Building an Effective In-House Marketing Team
Building a strong in-house marketing team involves a lot of time and energy due to which a lot of companies resort to hiring marketing agencies to do the work for them. While these agencies are fully equipped with the necessary skills, nothing beats having a quality in-house marketing team.
There are plenty of tough decisions to be made when designating an in-house marketing team. These decisions will impact how smoothly how your company runs and how effectively your marketing team will be able to make a positive impact on the business. To get the best out of an in-house marketing crew, here are some tips to consider:
- Take into account the workload
The advantage of having an in-house marketing team is their commitment and deep knowledge of the business. You can build a team that is reliable and that you trust. However, be realistic about what work needs to be done and what capacity you have.
If you’re using outside agencies alongside an in-house marketing team, consider what the agency can do to make the job easier for your in-house team. Find out where the gaps are and fill them—this is how to make your team thrive. Often businesses build an in-house marketing team and get rid of all their marketing agencies without consideration for the workload. This will not only hurt the quality of your marketing but also your team’s morale.
- Get the right people on board
Obviously, you want people on your in-house marketing team to be skilled and proficient in marketing, as well as possessing all the other characteristics that make a good employee—good communication skills, initiative, good judgment, easy to work with and so forth. Besides the obvious, there are some other traits you should look out for.
Your employees should be revenue-driven. They should be able to drive revenue growths in various markets. Your marketing team should consist of people with different specialities—such as SEO marketing or social media.
- Make training a priority
Well-rounded and continuous training is a MUST especially when it comes to building a new team from scratch. It’s not something that should be done over a few days. Properly training one person takes several months. Putting time and money inadequate training will go a long way for training.
In addition to the obvious marketing aspects, training should involve all aspects of the business, this includes giving them a full rundown of the company and the industry, as well as what you expect from them and their team.
- Focus on specialization
An effective marketing team has different people who are experts in certain aspects of the marketing chain. Create small groups that handle a particular aspect of marketing. So while one group might take care of the social media side, another group will handle website content and SEO, and another group will focus on offline marketing. If you have a smaller team, then you can assign a particular specialism to one person. This negates the problem of too many cooks in the kitchen and also provides your team people who are experts on different topics.
