A guide to hiring a marketing team in 2022

Hiring a marketing team can seem like a daunting task. There are so many specialist skills and capabilities to choose from it’s difficult to know what to hire when to hire who to hire and how to hire. In this post we will break down each of these questions to help you understand how to hire a marketing team in 2022.

When to hire?

Knowing when to hire a marketer is extremely important. In order to figure out if the timing is right you need to understand first whether your business growth is going to come from product, sales or marketing. Many founders and business owners want pure product led growth but in reality this is rarely achievable. For most businesses growth will come either from a sales approach (outbound) or marketing approach (inbound). Many businesses combine the two. If you have established that your growth is a marketing led function you are ready to hire a marketer.

What to hire ?

The next thing you will need to figure out is what to hire. Marketing can be a confusing domain because, particularly in the digital space, there are so many specialist disciplines ( as well as acronyms). There are dozens of specialisms including search engine optimisation, pay per click, programmatic, content marketing, email marketing, CRM, paid social, organic social, affiliates, the list goes on.

Unless you are a marketing expert the first hire should usually be an all round digital marketer – someone who is well versed in all the channels rather than a specialist in a single channel. These experts come in different flavours depending on ambition and budget: growth marketer, performance marketer, fractional CMO. Hire this person first because they will be able to define, in a channel and discipline agnostic way, where your marketing budget and efforts need to be.

You all rounder will help you put together your marketing growth plan which will identify the most efficient channels to generate growth. This will enable you to allocate budget and then guide you on what skills you need to hire next.

While every growth plan varies (dependent on vertical, B2B / B2C, business maturity, geography) you tend to see marketing skills demand consistently fall in to the following areas:

1. Content marketing / Organic Social Content marketing and organic social media experts help you build your presence outside of paid media. They will define what content you should be producing, help produce it and then manage the distribution on channels like facebook, Tik Tok linkedin.
2. EMail marketing Email marketers focus on building your one to one relationships with prospects and customers. Whether you are an eCommerce brand or B2B service provider email will play an important role in how you communicate. It will help convert more prospects efficiently and also extract more value from existing customers over time.
3. Paid social Paid social is now a key channel for most brands. It provides large scale reach on social media platforms, for both B2B and B2B audiences, alongside laser focused targeting. It provides the opportunity to generate consistent and regular top of funnel exposure as well as conversion driving retargeting.
4. Search pay per click Most brands invest in paid search because, although limited in volume, it is efficient in terms of targeting. This is because you only pay per click when you ad is served against a specific keyword search of your choosing. This makes it an extremely efficient channel for acquiring new customers.
5. Search engine optimisation SEO experts help you optimise your site for discovery by search engines. Good SEO experts will help you increase your organic (free) traffic by focusing your site optimisation efforts on keywords that generate good volume.
6. Data and analytics As your business grows the amount of data you accumulate will increase. Sales data, site data, customer data. Figuring out how you turn data into insights and revenue will become more challenging as you grow. Having data and analytics experts on board will help you maximise the value of your data.
7. Creative As you spend more on media e.g paid social ads, the demands for better creative will increase. Often the difference between a poor campaign and a successful campaign is good creative. Having access to talent that can make great creative assets will help you stand out and drive more sales for less media cost.

How to hire ?

There are many different ways you can go about hiring marketing talent but choosing how you are going to hire is important. Different strategies have pros and cons.

If you are looking for the cheapest marketing talent you should head to Fiverr or Upwork – marketers on these platforms will usually be cheap but very variable quality as there is very little or no quality control.

If you are searching for high quality marketing talent then a platform that verifies its talent using experts (like Traktion or Marketerhire) is probably your best bet – they will provide access to some of the best marketing talent with a cost efficient pricing model.

The alternative is to hire a recruitment expert or indeed to outsource your marketing entirely to an agency – though this can sometimes be costly with long tie ins and expensive fees.