The key functionality or purpose of that job within the team and the organisation
• The role responsibilities and KPIs
• Desired personal traits

If you can find the right people to fill all of the roles above, you’ll be on your way to having a marketing team that energizes your organisation, pushing it to the next level with the right balance of digital and creative skills. When you build a great  marketing team, they’ll be able to bring your brand’s story to life in a compelling way, and let design guide your brand’s evolution across all touch points. They’ll produce innovative content that’s carefully optimised and measured, and they’ll test it, and then test it again.

What resources do I need for hiring?

Now that you know who you need, you just need to find them! Look to trusted resources like LinkedIn, and other, more marketing-focused job boards like Tempo and Campaign. There are also tons of recruiting companies that focus on marketing and creative candidates, so consider working with one of them, as well. To maximise the diversity of your marketing team, which is a good idea for countless reasons, look to sites like GottaBe! and Rally, which both specialise in helping organisations build diverse talent pools. Of course, word of mouth, reaching out to people you know, and internal hires can work very well, too.

Once you’ve selected potential candidates, it’s time to start interviewing. Make a list of all the questions you’d like to ask each candidate, and rate their answers as you take notes. That rating, along with your notes, will help you quantify their answers and better compare them to other candidates. When it comes to the questions, ask them about their technical skills, ensuring that they have the right combination of agility and creativity. Ask them how their past experience applies to the role their applying for with you, and look for out-of-the-box responses to unique challenges they’ve faced. Ask them how they build relationships with internal and external people they work with, and try to gauge what their interactions with those people might look like.

Getting a good sense of someone is just as important as their experience and skills, but it isn’t always easy to sort out if you only have an hour with that person. Here are a few creative questions to ask:

1. What’s a non work-related personal goal you have?
2. If you were to start a business, what kind of business would it be?
3. If could have dinner with a celebrity or historical figure, who would it be and why?
4. If we asked someone who knows you very well to describe you, what would they say?
5. If you didn’t have to worry about money, how would you fill your time?

What kind of people should you be looking for?

As you’re hiring for your marketing team, you’ll likely notice that a lot of the people you meet and interview will be very agile, and prepared to wear many hats. They’ll have top-notch digital skills, be super creative, and understand the importance of data. Finding those people will future-proof your team, because they’ll always be ready to take on and master new technology as it comes. You should be looking for the kind of people who know how to produce and execute an amazing strategic marketing plan in a creative and collaborative way.

What tools should I give my new marketing team?

Now that you have your team, it’s time to give them the tools they need to maximise their potential. There is lots of marketing-focused software you can set up your team with, aside from whatever programmes the rest of your organisation is already using. Keeping everyone organised is key, and looking to software like Asana (which Avado’s marketing team uses), Monday.com or Trello are ideal for that.

• A quality content management system (CMS)
• Social media management software
• Analytics tools, potentially more than just Google Analytics
• A good email marketing platform with flexible templates

Whatever suite of tools you choose, they should all be cross-functional to make everyone’s lives easier. Along with software-based tools, don’t forget to keep your marketing team upskilled and sharp – marketing moves at such a fast pace with new tools and techniques hitting the market all the time, so regular workshops and training programmes from Avado’s Marketing Academy will keep your team motivated.

About Avado

For more than 20 years, Avado have been providing professional training and qualifications that transform businesses. This month, we are relaunching our Marketing Academy with a new webinar series that will help your organisation evaluate its own digital maturity, and introduce you to our new taster classes, Labs and Workshops. Stay tuned for more information!