How to Build a Great Marketing Team for Your Business
Challenges Facing Marketers and Small Businesses
These days, marketers everywhere face significant challenges in terms of reaching out to customers across multiple channels, being alert and agile to newer trends in a media driven 24/7 world where Twitter has more power than any other marketing approach.
Thus, it is very important for businesses on knowing how to build marketing team for success in the marketplace.
More so, for small businesses which sometimes get drowned in the barrage marketing of bigger businesses and inadequate response due to lesser financial muscle and fewer resources.
So, read on if you are a small business owner looking for information on how to build marketing team for your venture.
Know where you are, Where you want to go, and How to Get There
The first point to note when you are preparing on how to build marketing team is to understand where you stand presently, your ideal and realistic outcomes from the marketing team, and a clear roadmap on how to get there.
Indeed, as the old Chinese saying goes, “If you don’t know where you are going, you would end up in the same place where you started”.
Hence, perform a SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats) analysis of your current capabilities and identify weaknesses, recognize threats, and be alert to opportunities.
Next, once you have done the skills and capabilities matrix of your team, identify the gaps that arise from such an analysis and take steps to address those gaps.
For instance, your current marketing strategies might be eminently suited for physical world marketing, but, might be woefully short for virtual world marketing such as online, mobile, and social media.
In addition, your marketing team might be made up of prima donnas who cannot collaborate with others. Therefore, identify the blockers within your marketing team and read the riot act to them to shape up or ship out.
Remember that small businesses need cohesive marketing teams that are on the same page with each other and with you, as the owner.
Use the SMART Framework for Goal Setting
After the gap analysis, it is time for you to articulate the goals for the marketing team. A SMART Framework (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Time bound) set of criterion would do the trick as you begin to define a roadmap on how to build marketing team for your small business.
Include specific KPIs or Key Performance Indicators for your team by listing the measurable outcomes such as eyeball counts, page views, click on data, and conversion data as the benchmarks for your marketing team.
Hiring and Training your Marketing Team
A key constraint that small business owners face in how to build marketing team for their venture is the lack of resources in so far as hiring talent and staffing the team are concerned.
So, prepare a budget based on your capabilities and deploy the same to recruit marketing personnel with a clear vision of what you want from them. This should be consonant with your goals and address the gaps as well.
After hiring comes training and deployment and this is where, you as a small business owner have to be clear yourself to articulate a vision and set forth a mission for your marketing team.
You can dangle carrots such as performance linked pay and bonuses with additional benefits such as perks for the top performers.
On the other hand, you need to be careful when you raise the prospect of the sticks that you can wield if they do not perform according to expectations.
It is good idea when you start your endeavor on how to build marketing team to set expectations early on and to lay down the penalties for noncompliance.
As your journey towards marketing excellence continues, be mindful that you need time bound results without pushing your marketing team towards unrealistic outcomes. Having said that, you need to remember that Rome was not built in a day, and hence, you must achieve the fine balance between ambition and capabilities.
The SWOT and the SMART models mentioned earlier can come in handy when you sit down with your marketing team for goal setting and performance evaluation.
Feedback, Feed In, and the Next Iteration
More importantly, keep obtaining feedback from as many sources as possible as far as the performance of your marketing team is concerned and list down the areas for improvement and areas where you are doing well.
Indeed, you must be generous with rewards when your marketing team is doing well and parsimonious when they underperform. Close the loop by conveying the feedback to your marketing team and announce the goals for the next iteration that can be repeated with the same steps or with modifications depending on the specific situation.
The Buck and the Bucks Stop with You
As a small business owner who is interested in how to build marketing team, the buck stops with you in the same manner in which the bucks stop with you as well. So, be prepared to take responsibility for the outcomes in an honest and transparent manner without getting into personality clashes or ego fights.
Conclusion
Lastly, it does not matter how great you think your marketing team is without results to show.
In other words, performance is all that matters in the cutthroat world of marketing and hence, it is better to review performance every quarter or a time period that you think would suit your business. To conclude, with the ever changing world of marketing, building a great marketing team is the first step towards making your dreams about the small business come true.
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