This blog post is for business leaders who have hired their first marketer and are now ready...
This blog post is for business leaders who have hired their first marketer and are now ready to increase investment. Here, we delve into the steps you need to take to sustainably grow your marketing efforts.
Whether you’re a marketing leader or a business founder there are several considerations when expanding your marketing team. With so much to consider, we understand that it can be difficult to know where to start.
We've identified five key steps to approach growth before you even begin to think about marketing recruitment:
First, it's important to recognise that businesses will approach marketing growth at different times.
For instance, Company A has reached a new milestone in their growth plans. Having received investment, they are now ready to invest more in their marketing strategy. On the other hand, Company B has recognised their Marketing Manager is taking on a lot of new work. They require extra funding and support to deliver.
No matter the scenario, you must ensure that marketing investment aligns with your business objectives. This is crucial for achieving sustainable growth.
Next, it's important to evaluate the success of your initial marketing plan. The strategy that helped you grow to this stage, won't necessarily take you to the next. You will need to modify your marketing strategy for your business to continue scaling.
Plus, it's the perfect time to reflect on what successes you saw and where you can improve. This will guide the structure of your new marketing team and the goals you set them.
As strategies change, it's important to re-assess who makes up the marketing team. The skill sets required to execute your first marketing strategy, might not be relevant to your new marketing plan.
For most companies, the first hire is a generalist Marketing Manager, as they can support across multiple marketing channels. Now, as more budget becomes available, it’s likely that more specialist skill sets will be required.
Answering these questions will allow you to identify the gaps within your team. This is where new hires can best support the marketing team’s development.
Having different skills and seniorities in any team is crucial for the growth of individuals and the team itself. A diverse team will appeal to marketers who are actively looking to grow their careers within a new company. This is incredibly important for attracting candidates in today's market. According to our 2024 Annual Pay & Hiring Report, 12% of employees rank 'career development opportunities' as their first priority in a job search.
When your company first invested in marketing, you likely engaged an interim marketing leader to build a short-term strategy. As the company grows, it's important to embed marketing leadership permanently. A permanent hire will be able to get to know the details of your company and take full ownership of the marketing strategy. This will allow your brand to be more reactive, adjusting plans as you scale.
We would recommend hiring your senior marketer before building the rest of the team. This alleviates the pressure of building the whole marketing team from founders and/or talent teams. Plus, it also makes it easier for future marketing hires to understand their role, prospects and the team.
“This approach gives junior candidates a clearer idea of the team they’re joining, who will be managing them and who they will be learning from. Keep in mind that senior hires will need to justify their salaries quicker, so it’s vital to bring in the right talent at the right time.”
Michael Judkins, Director of specialist digital marketing recruitment
Additionally, taking ownership of and building a marketing department is a significant opportunity for marketers at this level. Many are looking to leverage their expertise to build out the marketing team in their vision. Including this in the job description will help sell the opportunity and encourage more applicants.
To understand the type of senior marketer you need, you must first consider your product and customer:
Answering these questions will allow the business to understand what channels it should invest in. This will help you identify the skills, experience and knowledge your senior marketer should have.
You don't need to have your entire marketing strategy planned out before making your senior marketing hire. However, answering these questions will certainly help the recruitment process. It provides candidates with a clearer understanding of the company and what they must do to grow marketing.
“A part of marketing’s role can be to define these channels, but if the company isn’t broadly aligned, marketing won’t have much success. Start-ups and scale-ups need to have a strong vision for marketing to be empowered to do the best possible job.”
Rowan Fisk, Executive Search Partner
Junior marketers are responsible for executing the marketing strategy designed by your Head of Marketing. These could be generalist Marketing Executives or more specialised marketers, such as SEO Executives, depending on your marketing goals. For some brands, junior support can be a "nice-to-have" because of budget restrictions. If this is the case, we would recommend focusing on hiring Marketing Managers.
Marketers at manager level are a great asset to your team. They have the right level of experience and knowledge to deliver on campaigns, understand strategic thinking and manage stakeholder expectations.
Marketing Executives, on the other hand, need the support of a senior marketer to continue to grow and learn. It's difficult to attract Executives without having the wider team in place, as learning and development opportunities are a key consideration for candidates at this level. As a result, we recommend hiring junior marketers when the team is more established.
For an example of how a Head of Marketing can support the development of your team, read our OCR Labs Success Story.
OCR Labs had already onboarded their Head of Marketing when they reached out to work with us. Having taken the time to understand the company and its growth plans, the Head of had identified a number of marketing specialists that would help the company continue to scale. Our specialist technology marketing recruiters partnered with them to build out the team, delivering excellent candidates for three newly created roles:
Remember, there is no one-size-fits-all solution. For some organisations, growing a marketing team will mean making a one-off hire to support with activity. For others, it will involve a high-growth recruitment strategy with the addition of multiple new roles to the team. In both scenarios, it will be important to prioritise the hires needed in order to ensure sustainable growth.
