At this stage in my career, I’ve had the privilege of building several awesome marketing teams.
This is a challenge you eventually face as your marketing career progresses. You go from focusing on creating content and executing campaigns to trying to find other people suited to handle those responsibilities with your guidance.
Many of us face our first team building challenge in a “learn as you go” scenario — that’s because hiring your first marketing team isn’t something that’s easy to train for, or simulate.
Reviewing resumes, evaluating skill sets, budget allocation, and considering team culture fit are all tasks that you get better at after getting them right and wrong a few times — but how do you mitigate the latter?
A friend of mine in the marketing community sparked a Twitter discussion on this topic. Her question challenged marketers to pick the three key roles they’d hire if they were building a new marketing team from scratch.
Seeing the questions people asked and reading different takes from marketers made me realize what an important topic this is. It also inspired me to share what’s worked for me when I’ve built marketing teams.
Before I jump in and explain which roles I think are the right fit for a new marketing team, here are a few disclaimers:
That said, here are the three roles I’d hire if I were starting a new marketing team, as well as a bonus section sharing the functions I usually like to outsource:
We all know how hectic things are behind the scenes in a marketing department.
New priorities pop up daily, deadlines are tight, and you always seem to have 1–2 more campaigns in flight than you can actually handle.
That’s where having a seasoned marketing manager to be your team lead and partner in managing the department is key.
There are too many campaigns and projects for you to be in the weeds on all of them. You need someone who can run point on campaigns, handle collaboration with internal and external teams, and at times, help you divide and conquer.
A marketing manager is the first role I’d fill if I were starting a new team. I’d look for someone who is “dangerous” in several functions and an expert in at least 1–2.
This is often referred to as a “t-shaped marketer.” It means these individuals are savvy enough to work alongside and manage people with different depths of knowledge, while also being a subject matter expert in a few areas they can fully own.
Here are the other key traits I look for when I hire a marketing manager:
A marketing manager should be a generalist equipped to support on a multitude of campaigns and projects. They should be able to create content and oversee campaigns across a variety of marketing channels, including events, websites, email marketing, and social media.
They can effectively manage junior team members and add structure to the department in the form of project management skills, accountability, and being deadline oriented.
Their seniority allows them to seamlessly work with external partners and vendors, such as marketing agencies or the company’s commercial partners. They can own communication, project management, and ensure external collaborations are productive.
A good marketing manager can also serve as the marketing department’s key point of contact with other internal teams, such as the sales and product departments.
Whether it’s an internal stakeholder or external counterpart, they know how to collaborate, communicate and operate with the department’s best interests in mind.
Marketing departments pump out a lot of content across channels. Having a marketing manager who can work on copy for things like email newsletters, social media posts, press releases and video scripts is a huge value-add within a team. This helps lead to consistent messaging and tone across everything the department produces.
With your marketing manager in place, the next stop I’d make with the marketing hiring train is a graphic designer or art director.
Everything a marketing department publishes has a visual component. For example:
You need someone to help you navigate these channels and create visuals conveying the team’s strategy and messaging.
The stage your company is in will help to inform the skillset and experience you need in a designer.
With these considerations in mind, here are the qualities I look for when I’m hiring for a graphic design role:
In a small marketing team, a designer needs to be prolific in terms of the volume of content they produce. You don’t have the affordance of an art director who can focus purely on creative strategy.
That is why I like to look for designers who can bridge both creative direction and execution and have a portfolio of different projects, including website designs, brand guide creation, and samples of plenty of other collateral.
Point number one above calls for a specific mentality. Given our three-person marketing team challenge, a senior art director who wants to purely drive creative strategy isn’t a fit for this team, and that’s ok.
You need someone who is at the right stage of their career for this opportunity and who is willing to do a high volume of production work in their day-to-day role.
For example, someone who is 15 years into their career as a senior graphic designer or art director might not be interested in a startup marketing team role where a significant portion of their job is working within the existing brand guidelines to produce sales decks and graphics.
