How to Build a Modern, Agile Inbound Marketing Team

December 21, 2022

Introduction

This article will look at how small to medium-sized businesses can develop their own in-house marketing teams. While many firms may balk at the idea of hiring full time employees (at least three) for marketing, the vast majority who make this investment realize it pays for itself many times over. It’s well established now that the most effective marketing is inbound: engaging with specific customers and drawing them to your business by offering the information and services that they are looking for, rather than trying to reach everyone by interrupting them with advertising. Inbound marketing is where in-house teams excel.

The fact is, we all live in a highly distracting world and we’ve all become skeptical of interruptive advertising. Most of us now only do business with those whom we trust. This means you have to establish your company’s credibility and gain the trust of the people you want to be your customers. And to get that message out, you need to do more than just make noise.

Inbound marketing relies on creating useful, targeted information for specific groups of customers, and that requires strategy, research, and customized content creation. Technologies are at every step, and success depends on a combination of analytical thinking and creativity. This means specializations and specialists, and while the temptation will be to outsource these roles, the fact is, outsiders will never be able to really understand your company as deeply as they need to to create truly effective strategy. You need people in-house who know your culture and your customers.

The good news is it’s never been easier for small businesses to achieve real results with inbound marketing. The first step, as we will see, is hiring a marketing leader. They will research your competitive environment and develop short- and long-term strategies for success. Once this person is up to speed, you’ll know who you need to reach and how. They’ll help you build your small foundational marketing team who will launch campaigns that engage with your target audience and draw them into your sales funnel.

Building your own marketing team means reducing your reliance on freelancers and agencies and investing in full time internal hires. It also means ending your reliance on luck, because at the core of any successful marketing campaign is researched and customized strategy. When done right, your marketing team will become a profit center, paying for itself and driving the growth of your business. This article will show you how to do it right.

Early days: “The pre-marketing team”

Most companies don’t start out with large in-house marketing teams already established. Often, existing leadership takes on the role until the demands exceed their capabilities. When that point is reached, they typically hire consultants or create a dedicated marketing role with the expectation that the person will handle everything. This can be considered the “pre-marketing team” stage, and while most companies go through it, the successful ones grow out of it. Getting stuck in this stage means wasting a lot of time and money.

Below are the most common types of roles that result in these early days, when non-dedicated staff handle marketing alongside their other duties, or a single person is tasked with all things marketing. While these may seem like the best or only solutions at the time, they are, in fact, various ways of neglecting your marketing, and growing less than you could. You can think of this as the period before a marketing team is turned into a profit center.

The Founder-Marketer

The CEO or founder has a good eye for marketing, so they take on marketing tasks in addition to their core responsibilities. This can actually be a huge advantage, given the importance of marketing for the company's growth. The challenge comes when marketing tasks start to overwhelm other responsibilities.

The Accidental Marketer

In some cases, marketing responsibilities fall on someone in the company who has an interest in marketing, or perhaps is just too polite to turn down the new tasks they’ve been assigned. And while marketing assignments may get completed, this individual is unlikely to have the experience or capacity to develop an effective marketing strategy, so the results are often limited.

The Marketing Admin

More challenging still is the marketing admin, who may also be the receptionist or office administrator tasked with handling a contracted marketing agency. As well intentioned as a marketing admin may be, they likely lack the leadership skills to guide agencies and freelancers or keep them accountable.

The Marketing Consultant

Consultants are sometimes brought in to provide marketing guidance. They may offer a lot of useful ideas and recommendations. However, without a clearly defined ownership role to implement and oversee the recommendations, the engagement may be short lived and deliver only superficial improvements rather than a reproducible system.

The All-in-One Marketer

This will be the first dedicated internal marketing hire, and they are typically tasked with all things marketing. Expectations are often unrealistic, and they could be expected to handle everything from managing social media to blogs to ads to SEO. They’re usually inexperienced, because experienced marketers learn to avoid this type of overstretched position.

If you’ve had people in any of these roles and got results that were less than what you were hoping for, you’re not alone. It’s a phase that many companies go through. At some point, successful companies realize that keeping marketing on the sidelines or leaving results to chance won’t achieve positive outcomes. At this point, it’s time to create your own marketing team.

Let’s find out how.

