Why your marketing team will make or break your business - and how to hire accordingly
Marketing, as a whole, is more important than any other function of your business when it comes to growth - and growth is the catalyst for increased sales and revenue. Growth - and doing everything possible to maximise it - are essential business practices. Companies that remain stagnant and don’t look to grow by pushing the boundaries of their brand and marketing, over time, will start to decline, or at the very least plateau. When we consider what marketing entails; all of the elements like branding, messaging, advertising, social media, website, and so on, it starts to become obvious that real care and attention needs to be put into it for them to both thrive and survive in our current digital climate.
Let’s dive into what having an effective marketing team looks like, what the benefits are, and how to hire and lead a team accordingly.
Why do brands need marketing anyway?
Digital presence is the only presence that matters.
Right, but what is “digital presence”? We hear you say… Digital presence describes a brand or business’ voice online - how they’re perceived, their reputation, the level of awareness that surrounds them, how big of an audience they have and so on.
The size of a brand’s digital presence directly influences the results of marketing, sales, and consequently revenue. Those with the largest presence online can promote their product or service to more people, turning those people into customers. This is why digital presence directly correlates to the success of a business. To see any growth as a company, attention has to be placed on increasing and maximising the volume of presence that they have across digital mediums. The reason is that literally, everything we do today is online. Where we hang out, where we communicate, where we socialise, where we do our business, read our news, and see adverts for new lifestyles and opportunities. It’s all online.
It’s for this reason that hiring an effective, driven, and creative marketing team is so fundamental to the success of any modern brand. You won’t get a strong digital presence simply by existing. It takes the work of professionals. And digital presence is the only presence that matters.
Marketing connects you to your ideal customer
Strong marketing is the difference between your sales pipeline being filled with ideal customers that are ready to convert or ‘leads’ that don’t have any interest in your brand at all. The disparity between these two outcomes cannot be overstated. Good marketing will generate inbound leads for your business, at volume, that are so much further down the sales funnel and closer to purchase. This makes the lives of your salespeople so much easier, and it means that your business is working with people who you deem ideal, not just satisfactory. It means that you can work with prospects that align with your values and your way of thinking. Only great marketing will make this happen.
Zero or poor marketing will have an adverse effect. Your sales team will be relentless on the outbound and without a proper strategy, will end up with poor results. The role of the marketing function within your business is to create demand for your product/service and promote your brand by focusing on targeting your ideal customers with campaigns across digital mediums.
Developing a strategy that builds and delivers campaigns aimed at your target audience is imperative for a few reasons. Firstly, it helps to eliminate any timewasters and people that aren’t close to purchasing, meaning you have more time to sell to the right people. Targeting your ideal customers with your marketing - instead of people that may fit your buyer persona - is key also because of the difference in conversion rate. High conversion rates come only when your brand is put in front of the right people: your ideal customers. If you want to make the most out of your efforts, maximise your sales, and reduce your cost per customer as possible; you need to invest in a marketing team.
Employer brand, created through marketing, has a direct influence on recruitment success
Employer brand is something we talk a lot about, and for good reason. Employer brand and employer value proposition are terms used to describe the reputation your brand has from an internal pov; the perspective of your employees. More specifically, employer value proposition is a collection of the values that you hold that would influence whether or not someone wants to work with you. The only way you can create a good employer brand, and attract the right talent for your business, is to invest in a marketing team to make that happen.
How to hire the right marketing team for your business
You need to hire for culture fit, and then ensure your team is learning and growing.
Hiring for culture fit is more important than skills or experience.
Most businesses hire based on their current needs, but it’s more important to look into how a potential employee will fit into your company long term. When you hire someone who doesn’t have the skills needed for the job, they can learn them quickly enough—but if they don’t have a good attitude toward work or teamwork, it can be difficult for them to change.
Be sure that your team is growing and learning new things every day by setting goals and providing growth opportunities internally (e.g., through mentorship), as well as outside of work hours with conferences and workshops at least once per quarter (and ideally more often).
Hire people who are different from you, both in their job experience and personal life.
The benefits of hiring diverse teams are many, but they all come down to one thing: diversity of thought.
When you’re making decisions at work, it’s important to have a team that will challenge your ideas and give you new perspectives on problems. This is where diversity comes in—if everyone around the table looks and thinks like you, there’s no room for differing viewpoints or unique solutions. Since most people tend to hire those who look and think like them (it makes their lives easier), it can be difficult for companies with homogenous leadership teams to avoid groupthink.
For your marketing team (or any other department) to function properly, the people who make up that team need diverse skillsets and experiences—and those qualities can only be found in someone who brings something different from what others already know into the mix!
Don’t hire marketers who don’t have a holistic vision of the role and impact of marketing on the company.
Don't hire marketers who don’t have a holistic vision of the role and impact of marketing on the company.
Marketing is not an oil change or a trip to the dentist. It's not something you can just hire someone to do and then forget about until it’s time for another visit. The marketing team should be a team—a group of people who work together to achieve a common goal. They should be as invested in your success as they are with their own because they're both tied directly together by their work together as well as individually.
Your marketing team needs to work with your sales team, not against it.
Hire marketers that understand exactly how to benefit the sales team.
Being able to provide your sales team with the information and data they need is crucial. If your marketing team isn't able to provide this, it's going to be difficult for them to sell your product or service effectively. In fact, not being able to do so could actually hurt their ability to sell in the long run.
To ensure that you're providing all of the necessary information and data, you must make sure your two teams are working together effectively. This means everything from making sure everyone knows what each other's job descriptions entail—and stays within those boundaries—to having regular meetings where both sides can discuss any problems they're experiencing.
Hire marketers who can communicate well and clearly with anyone, at any level of the organization, without pretence or jargon.
As a marketer, you need to be able to communicate well and clearly with anyone, at any level of the organization. You may be working with people who don’t have any direct experience in marketing or advertising—your boss, CEO, CFO and COO are not necessarily going to be familiar with what a landing page is—but they all need to understand what you're talking about if you want them to buy into your ideas.
This means that when you're explaining something new or showing off some cool new tool, there should never be room for confusion. This can only happen if everyone on your team has a deep understanding of how everything works together so they know exactly what each other is doing. In short:
You need good communication skills
You need clear communication skills
You must have no pretence about communicating effectively
your marketing team should be leading the charge on building loyal enthusiasm among employees, internally!
To grow your business through word of mouth marketing, you need to create loyal and enthusiastic employees first. And your marketing team should be leading the charge on building that enthusiasm among employees internally! The best marketing teams are made up of people who are excited about what they do and confident enough in their abilities to communicate with anyone and everyone throughout the organization—from the CEO down to interns.
If you already have a great marketing team, congratulations! But if not, here are some tips for hiring new people:
Hire someone who has experience creating positive brand images or working with individual consumers. This is key because this person will be responsible for managing how customers perceive your company as well as how current employees feel about it. If your job posting doesn't specify this requirement specifically (or even if it does), make sure you talk about it during interviews so potential hires know what's expected from them when they come on board.
Make sure candidates can speak plainly without pretence or jargon—and don't let them use buzzwords like "synergy" or "thought leadership." You want someone who can communicate effectively across departments and levels within an organization; buzzwords won't help that happen!