So, you’ve gotten to the point where your company is growing, or you want it to grow, and you don’t have someone dedicated to marketing. Ah! Better hire a full-time marketer, right?

The answer is: maybe.

Over my career, I’ve had several opportunities to be the ‘first’ official marketing person in a business and have been tasked with not only driving revenue growth, but also creating sustainable marketing operations in the business. This doesn’t just entail buying some advertising, creating some new flyers, updating the website, or posting on social media. The role of the ‘first’ marketing professional in an organization requires much more:

• Educating other teams (sometimes including the leadership team) about what marketing’s role is within the business; working across or breaking down silos;

• Understanding the overall business goals so we can be strategic in whatever marketing efforts we decide on;

• Researching and deciding which marketing tactics will help us reach our goals, including determining which customers to target and which not to;

• Aligning internal and external resources (hiring a team) and creating the marketing infrastructure so we can execute efficiently and maintain it effectively;

• Selecting and managing technology platforms and helping to structure the data that goes into them;

• Selecting metrics that matter, and then measuring and communicating marketing results;

• Communicating with others in the organization who deal directly with the customer (sales/service) so we can get feedback.

If you haven’t had a marketing person in your company in the past, these things are easy to overlook, but they are critical for long-term growth success. Here are a few points to consider if you are bringing on marketing staff for the first time:

Know Your Goals

Understand why you need this person/position

Why are you hiring marketing? Why now? What are you hoping they’ll achieve? Here are a few situations I’ve heard over the years. Do any of them sound familiar?

• You have a couple of people doing “marketing things” and it’s overwhelming them, so you want to bring on one person to centralize and coordinate your marketing efforts.

• You want to launch a new product but your sales team doesn’t have any new materials to support them.

• You need to be the first to market with a new idea and that’s what marketing people do, right? Launch promotional campaigns?

• Your market is changing (Going more digital, perhaps? We hear that one a lot.) and you need to be able to reach customers in new ways.

• You’re spending a lot of money on advertising but you have no idea if it’s working, and you need to know what your ROI is.

• You feel like sales aren’t where they should be, even though your sales team is fully staffed.

These are all fantastic reasons to hire someone in a marketing role. But realize that one new person is not going to be the “be all, end all” solution. Marketing is an investment and is a critical function in the business. But the expectation that adding a marketing person will somehow launch your company into stardom or blow your sales through the roof is just setting that person up to fail. Should there be successful campaigns? Yes. Should they be accountable for the ROI on marketing tactics? Sure. But they’re not going to solve every marketing problem for you. At least not for quite a while.

Also, realize that some of those reasons might require you to hire a generalist who has a wide variety of experiences and skills and can manage many projects seamlessly. Other reasons might require someone with a very specialized skill set. Understanding why you need that person may help you decide what skills you actually need in-house.

You’ve Been Doing Marketing All Along

even though you may not have called it “marketing”

You’ve been doing marketing - as the leader of the business or someone making financial or product decisions.

• What customers do we want to sell to and what do they want/need?

• Where are there opportunities in the market for us to capitalize on?

• What are the risks in our industry that we need to be prepared for?

• How should we price our products/services?

These are all marketing questions, and if you want to bring someone in to “do marketing” you may need to let these types of decisions go, or at least make sure that your new person is involved in and can give input on the decisions. An experienced marketing professional (especially if put in a management role) will expect to be accountable for questions and decisions like these. They understand that there is a lot more to marketing than just promotion. (Shoutout to the Four Ps…Product, Place, Price, and Promotion…the foundational principles of marketing.)

So before you bring someone on, know what they will be accountable for. If it’s overall strategy, then you may need to give up the reigns to them so they can succeed and take ownership of the process. If it’s tactical support, then be sure you can give clear direction to them on your target audiences, your product features, pricing strategy, and sales promotions so they can make their best effort based on that information.

Determine Your Budget

not just for the person, but for what they will have to work with once they arrive

Bringing on a marketing professional and then not giving them a budget to work with is futile. If you are investing in marketing then that means people and other resources. It helps to put a budget together of what you’re spending currently, so they have a place to start. It’s also important to have a conversation with your CFO about marketing’s role, and to educate yourself about what some typical costs are to execute marketing these days. That way, when your marketer requests a budget for a new piece of technology or for digital advertising, you’re not thrown for a loop.

Ready to Read Part 2?

This blog post is the first in a multi-part series for growing businesses. You can read the next post in the series here.

Need Help?

If you’re thinking of bringing on a marketing person, but you’re still not sure if that’s the right move, we can help! As a fractional CMO, we can help implement the marketing operations and infrastructure, walk you through business-case budgeting, determine a baseline tactical plan, select vendors, and help you with ongoing oversight of the customer/revenue functions in the business. If at some point you are ready to hire someone full-time, the ground will be well-established for them to come in and grow from there. We can also help with projects ranging from content writing to email marketing to marketing analytics.