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Digital marketing for a start-up requires faces. A lot of them. For a CEO, pitching, dozens of calls, and other operations make it easy to get sidetracked. The absence of a well-designed digital marketing strategy can sabotage most, if not all, of your efforts. Blogs and social media are a great place to get the show on the road: 247% of millennials are more likely to respond to these channels. Don’t know where to start? We got your back.
You may think that Step One is defining your perfect audience. Makes sense. It’s the reason why you do what you do. However, there’s a Step Zero: analyzing your business overall, marketing tools and activities, and other factors that impact team operations, including:
Founder of NP Digital Neil Patel built a marketing department from the ground up in his career. One of the lessons he shared was keeping it simple in the beginning. Choosing quality over quantity will prevent the waste of resources, and you’ll save yourself from disproportionate results.
Your marketing plan will also help your new employees. They’ll have realistic expectations of what’s required and which tasks must be prioritized. We help start-ups develop marketing strategies that work. You can learn more about the strategies we at Whales offer here.
A start-up marketing team depends on your company’s size, budget, operations, clients, how much they spend, and more. Getting your first hires right can be challenging, but you can still work around the pitfalls. Let’s see how.
Some roles are more important than others, sorry. Here are a few you should consider filling in the first place:
Here are a few of the additional marketing roles that will help you scale your business faster once the foundation is established:
The number of ways you can assemble your marketing team is countless. You can follow Gary Vaynerchuk’s formula and hire a math person (ads), an art person (design), a written word person (content), and a video person. You can also do it like Chris Walker: hire an architect (strategy), distributor (ads), creative (content), and subject matter expert (data). Or, you can shape your own structure. It depends on your goals & capabilities, your clients, and your priorities in hiring.
After the roles are set out, your next step is structuring the team for maximum effectiveness. Sometimes, it’s unproductive and costly to have everything done by in-house employees. You may not know where to involve some experts, need all roles at all times, or struggle with retaining them. Then, it makes sense to go demand-based and outsource part of the expertise. Outsourcing does more than save you money and time to train employees – we’ve assessed this.
Let’s think ahead, too. Small marketing teams usually rely on one leader for supervision – the CEO, VP, head of marketing, you name it. As your business ambitions expand, engaging team leads is reasonable. Then you, as a CEO, can focus on more complex tasks while maintaining a clear strategy and reporting system.
The dawn of start-up life is never easy, especially for the marketing department. You may even have to pitch in with emails, copy, or data research as a CEO. But if you choose your battles right, you can build a widely known brand with content people anticipate and services they choose over your competitors.
Aiming to build a marketing team that kickstarts your success?
Whales is here to back you up.
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