If you’re a growing business looking to expand your audience and increase revenue, you’ll need a marketing professional to help achieve your goals.
Before beginning the recruitment process, you’ll need to be clear on your business objectives, and give some thought to how you’d expect your marketing professional to support these objectives. Once you’re clear on this, it’s helpful to set some realistic marketing objectives, so you can set clear expectations about you’ll want your new marketing professional to achieve. This will help you to recruit a marketer with the appropriate experience and skill-set to help reach your goals.
Once you’ve determined the marketing objectives, this will help you to consider the seniority of the role. The role could range from Director level right down to Assistant. You may be fine to bring on a Marketing Assistant to deal with the day-to-day tasks as instructed, but if you need someone to devise and implement marketing strategies and campaigns, you’ll need someone at manager or director level.
Marketing covers a wide range of expertise and skills. You can recruit someone who specialises in just one area, or one who can deliver a range of marketing activities.
Below, we look at some of the different marketing specialisms you may want to explore.
Strategy and planning
A marketing professional specialising in strategy & planning should have the potential to assign marketing goals for the company and devise strategies within budget to help achieve those goals.
This person would sit with, or integrate with, your senior management team, offering advice on the direction the business should take, while also coming up with marketing plans for implementation.
Market research
If your business has a strong need in this area you should look to recruit someone with extensive research skills. Research can include industry research, client research and competitor research.
So you will need to decide if you want someone to cover all, or some, of these. For example if it’s important that your business stays up-to-date with the latest trends and industry standards, you may feel you need someone strong on industry research, so your company is continuously staying ahead.
A professional who is experienced in customer and competitor research should be able to carry out the research both qualitatively and quantitatively and analyse the results. This can then underpin your marketing strategies and which marketing activities you should invest in to reach your target audience.
Digital marketing
This can cover a whole host of skills such as social media marketing, content marketing, SEO, PPC (paid online advertising), email marketing, web design & management.
Some people will be a specialist in just one of these functions, while some will have the ability to perform several, (although it would be unusual for one person to encapsulate the entire range, as it’s so varied), so it’s important to understand the different areas.
A specialist in email marketing will run and monitor the performance of campaigns. They should be proficient in the latest email marketing tools and produce top quality campaigns. They should also be fully compliant with GDPR legislation and be prepared to take responsibility for this within their work.
Specialists in SEO and PPC work on getting your business in front of people as they browse the web. These are extremely important for businesses today. Appearing as high as possible on Google is a key objective for most companies, so you need someone who understands this area and can advise on whether you need to allocate budget and/or work on your organic position through SEO.
Social media marketing
Having your brand across a number of social media platforms is a strong way to market your company. After all, research from Global Web Index found that social media accounts for roughly one in every three minutes that users spend on the internet.
A Social Media Marketer should create a social media strategy and plan, advising which channels to target, what type of content to create and share and how your branding should work across the channel. They should then implement the plan and creatively manage the channels consistently.
It’s also useful to monitor what’s being said about your brand across social media. The same applies with any questions and queries, as people usually take to social media to ask them.
A social media specialist can use this as an opportunity to communicate and support your brand, by dealing with any queries, comments or complaints. Being active and responsive on social media will reflect positively on your business.
Content marketing
No matter how niche or how small your company is, a great content marketing professional should always be able to understand your business and your audience, while also providing great content that can be shared by your audience.
Whether it’s a blog post, an infographic, meme or otherwise, a content marketing professional can always find new and innovative ways to educate and engage your audience with great content.
They can then assess the effectiveness of the content being created and shape your strategy around this.
Traditional media advertising
Advertising covers many different formats from traditional magazine adverts and radio, to TV and outdoor. A marketing professional who specialises in this area should be able to negotiate the best deals for you when buying media space to promote your brand, and work with creatives to design the adverts.
PR
This area of marketing is a softer approach to getting in front of your target audience, but one that can work extremely well if done right. Public relations is all about managing the perception of your brand and delivering messages through the media.
Therefore, if you are looking to gain exposure in key industry magazines or regional and national newspapers, you should take on board someone who has experience in PR.
They should be able to construct a PR plan, understand your target media and then be able to come up with compelling angles that excite journalists and make them want to write about your company.
Ready to hire a marketing professional?
It’s clear that marketing is key to growing a business, so recruiting a good professional with the right experience and providing them with clear objectives can pay huge dividends and really drive your business forward.
