For a small or mid-sized B2B business that has never had marketing staff before, building a marketing team – or even hiring your first marketing freelancer – can be overwhelming.
Many B2B businesses are looking for a marketing ‘rockstar’. I translate this to mean a marketer who excels at everything, which is rare, especially when you’re offering $10 an hour on Upwork. When I read job proposals like that I understand that the firm does not know who they need.
If you are a business owner or partner, sales director or office manager tasked with offloading a lengthening list of marketing tasks to a new hire, you might be wondering where to start. Which role should you hire first and what skills should that person have?
Below are five elements for a nascent marketing department, whether it is freelance or permanent, remote or on-site, strategic or administrative.
1. Understanding of your marketing expectations
What is your marketing for? What are the early outcomes you’re expecting? What are the later outcomes? Whether you plan to hire just one marketer or two or three, you should have a clear view of what they will bring to the company.
2. Skill sets that you actually need
I read many requests-for-proposals to freelance marketers that ask for a content writer who can write compelling text, a PPC expert who can predict when sales will increase, or a social media manager who can ‘enhance brand awareness’. These are vague generalities based on criteria that might be fulfilled at some point.
Initially, the marketing skill sets that a B2B needs are much more down-to-earth: the ability to adapt content to multiple platforms, the ability to learn the technical language of your industry, and the intuition of an organised self-starter.
3. Their marketing strategy to achieve your goals
You’re hiring marketing professionals to hone a strategy for you, not to implement yours. Yes, you are the expert in your industry and your marketers may not be. However, marketing voices are there (partly) to disrupt your well-laid marketing plans with facts and considered opinions.
4. A focus on supporting the sales team
Smaller B2B businesses need marketing that helps drive sales. I think an early goal of your new marketing hire is to help solve sales funnel drop-off: focusing on marketing to highly rated leads, increasing/improving marketing collateral that can be used by the sales team and driving follow-up systems to improve conversion rates.
5. A focus on customer experience
Seamless prospect/lead/new customer experience should be the product of the above four functions. New marketing hires should take the customer by their hand and lead them through the decision-making process
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