We recommend prioritising hires based on the importance of projects. Prioritising projects will allow you to expedite the most important work.
For instance, if you’re building brand awareness across social media platforms, hiring Content and Social Media Managers will be your best route. Or perhaps you’re looking to invest in data analytics to identify new sales opportunities and need to focus on building your data team.
No matter your plans, each project requires different specialists. That's why it’s important to prioritise the skill sets you’re investing in.
"When thinking about what skills you’re missing in the team, it’s important to think beyond your current needs and goals. In order to build a successful, sustainable marketing team, you will need to consider how hires can contribute to future plans.
Most new hires will need time to get up to speed and embed themselves into the business before you start to see the results of their campaigns. Expecting results on day one is unrealistic, so plan ahead!"
Liz Hopkins, Director of marketing recruitment
When prioritising projects, it's important to look to the future to ensure sustainable marketing growth. Looking ahead will help you manage business expectations around what is achievable and within what timeframes. It's unlikely that new hires will be able to make any real achievements within the first few months as they get settled into their new roles. If you’re looking for a quick fix, permanent hires might not be the best solution.
One hire will not solve all of your problems and certainly not immediately. If you have a project that requires urgent support (within six months), bringing on a contractor will be the best solution for your team.
Hiring contractors gets you access to skills immediately, allowing marketing teams to complete projects on time. Contractors often provide a cheaper solution when companies need skill sets for only a short period. They are also practical when teams need immediate access to a role they’re still hiring for permanently.
“Contractors require far less training than a permanent hire and are accustomed to slotting into a team. Engaging experienced contractors are a great option for hiring managers whilst they continue searching for permanent additions to the team.”
Taylor Nash, contract recruitment specialist
Now you've identified the gaps in your marketing team, you're ready to define the roles you’re looking to hire. This will allow you to write attractive job descriptions and set clear goals for each new hire.
When hiring for a newly created role, it can be tricky to know exactly what the role should look like. You need to define their responsibilities and the impact they will have on the team. Here are the steps you can take to define new roles before filling the role permanently.
One easy way to understand a role’s responsibilities is to research job descriptions.
There are lots of example job descriptions online, but it’s also worth looking at ones from companies similar to yours. Skills and requirements of every role vary based on the sector and company size. Taking this approach will allow you to paint a clearer picture of your future hire.
If you choose to work with a recruitment consultant, they will be able to supply you with these job descriptions. Additionally, they can help you tailor your own so it’s attractive and sets out reasonable requirements.
Contractors can give heads of departments insight into new roles before they hire them permanently. Committing to a short term hire gives employers a clear understanding of how the role will impact the business, without over-committing budget to a permanent employee.
Budgeting is one of the most important, yet difficult, steps in hiring new talent. If hiring managers aren’t released the necessary budget, they will have to compromise on the new hire's experience and expertise. This will impact the quality of work produced and the speed of delivery.
“One of the biggest challenges that Heads of Marketing face when growing their team is securing the budget needed to bring on talent at the right level. To secure the budget for new hires, you must demonstrate the ROI of each addition. Keep in mind that you might need to justify salaries to stakeholders in the business who don’t have marketing backgrounds.”
Liz Hopkins, Director of marketing recruitment
For example, a CFO may be quicker to approve a junior hire at a lower cost. For more senior hires you may need to put forward a business case that shows the potential ROI by the end of the year. Providing a clear timeline for when the business can expect a return on investment is important. It will help you demonstrate how each new hire directly impacts the company's finances.
Return on investment is most important to stakeholders that sit outside marketing. However, depending on industry, business model and company stage, it can be difficult to determine the ROI of every hire.
In these scenarios, we recommend considering how the hires will contribute to the marketing strategy. Can you identify the results that the business will see outside money? For example, this could be increasing the number of marketing-qualified leads through lead generation marketing.
Either way, it’s crucial for you to manage expectations around each hire. Forecasting when the business will expect to see results will be key.
Keep in mind that the budget will need to include more than compensation packages. You need to include each of these in your budget:
Being prepared and covering all these bases will be vital to securing the budget you need to hire.
If you're struggling to get sign-off on your budget, we recommend presenting job descriptions to the wider business. This should detail why certain skills, background and experience are necessary to achieve your vision. By presenting this information for varying seniority levels, you give the company a clear understanding of why the desired marketing roles and the budget are required for each.
We understand how difficult it can be to get sign-off on new hires. Our recruitment consultants are well-versed in supporting companies with salary benchmarking.
Manager, Jasmin Eastwood, supported heycar with this process. Jasmin researched the market, finding similar candidate profiles to those she was looking to hire. This gave heycar a clearer understanding of how the newly created roles would impact the company and its growth plans. Salary benchmarking also gave heycar a complete understanding of what candidates they could engage based on their budgets.
Taking these measures allowed for a quick and smooth recruitment process for heycar and Jasmin secured top candidates for each role:
Need support with any of these steps? Get in touch with our expert recruitment consultants for more advice customised to your business requirements.