The 5 Stages of Building an In-House Marketing Team

Stage 1: Hire a marketing leader

Company size

< $1M annual revenue

Overview

Once your marketing leader has a good understanding of your business, they’ll be able to hire the first two key members of your team: your analytical/technical marketer and your creative/content producer. You should think of these three people as your “minimum viable marketing team”, capable of creating initial campaigns and gathering essential data for honing your messaging strategy. In other words, getting your in-house marketing off the ground. If you already have someone in a marketing role, they will likely fit nicely into one of these positions. They’ll also appreciate having an experienced leader to guide and coach them.

Job Description

Titles: Marketing Coordinator, Marketing Technician Attributes: Analytical and technical; skilled at research, project management, campaign monitoring, vendor management, and SEO performance; flexible and willing to learn; able to collaborate with internal and external stakeholders.
Titles: Content Manager, Marcom Manager, Managing Editor Attributes: Creative and open-minded; skilled writer and editor; skilled at interviewing colleagues and customers to gather insights, and then putting everything together into a blog post, video script, email, web copy, etc.; able to collaborate with internal and external stakeholders.

Objectives

Once these key positions are filled, your marketing leader will work with them and your marketing team will be in action. Their first activity will be to launch short-term marketing campaigns so they can begin gathering data. They will likely start with some low-hanging fruit and achieve some quick wins. More importantly, they’ll use the data gathered from these results to begin structuring well-organized quarterly campaigns that can be properly tracked and optimized for longer-term, reliable ROI.

Points to Note

Your marketing leader will leverage this three-person foundational team for as long as possible, making sure not to add roles until it’s absolutely necessary. In the following stage, we’ll see the expansion of your marketing team with specialized roles. For now, though, you’ll be using vendors and agencies to fill the gaps for any specializations that don’t yet exist internally. This could include people with specific areas of expertise working on a short-term or project basis.
You may be tempted to save money by hiring just one new person instead of two. This role would then be a hybrid of the marketing coordinator and content manager positions described above. This is a compromise you should avoid if at all possible. Under-resourcing the foundation of a marketing team often ends up wasting money rather than saving it. This is due to two main reasons.

First, it’s difficult (if not impossible) to find a quality content creator who is also organized and analytical. This person would need to be skilled at both manipulating language and crafting messaging, and reading dashboard analytics and researching the latest SEO trends. Think right brain vs. left brain. And if this unicorn is found, and they’re successful, their workload will quickly become unsustainable as their responsibilities grow. This means hiring the second position anyway, and starting the team-building dynamics from scratch.

Second, speaking of interpersonal dynamics, having two positions under the marketing leader is advantageous for team chemistry and competition. These two colleagues will start working together under the guidance and direction of your marketing leader, and they’ll inspire each other with ideas and push each other to grow. With a single leader and a single all-in-one subordinate, the dynamics are far trickier. It’s also difficult to gauge the relative success of either person.

With all that said, if hiring both positions at once is not financially feasible, the marketing coordinator role can be filled first and the content manager hired later. It will work like this: The marketing coordinator establishes the internal marketing processes, an area where most firms struggle. This includes setting up the CRM, lead tagging, working with the web support company, setting up webinar software, etc. These are things that an outsider cannot do. For the content-creation side, they can begin tasking freelancers to write and design. But as this inbound process begins to prove itself, your marketing leader will create a job posting for a content manager, and that will become a full-time position on its own.

Stage 2: Build the marketing foundation

Overview

Once your marketing leader has a good understanding of your business, they’ll be able to hire the first operational member of your team: your analytical/technical marketer. If you already have someone in a marketing role, they will likely fit nicely into this position. They’ll also appreciate having an experienced marketing leader to guide and coach them.

Job Description

Titles: Titles: Marketing Coordinator, Marketing Technician
Attributes: Analytical and technical; skilled at research, project management, campaign monitoring, vendor management, and SEO performance; flexible and willing to learn; able to collaborate with internal and external stakeholders

Objectives

Once this position is filled, the first activity will be to build and launch a quarterly marketing campaign to begin gathering data. The team will likely start with some low-hanging fruit and achieve some quick wins. More importantly, they’ll use the data gathered from these results to optimize future quarterly campaigns for the highest ROI.