You also can’t afford to have someone who is too junior. On this fictitious three-person team you are building, this individual is your sole design talent. They need to be able to produce quality content in high volumes and help you navigate creative challenges with their own informed point of view.
Beyond pure creativity, this role requires a deep understanding of design tools, software, and best practices. Their toolkit — be it the Adobe Creative Suite, Figma, Canva, or something else — is wielded with finesse, producing outputs that are both aesthetic and functional.
You have the option to try and hire someone who works with the software your company has already adopted, or to use this new hire as an opportunity to adopt new design software across the department based on their preferences.
For example, one time I hired a designer who predominately used Figma within a department that was currently using Adobe products — this was an opportunity to make a department-wide shift that I wanted to make and to hire someone to help lead it.
Whether it’s revamping the company website, designing sales collateral, or creating eye-catching social media graphics, this person needs the ability to create content that properly represents the brand across channels.
The role isn’t siloed. Graphic designers often work closely with content creators, marketers. and product teams. They work with these different constituents to transform their ideas into visual narratives.
Their ability to understand and interpret needs from various stakeholders and to act on them is invaluable.
If you come across a talented designer who prefers to take direction from one point of contact, you can make this work by adjusting the way you communicate and manage this individual to better suit their working style.
As I mentioned earlier, marketing teams put out a high volume of content.
You need someone who can create content across channels, understand social media and marketing platforms as they evolve, and keep up with content trends.
That’s why with my third and final pick I’d hire a content marketing specialist who has writing talent and digital marketing knowledge as key parts of their skillset.
Here’s what I typically look for in a content marketing specialist:
In a small marketing team, I prefer to hire someone with content creation expertise across a minimum of 2–3 channels vs. hiring channel-specific specialists.
For example, I’d look for someone who can create for visual platforms like TikTok and Instagram as well as predominately text-based platforms like email marketing and blogs.
Use your target audience to help inform this hire. If your target audience uses TikTok as their primary social media platform, then hire someone with TikTok content creation in their skillset. The same goes for B2B channels like LinkedIn—you want someone who is comfortable creating and engaging on the channel your target audience uses most.
You will see a theme here with writing skills.
That’s because the high volume of written content tasks that come across a marketing department’s proverbial desk is significant. I like to stack my teams with writers to handle it.
I’d look for a content marketing specialist who can bounce between formal and informal tones and is comfortable writing long form and short form content for different channels.
That way you’re covered whether you need to draft short, snappy social media captions, or publish long form pieces in specific formats, like a white paper or press release.
A good content marketing specialist comes with some technical chops, such as proficiency in marketing automation platforms like HubSpot and analytics skills to measure and report on the success of their content.
They certainly don’t need to be experts, and I wouldn’t consider this to be a deal breaker. Writing skills are more critical for this role and should be prioritized accordingly.
The aforementioned technical skills can be taught through online courses or shadowing within your team. Writing skills on the other hand take longer to develop.
However, if the candidate doesn’t have deep platform knowledge or any experience with reporting, I would make sure you are confident they are someone who can learn those technical skills.
You won’t be asking this individual to be the department’s primary design resource, but you will be asking them to work on projects that have a visual component. This means working with a designer to develop those visuals.
Bonus points if you can find someone with basic design skills who can make simple graphics for platforms like social media—that way you can keep your designer focused on bigger design projects.
Examples of graphic elements a content marketing specialist needs to either oversee the production of, or create themselves:
The core three-person team I outlined above is designed to handle a wide variety of marketing projects that you’ll encounter on a regular basis ranging from event production to email marketing campaigns and social media content.
However, there will always be outlier projects that require a specific skill set no one on your core team possess. That’s where augmenting your team with contractors and vendors comes into play.
The idea is to identify resources you can use for marketing tasks that come up from time to time, yet aren’t a daily requirement. These tasks can be handled by part-time contractors or agencies that you engage as needed and make available for your core team to work with.
