How to structure your marketing team
Ready to develop your marketing team, need more feet on the ground but are not sure exactly where to start with structuring? Let’s delve into the options you have…
A question we get asked a lot, particularly from start-ups, is what roles you need within your marketing team. Where a lot of companies go wrong, is that they give one person (typically their marketing manager or similar), several marketing hats. For example, they appoint a marketing manager who is responsible for PR, social media, events, advertising etc - all within one role. Without external agency support (like us) or an extensive team to support you, that’s a near-impossible task. When you’re at a phase of your business that requires more in-house functionality, you’re unlikely to have the budget for a multi-person team, so how do you make your marketing work?
The early days
If you’re a founder or CEO with a solid understanding of marketing, having a CMO on board isn’t something to prioritise in the early stage but you do need to have an experienced marketing manager with at least 5 years of relevant experience. Their role would be to work with you on setting your marketing strategy and putting it into play. This will be a mix of doing it themselves and managing external support where required. If your founding team are marketing novices, a fractional CMO or an external marketing strategist is a worthy investment.
Where you can outsource
Typically, the most logical areas to outsource are SEO, PPC/advertising, and PR. Whilst these are roles you can integrate internally further down the line as your business grows, you’re unlikely to have the budget to justify making these full-time roles early on.
However, despite the budget not being there for internal hires, do not underestimate how important these roles can be for reaching your goals. If in doubt, book in a chat with experts in the area to get some pointers of how best to utilise these areas (our Power Hours are perfect for this).
Social media
What can’t be ignored is social media. If you want this to succeed, this must always be a standalone role, not a tag on. Your social media manager should work in conjunction with your marketing manager. Their role should cover content production, channel management, and proactive/reactive engagement. We’d recommend having adhoc external support to hand to support them on content production and strategy, particularly around specific campaigns or peak seasons. A great way to do this is to have quarterly social strategy days with an external resource to plan out content for the upcoming months.
Need bespoke advice on structuring your marketing team? Book a call with us to find out how we could help set up your team for success.
