No business can survive without marketing. You need consistent conversions, a solid brand reputation, and meaningful customer relationships to operate a successful business long-term. And none of this is possible without an intentional marketing strategy.
But to craft this marketing strategy, you first need to have the right team in place to do it. That said, building a high-performing marketing department is no easy feat. Careful planning and strategic implementation of best practices for constructing a marketing department are required.
Let’s take a look at how to do so.
1. Define your Vision for your Marketing Department
All business owners should have a vision for how they want each department in their company to function. When you visualize and pin down the details of what your ideal marketing department looks like, you can create a blueprint to bring the vision to life.
Answer the following questions to define your vision for your marketing department.
What Roles Are Most Important?
One of the first things you want to think about is who you want on your marketing team. What roles do want to fill? Here’s a list of some of the most important people to have in your marketing department:
- Writers
- Data analysts
- Brand strategists
- Content creators
- Graphic designers
- Marketing manager
- Digital marketing specialists
- Web designer/developers
- Public Relations (PR) manager
- Market research specialists
- Social media managers
- Email marketing experts
- Search engine optimization (SEO) strategists
The roles most important to your business’s marketing department will depend on your unique needs and goals. However, putting a talented person at the head of as many marketing roles as possible will help ensure your team is well-rounded and highly productive.
At Growth Hackers, we helped a B2B SaaS company redesign its marketing department structure into a full growth engine with SEO, content, analytics, automation and paid media roles, and this team restructuring improved campaign output efficiency within 2 quarters.
In-House or Outsourcing?
Your marketing department can be completely in-house. You hire the people you want to hire and they complete all of your marketing work for you within your company.
Or, you can outsource certain tasks or roles. For example, instead of having in-house content creators, you can hire a content creation agency to create the content you need for all of your campaigns.
Outsourcing on an as-needed basis may be cheaper. But you can create a more cohesive team when they’re in-house. Weigh the pros and cons of each approach equally and decide what fits your vision best.
At Growth Hackers, we worked with a DTC brand that compared in-house versus outsourcing like choosing between owning a full kitchen or partnering with a Michelin delivery team, and by moving to a hybrid model, they improved speed of execution while controlling costs.
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How Do you See Everyone Working Together?
Here’s where you can dig into the details of how you see your marketing department functioning.
For example, ideally, your marketing department will communicate openly. Each person will be able to work well on their own but also collaborate with their team members with ease. Every day, you see happy, smiling faces of employees that are incredibly satisfied with the meaningful work they’re doing.
You should also consider the cross-departmental collaboration that you want to see. For instance, sales and marketing teams need to work together.
Marketers can give in-depth insight into who the target audience is to salespeople, and they can then use this information to create better-tailored pitches to ignite sales. On the other hand, salespeople can disclose what products and services are selling the most, and marketers can use this data to focus their efforts on campaigns around these products and services.
At the end of the day, you want to see the individuals in your marketing department work well together, and you want to see your marketing department collaborate with the other divisions in your company.
How Will your Marketing Team Grow Over Time?
Your vision should entail where you want your marketing department to be in the next six months. But it’s also important to visualize how you see your marketing department evolving over the next 5 years. At Growth Hackers, we partnered with an early-stage fintech company that initially only had budget for a single marketer, and over a multi-year roadmap we helped them expand into a full team with clear specialization, resulting in a massive increase in campaign volume and stronger long-term brand consistency.
For example, you may only be able to hire a handful of people over the next six months and complete a few marketing campaigns and projects. But over the next 5 years, you may want to create a more pronounced marketing department, with most, if not all, of your roles filled and a long list of successful campaigns under your belt.
2. Make Sure you Have the Proper Tools in Place
Once you define your vision for your ideal marketing department, you need to make sure you can support it, starting with having the proper tools in place.
A content management system (CMS), for example, is one of the most important tools in a marketing department. It ensures that you can create, organize, and publish your content efficiently. Understanding the different types of CMS systems and what they offer can help you select one that meets your needs.
If your team doesn’t have any coding skills but needs to publish content online, a web content management system is a good choice. If you want to reuse portions of your content often, a component content management system is the way to go. Or, if you want to automatically digitize, organize, and track documents in the cloud, go with a document management system.
Other tools you may need to support your marketing department include:
- Data analysis tools
- Automation tools
- Cloud storage
- Project management platform
- Email marketing software
- Website management platform
- Quality desktop or laptop computers
- Social media management tools
- Customer relationship management (CRM) system
Doing thorough research to determine what tools you need and which companies offer the best products is essential. You will also want to demo the tools if you can. If the tool has a dedicated training program or person you can reach out to, even better.