In this section, I’m going to talk about the specialized tasks and roles I’ve found success outsourcing to augment my in-house marketing teams.
Establishing and maintaining media relations demands a specific skill set, extensive network, and a constant pulse on the media landscape.
In a larger organization this can certainly be a full-time hire, and I know some great in-house PR teams.
However, this is less common in a smaller marketing department — especially the three-person team scenario we focused on in this article.
Alternatively, media relations are resourced in two primary ways by small marketing teams:
The first option is straightforward, and will be something you can help your team to navigate.
In terms of hiring an established PR agency or consultant, the key benefit is you get immediate access to their established media relationships without the overhead of building this function from scratch.
Many agencies also offer à la carte services and project-based billing in addition to more permanent retainer engagements.
I have to give a shameless plug to two of the best PR agencies I’ve worked with in InkHouse and Chap Public Relations—I get nothing for promoting these, and genuinely think they are fantastic partners for any marketing professional in need of PR services.
Depending on how much paid advertising you plan on doing and the skill sets of your existing team, you might be able to get away with having someone in-house manage your paid social media ads and SEM campaigns.
If you’re working with a larger budget and paid channels are a significant part of your lead generation strategy, outsourcing this to an expert is your best move.
Ad formats, platform features, targeting tools, algorithms and best practices constantly evolve on platforms like Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, YouTube and Google. Having a part-time contractor or agency who keeps tabs on these developments every day and spends tons of ad dollars will ensure your budget is spent most effectively.
Scalability is also a benefit of having a contract-based engagement for paid advertising. You can scale up your efforts for specific campaigns or peak seasons and dial things back in between.
In an environment where many social platforms are becoming video-first, video production is a key function within a marketing department.
This might be something you can get away with having your marketing manager or content marketing specialist handle depending on their skill set and comfort level with video as a medium.
This is especially true if organic-feeling, 1st person TikTok-style content is all you need in terms of video content creation. These assets can be created by someone holding their phone, recording and leveraging on-platform video creation tools like audio libraries and templates.
If more professional video filming and editing is required and no one on your team has this skill set, keeping a part-time filmmaker or editor on contract is a good fit. That way you can spin up video production resources as projects that require video arise.
This should be enough for most small marketing teams. If you find video production is a huge component of your weekly marketing campaigns, at that point you could consider a more permanent arrangement with a video production house or making a full-time hire.
There are certainly marketers with website development skills. However, this isn’t the norm in my experience.
That means you have two options for handling your website work:
If option 1 suits your needs, then great. You’re all set.
If you need a custom website, or intend to publish new landing pages regularly, then establishing a relationship with a freelance web developer or web development agency is your best move.
That way you have someone on hand that you can engage for big website projects as they come up.
I would ask them to structure your site in a way that enables marketers with no web development experience to easily create and publish new content. Then you will only need to spend budget on web development for new page structures or significant website revamps.
That’s another reason I like no-code website builders—once the foundation is in place, it’s easy for anyone to learn the content management system (CMS) and publish new content using the existing content blocks your developer built.
Building a marketing team is a task I consider to be equal parts challenging and rewarding. As a marketing team lead, it is the most significant avenue you have for effecting marketing success at your organization. That is because hiring a high quality team will amplify all of your efforts.
I hope my approach to the “build a three person marketing team” challenge offers insights you can use on your own team building journey.
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Hi, I'm Justin and I write Brand Credential.
I started Brand Credential as a resource to help share expertise from my 10-year brand building journey.
I currently serve as the VP of Marketing for a tech company where I oversee all go-to-market functions. Throughout my career I've helped companies scale revenue to millions of dollars, helped executives build personal brands, and created hundreds of pieces of content since starting to write online in 2012.
As always, thank you so much for reading. If you’d like more personal branding and marketing tips, here are more ways I can help in the meantime:
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