How To Build an All Star Marketing Team / Marketing Department

Well hi there and thanks for stopping by 🙂
If you’re reading this, then you are probably interested (to some extent) in building a marketing team/department in your business.
Building a marketing team is a general term. If we want to be more specific, it might be just the SEO or PPC team, might be Marcom, email marketing or social media teams…
Or it can be a general small marketing team for small or medium businesses.

The methodology is pretty much the same but the entire process varies according to the job specifications and the character types that will best fit into the teams that you’re building.

The marketing department is one of the most important departments in any organization, it’s responsible for bringing leads and potential customers to your doorstep.
From there – sales (if you have salesmen) are responsible for converting them into customers.
But marketing is also responsible for online direct sales meaning people purchase through the website without needing a salesman to convince them.
So it’s easy to see that marketing is essential to any business that sells something (any product or service).

And since it’s so important – it’s so critical to build it properly. I can’t emphasize enough the damage that an untrained or unsynchronized team can cause and therefore you might want to bookmark this post.

I’ve been building marketing departments in big, international companies for the past 10 years and I’m going to share a few key steps in building a top-notch marketing team or department from scratch hopefully, it will give you enough value to get it started.

Table of contents:

1. Understanding the needs
   1. What are the primary goals? (even if they are still general)
   2. Understanding key marketing needs – which key roles will you need?
   3. Understanding the department’s size – how many people do you actually need?
2. Building a plan
   1. Setting specific and measurable goals – Which numbers should the marketing team shoot for this year?
   2. Determining how many employees will the marketing department contain.
   3. Setting a budget – You have your goals right? how much are you willing to invest in reaching those goals?
   4. Setting goals per marketing channel.
   5. Setting a plan per each marketing channel.
   6. Splitting the plan into 4 quarters.
   7. Setting clear KPIs for each team member.
   8. Creating a training plan for each marketing role
3. Order and methodology
   1. Creating a shared marketing folder.
   2. Creating subfolders for: Plans, Methodologies, Reports, and Role specifications (Describing the work for each role – for training purposes)
   3. Creating a reporting process.
4. Opening a position and interviewing
   1. How to open a position.
   2. How to interview.
   3. How to choose the right candidate.
5. Onboarding, training, and managing
   1. Creating an onboarding process – Giving the employee motivation.
   2. Starting the training process for new employees.
   3. Determining if the training went well.
   4. Manage the team’s day-to-day work

Part 1. Understanding the needs.

Let’s start with the reason why companies start building a marketing team in the first place.
Any company has some kind of marketing to some extent. Might it be just a small PPC campaign, just a little SEO, or even good old fashion mouth to ear.
So let’s say work starts coming in and if the company’s product or service is good enough, it’ll sell and the company starts growing slowly.
Now in order to grow further, someone in the company understands it needs to expand the marketing in order to grow further.
That person might say to himself: “hmmm… the PPC is going well, perhaps it’s time to scale it or start SEO as well”.
That’s how the primary goals start showing.

1. Setting primary goals

You probably already know how much revenue your company makes. You can determine how much of the revenue was brought by the current marketing efforts.
You also have an idea about how much you want it to bring in order for your company to grow.

For example, you might have started a PPC campaign that brought $100K profit to your company last year.
This year you have a plan to hire some designers and developers to improve your product which will make it sell better.
So now you need to increase the company’s revenue in order to pay more salaries and also to earn more, make the company more profitable.

So, after some quick calculation, you realize you need another 60K/year. So $160K would be a good primary goal.
Note that I’m talking about profit. You must not forget about the expenses and calculate the profit properly.
So the formula is sales minus expenses. Simple right?
Wrong! – Calculating expenses is one of the hardest things and many companies are wrong in how they calculate profitability.
The cost calculation must take everything into account: Manpower, tools, services, hardware & software, manufacturing, traveling, etc.