Web Canopy Studio Blog

What is the ideal team for a startup marketing strategy?

Written by John Aikin | Jul 26, 2019 2:40:00 PM

 

Different Sizes for Different Industries

This is a cool shift and it's kind of another thought experiment almost, and it's for a startup. What's the ideal team that you need on your marketing team to grow your business? What does that look like? Is it five people? Is it two people? Is it one person? Is it just hire an agency? Of course, all of these are an okay answer, but let's narrow it down. Let's think of our own, what would we do?

It's almost an impossible question to answer in the sense that it depends on your budget, your industry, and your company.

However, rather than thinking about number of people on your team, let's focus on thinking about the job functions in that team.

The two Ideal Marketing Positions

If we're talking just a marketing team, you've got to have someone who's capable in digital marketing, marketing ideas, marketing channels, marketing campaigns, and your marketing plan as a whole.

I think you need someone who has a proficient understanding and a balance of being and seeing a big picture strategy with the finer details, as well as having a content strategist for successful marketing.

You have to have someone who can do keyword research, competitive research, search engines, case studies, someone who can take all these abstract concepts that you're coming up with. You want to get your message out, but how you do it? You can put that all into a cohesive campaign with blog posts, pillar pages, social media channels, website messaging, email marketing, etc.

It's not an easy task and it has to be done by someone with experience and someone who's got a vision for where you're going. So you need a content strategist and you also need to have someone who's actually going to go write all that content to reach your target audience.

For a lot of smaller teams, it's probably more efficient to use the same person. We have a lot of tricks for getting content without taking up too much of your time. We're doing it right now. Are we going to transcribe this and turn it into a blog post? Yeah.

Having someone who can write content and spend time in the weeds, like writing blog posts, social media and writing emails. It's not the hardest thing necessarily, especially when they have a good content strategy, but it takes time. It's a very time consuming job.

If you're building a marketing team from scratch, that's the kind of person that you could probably go out and find a college graduate who has a good writing background and who wants to learn.

I don't think you need to find somebody with a ton of experience. It's a very teachable role, especially with the right management in the right system.

If you're a startup snagging an intern that's still in school, there's a wealth of talent out there with kids that already know exactly what they're doing. Our interns are amazing. It's easier for us to say that as an answer because we have some really good interns and they are unbelievable.

They're doing stuff without being asked, they're taking on projects they don't know how to do, and they're just like "oh, I'll figure it out." It's been a huge difference maker. There's a lot of talent out there. Kids want to learn. Kids want to be given the opportunity.

You can get the job done with two people and then scale it out. It's hard to do it with one person. There's people that have to do it, it's just inevitable. But you need a vision or a marketing coordinator who knows where you need to go and what you need to do to hit your target market.

A decision maker. Then you know how to lay out the plan. If you are trying to run your startups marketing solo, find a mentor. Find somebody who can run the big picture and can tell you actually how and what to do.


For more, Check out our podcast "Under the Canopy: More than a marketing podcast"

www.webcanopystudio.com/podcast