Building an in-house inbound marketing team takes work. There’s a variety of different skills that you need to be sure to bring on if you don’t want to be left with a gaping hole in your marketing department.
However, even if you do bring on all the necessary skills there are other factors at play that can be easy to overlook. Here’s a list of 4 mistakes that are easy to make when building a marketing team.
1. Thinking you need a “traditional” marketing department
Marketing used to be the team that created the brochures and flyers. It was the team that managed lead generating events, dropped those unqualified leads on sales, and walked away. However, that’s not a marketing team’s role anymore.
Marketing’s role in the old way of doing business was to produce and manage a company-focused message. Through informational pamphlets, flyers, and even through content on the website, your marketing department’s job was to talk about your company.
In today’s market, with buyers constantly conducting more and more research before a purchase, your marketing team needs to work to provide information. It’s about producing solution-oriented content that helps catch the attention of potential buyers, which you can then nurture and sell to.
2. Letting sales do the selling
Just as marketing’s role has changed, your sales team also finds themselves in a different position. Because of all the research going on with buyers, your marketing team now factors in to the equation much earlier than before. This means that your marketing team is putting out blog posts, videos, ebooks, etc. to catch the attention of those potential buyers doing their research, then nurturing them to find out whether or not they’re interested or would be a good fit for your product/service.
That means that any leads that make it to your sales team have shown interest by engaging in your content, already know about your product/service, and they have a problem/pain that can be solved by that product/service. If your marketing and sales departments are working together well (they’ve agreed on what makes a lead “sales qualified,” they both helped create your buyer personas, etc.), those sales qualified leads are the exact people your sales department needs to be talking to, not wasting their time on those leads who are never going to buy.
3. Hiring channel specialists
Yes, they are specialists for a reason. There’s a good chance that the people only doing PPC or email marketing, know more about it than any “regular” marketers on your team. Their expertise would be a great asset to bring in should you find one channel struggling more than the others do.
However, you don’t need an email marketing manager or a paid advertising manager for day to day operations. You need a content person, who will write up content for your various channels, a demand generation person who builds a plan to get in front of your potential buyers, and an operations person who can connect and manage all the pieces in the software. Agility is key in the age of digital marketing
4. Forgetting about agility
Marketing used to have time on their side. They would be given weeks to create an advertising campaign around the latest product/service the company was offering, but now, there are constantly moving pieces within your sphere. Marketing agility should be a top concern when looking for new team members.
Your team should be able to:
- Shift priorities to hit metrics
- Recognize and abandon what’s not working
- Highlight and strengthen what is working
- Preserve your brand and messaging through various different platforms
- Etc.
Are your team members willing to change? Digital marketing is constantly changing, what works today may not work next month, so it’s important that you build an open-minded, focused, and flexible marketing team.
