Stop putting it off. Digital marketing isn’t going away. It’s time you start taking it seriously and recognize what it can do for your business. But in order to achieve results, you need a team that can get you there.
Here are a few things you should consider behind building your digital marketing team before you start extending offers.
What to Consider When Building a Marketing Team
1. What Are Your Goals?
Yes, digital marketing is an important part of your marketing strategy but what are you using it for? Knowing what you want to achieve will help you decide who you need in place. Some areas of your business may need more help than others. For instance, SEO may be lacking, while social media may be a strong engagement tool for you. Recognizing that you want to improve your SEO and organic listings will help you allocate more resources in that area.
Check out our blog post, How to Plan Your Digital Marketing Strategy, for more info on how to achieve your marketing goals.
2. What Do You Have?
This is a continuation of the goals question. Assess your current team, their strengths, and their areas for improvement. Decide whether the skills you need are something they could learn or whether you will need to bring in outside help.
There are some real advantages to developing your existing team such as increasing the loyalty of team members due to the investment you’re making in their professional development. However, sometimes you need the skills too quickly, and going outside of the company to hire is your only choice.
Get more team-building tips with, What Does a Marketing Dream Team Look Like.
3. Find Out What the Company Needs
Marketing is not an island. It often overlaps with your design, sales, development, customer service, and product development departments. Talk to these departments to assess what they’re feeling. Sales should have a good insight into where the disconnect is. Are they getting lots of leads but all of them are worthless? Do they have the educational materials they need to make conversions? Having candid conversations with these departments can help you recognize weaknesses or areas of potential that you hadn’t thought of.
Want to learn more about lead nurturing and customer conversion? Check out our Lead Nurturing Guide.
4. Focus
Since you already laid out your goals, it’s important not to become spread too thin as you try to accomplish them. Just like in a scientific experiment, you want to control some parts of your marketing strategy so that you can tell what is working and what isn’t. If you overhaul everything at once, including your team, and something doesn’t work, you won’t know what to discontinue.
On the other hand, if you roll out your new marketing strategy in phases and part of it doesn’t work, you’ll know what part needs to be re-examined. Today’s marketing has become very scientific. Approach it as if it was an experiment and you’ll have more control over, and success with, the results.
Find out how unexpected challenges can happen to the best of us. Check out our Hardest Part About Building a Website series.
5. Check in with Your Audience
Before building your digital marketing team, take your audience’s pulse. Make sure you truly understand the market you serve and what they want. Being clear in these things will help you put together the most important pieces of your team in the right order. For instance, if you’re serving a young demographic you’d most likely want to work on establishing your brand on social media before focusing on meaty white papers. Younger people may want the white papers down the sales funnel line but initially, it will be social media that gets you noticed.
If you have a limited budget (and who doesn’t?), you’ll most likely have to build your digital marketing team in phases. Knowing what you want to do, identifying your strengths and weaknesses, and getting a clear view of your ideal customer will help you roll out your team and strategy in the most effective way.