At Growth Hackers, we partnered with an e-commerce startup that was struggling with disconnected tools and fragmented workflows, and after we helped them implement an integrated marketing stack including CMS (Shopify), CRM (HubSpot), and automation platforms (Klaviyo and Make.com), they improved lead tracking accuracy and reduced manual workload significantly.
3. Audit your Current Marketing Department
To bring the right people into your marketing department, you first need to know the current state of it. Note the skillsets and personalities you currently have on your team. Detail how beneficial it’s been having these individuals on your marketing team.
Then, note what’s missing in your marketing department. Do you need more leadership? Do you need a digital marketing team? What about a videographer and editor? Or additional content creators and data analysts? What skills and personalities would complete your team?
Audit your marketing department on your own and ask for feedback from your current team to get their perspective on what the department needs.
4. Design Suitable Hiring and Retention Processes
When you understand what you need in your marketing department, you can start recruiting and hiring individuals that fit the mold. But to attract, hire, and keep top talent, you need effective processes in place. Let’s discuss what an effective recruiting, onboarding, and retention strategy look like.
Recruiting
You have an ideal candidate in mind. Now, how are you going to attract them? Doing so obviously starts with knowing who you’re trying to attract. Understand what kind of job ads they’re attracted to, where they look for jobs, what kind of company culture they’re enticed by, and what’s most appealing to them in a role.
Then, you can work on your job listings. Make sure they’re detailed and highlight the things your ideal candidate is most drawn to. Put these job ads in places your ideal candidate frequents to look for jobs.
Spruce up your application process too and make sure that it is effective at weeding out candidates that aren’t fit for the job. For instance, you can have an application, then a skills test, then an initial interview, then a final interview with the team lead.
Recruiting should be a detailed, ongoing process.
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Onboarding
When you hire someone for your marketing department, don’t just give them a nametag and say good luck. Instead, design an intricate onboarding process that readies new hires for their roles. This means lots of training, collaboration, and communication.
Your onboarding process can be as long as you want it to be. However, it should be long enough to teach your new hires everything they need to know to excel in their positions and for them to meet the team and bond with them.
Filling out HR paperwork, going over expectations, policies, and procedures, and team introductions should take place at the beginning of your onboarding process. After that, move on to training. It can be a combination of online training modules, shadowing coworkers, and on-the-job experience.
Once your new hires complete training, let them loose in their roles. Watch what they do from afar and make notes about what you see. By the time they reach their 90-day performance review, you’ll have what you need to determine if their role should be permanent.
Retention
Employee retention is important because it leaves a hole in your team’s workflow when a good employee leaves. It also costs a lot of money to hire and train new workers.
So, design a retention strategy alongside your recruiting and onboarding strategies. What will you do to ensure employees in your marketing department want to stay? Offering professional development opportunities, performance bonuses, great benefits, and meaningful job duties is a good start.
Creating a positive company culture aids employee retention too. Establish core values that align with your employees. Hire with diversity and inclusion at the forefront so that everyone feels welcome on the team. Establish the behaviors you expect from everyone. And detail what leadership is accountable for.
A workplace environment that genuinely supports employees is one that talented workers will flock to. At Growth Hackers, we helped a manufacturing company implement a structured retention strategy with clear growth paths, performance incentives, and culture alignment, and they reduced turnover while improving overall team productivity.
Final Words on the Strategies to Adopt to Build an Outstanding Marketing Department/Team
Building an exceptional marketing team isn’t simple. There’s a lot that goes into it, like defining your vision for your ideal marketing team, ensuring you have the proper tools to support it, auditing the current state of your marketing department, and designing suitable hiring and retention processes to attract and keep top talent.
We’ve given you a blueprint for conquering each of the above-mentioned stages. But realizing your vision will take time. So, be patient, stay organized, and continue refining what an exceptional marketing department looks like in your business.
Growth Hackers is an experienced content marketing agency helping businesses from all over the world grow. There is no fluff with Growth Hackers. We help entrepreneurs and business owners implement effective strategies for building an exceptional marketing department, increase their productivity, generate qualified leads, optimize their conversion rate, gather and analyze data analytics, acquire and retain users and increase sales.
We go further than brand awareness and exposure. We make sure that the strategies we implement move the needle so your business grow, strive and succeed. If you too want your business to reach new heights, contact Growth Hackers today so we can discuss about your brand and create a custom growth plan for you. You’re just one click away to skyrocket your business.
