Guide for Hiring New Members of Your Marketing Team

nextcmo27 Feb 2023
The Next CMO Blog

CMO Guide for Hiring New Members of Your Marketing Team

As a marketing leader, hiring the right team members can make a huge difference in success. Your role will shape the future of the company you work for through your campaign execution and curating content that engages your target audience and drives growth.

You must build a team with diverse skills and expertise to achieve the marketing goals you have set in place. However, success in this role can’t be fulfilled and achieved without the support of a talented and skilled marketing team. In this blog, we will discuss the essential skills and positions that every successful CMO should hire on their team.

The Essential Skills & Positions of an Operational Marketing Team

To develop your dream marketing team, it’s important to understand where you are as a marketing organization and your major needs. As a CMO, you may be looking to start from scratch and build your team from the ground up, whereas others may be one or two positions away from having a self-sufficient team. Below, we’ll dive into 5 essential positions in marketing and their qualified traits and skills needed to be on your team.

  1. Data analysts
  2. Social media specialists
  3. Content marketers
  4. Digital marketers
  5. Product marketers

1.Data Analysts

 

Data is the backbone of any successful marketing campaign, and having a data analyst on your team is critical. They will help you understand your target audience, identify opportunities, and measure the success of your marketing efforts. Data analysts can help you collect and analyze customer data, as well as performance data from your website, social media platforms, and other marketing channels.

Marketing Team Impact: Enable Data-Driven Decision Making

For each decision your team makes, there should be data supporting it. Hiring a data analyst will help you and your marketing team make better data-driven decisions. Data analysts and digital marketers are essential for collecting, analyzing, and using data to make informed decisions about your marketing efforts. With their help, you can measure the success of your campaigns, identify areas for improvement, and make decisions that will drive growth and engagement.

Important Skills:

  • Collect marketing data, and report findings
  • Analyze data to help make informed decisions
  • Identify trends, predicts, and areas of improvement

2.Social Media Specialists

 

Social media is an essential part of modern marketing, and having a social media specialist on your team is crucial. They should have a deep understanding of each platform and be able to help develop content that aligns with your overall marketing goals as well as engages and resonates with your target audience.

Marketing Team Impact: Supporting Strategic Marketing Goals

Having the right positions on your team helps you achieve your marketing goals more effectively. Suppose one of your goals for this year is to increase brand awareness through social media. In that case, you need to hire a social media specialist with the skills and expertise to develop and execute a successful social media strategy. 

As CMO, you should work closely with your social media specialist to develop a cadence and strategy to achieve your marketing goals. By hiring the right person for this position, you can ensure that your marketing efforts will be aligned with your strategic goals and that you have the support you need to achieve them.

Important Skills:

  • Build up social media presence
  • Improve top of the  funnel metrics through social media 
  • Engage with customers, prospects and stakeholders

3.Content Marketers

 

Like social media, content marketing is a powerful tool for engaging with your target audience and building your brand. Content marketers are responsible for creating, curating, and promoting valuable content that educates, informs, and inspires your audience. They should have excellent writing and editing skills, as well as a deep understanding of who your audience is.

Marketing Team Impact: Supporting Collaboration and Innovation

Having a diverse team with different skills and expertise can help you create a collaborative and innovative environment. When hiring a content marketer, you should look for someone innovative and willing to push the needle, daring to be different. This position can tend to be siloed, so it’s important that your entire team stays aligned and informed on moving parts and changes in creative direction.

When team members bring their unique perspectives and ideas to the table, it can lead to the creation of new and innovative marketing ideas which will help you stand out from your competitors. Collaboration amongst your overall team will also help you to tackle challenges from different perspectives and angles, which can lead to better solutions and outcomes.

Important Skills:

  • Create a content strategy
  • Help your brand stand out against competitors online
  • Reach your target audience with the right messaging

4.Digital Marketers

 

Digital marketing is a rapidly growing field that encompasses a wide range of activities, including search engine optimization (SEO), pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, email marketing, and much more. A digital marketer should have a deep understanding of the latest digital marketing trends and technologies, as well as the ability to develop and execute effective digital marketing campaigns.

Marketing Team Impact: Increase Efficiency and Productivity 

Hiring the right team member for the right positions will increase your marketing efforts’ efficiency and productivity.  When your digital marketing team can show a specialization in their respective roles, they can focus their efforts on tasks that align with their skills and expertise.

It’s believed that generating leads is the main job function of the digital marketing team. While this isn’t entirely true, it’s important for you to be able to trust your digital marketing team and their decision on where to allocate their spend. (This includes roles within demand-gen as well).

With the emergence of their proven skill set and your developed trust in their decision making, this will allow you to leverage their strengths, reduce the overall workload on individual team members, and increase the overall output of your team.

Important skills

  • Create a strategy that encompasses many different marketing channels
  • Improve the number (and quality) of online leads
  • Help allocate marketing budget by campaign & channel

5.Product Marketers

 

Hiring a product marketer for your marketing team is essential for several reasons. Product marketers are responsible for understanding the market and the needs of your target audience. They use this insight to develop and execute marketing that effectively positions and promotes your product or service. This will not only help increase sales and revenue, but also help build a strong brand and reputation in the marketplace.

Marketing Team Impact: Build Strong Relationships with Stakeholders

The right positions on your team can help you build strong relationships with stakeholders and partners. Project managers and product marketers can help coordinate and manage projects effectively, ensuring that they are completed on time and within budget. Product marketers are critical in not only helping your company stay competitive by staying up-to-date on market trends, but analyzing the competitors and identifying new opportunities.

Through collaboration and alignment with your product development team and a willingness to decipher tone and messaging with your comms team, your product marketer will slowly develop into the lifeblood of your organization. This will in turn help you build a strong relationship with your stakeholders which will build trust across your organization & lead to new opportunities and growth for your company.

Important skills

  • Research and understanding the market and the needs of your target audience
  • stay competitive by staying up-to-date on market trends
  • analyzing the competitors and identifying new opportunities

Closing Out: Hiring Marketers to Contribute to Your Team

By investing in the right skills and expertise, you can increase efficiency and productivity, support your strategic marketing goals, make data-driven decisions, foster collaboration and innovation, and build strong relationships with stakeholders across all facets of your organization. Don’t underestimate the importance of hiring the right members for your marketing team. It can make all the difference in your efforts.