Stage Duration

3-12 months

Points to Note

Your marketing leader will help the marketing coordinator to establish the internal marketing processes, an area where most firms struggle. This includes setting up the CRM, lead tagging, email software, webinar software, etc. These are things an outsider cannot do.
For content creation, your marketing coordinator will task freelancers with writing and design. However, as this inbound process begins to prove itself, it will be important to begin creating content in-house, which is the focus of the next stage.

Stage 3: Grow and specialize the team

Company size

$3M+

Stage Description

As your campaigns roll out, the results will be studied and fed back into a cycle of optimization by your marketing team. Campaigns that deliver results will need to be scaled. This means an increased volume and frequency of content creation, more events, and likely more marketing channels to manage. To accomplish these new growth objectives, your marketing coordinator and content manager can transition from solo producers to hybrid producer-managers overseen by your marketing leader. This means hiring functional specialists like copywriters, SEO experts, videographers, or social media experts. Not all of these need to be hired at once; your team should grow organically to maintain profitability.

Job Description

Title: CRM Specialist
Attributes: Data management, reporting, lead tagging, email campaign management. They should free up the time of the marketing coordinator so the latter can focus more on revenue-generating tasks.
Title: SEO Specialist
Attributes: SEO is so important that it can be worth hiring a full-time expert. They will continuously optimize your existing online content and propose new content based on trends in what people are searching for. They can also conduct outreach to other businesses in order to obtain valuable backlinks.
Title: Video Specialist, Videographer
Attributes: This role has gone from a “nice to have” to an essential. They engage your customers by creating videos of your office, the team, explainer videos, help center videos, case studies, etc.
Title: Copywriter, Editor
Attributes: With the content manager now overseeing all of the content production, this writer will ensure that content is still written at the required frequency.

Points to Note

At this stage, the two foundational specialists become team leaders: the marketing coordinator becomes the marketing operations lead and the content manager becomes the content lead. They no longer have to split their time across a wide range of tasks. They still report to your marketing leader, but they are now able to delegate and act as an additional layer of oversight to make sure everything is performing at an optimal level.
This is the stage where the marketing flywheel begins to turn. You have a relatively small team of just five to seven people, but there’s enough specialization that everyone knows their responsibilities and can really hone their craft. Some companies may remain at this stage, and that’s completely fine.

Stage 4: Become self-sufficient

Company size

$8M+ annual revenue

Stage Description

While many companies may stop at Stage 3, success begets success. If your team is excelling and your company is growing beyond expectations, the natural next step is to bring all marketing in house. Up to this point, some gaps were still being filled by agencies or freelancers, both of which have their limitations. With a fully in-house marketing team, you can scale your marketing further, increase quality/brand consistency, and reduce total expenses. The following roles are increasingly specialized.

Job Description(s)

Title: Advertising Specialist
Attributes: Skilled in creating ads and campaigns that convert; expertise with platforms like Google, Facebook, and LinkedIn
Title: Web Developer
Attributes: With new content being produced regularly and your website always changing, it’s time to bring in a web developer so you no longer have to be dependent on vendors or freelancers.
Title: Graphic Designer
Attributes: Designing web pages, eBooks, infographics, display ads, presentation slides, business cards, etc.
Title: Junior Copywriter
Attributes: A new writer joins the content team. They are mentored by the existing senior writer, and their work is still overseen by the content manager.

Points to Note

As your marketing team scales with your growth, it becomes more agile and less expensive relative to the revenue generated. The expansion of each functional team in house means more accountability — you can expect and demand these people own their outcomes. Externally, your company enjoys more consistent branding and, internally, better connected systems.

Stage 5: Achieve inner peace

Stage Description

This stage is the ultimate goal of building a marketing team: they’re operating efficiently and independently, and you’re receiving high-level reports and making executive decisions when required. Stress levels are low because you have confidence that your marketing is working well. The market still changes and you still have competition, but you have the right people in the right positions to keep you competitive and successful. In the end, you have more time to focus on the things you care about

This final stage is essentially Stage 4 becoming entrenched in your company culture and operating procedures. Because you have agility baked into the team structure, it can adapt as needed, filling or removing positions over time based on demand. Financially, in Stage 5, the marketing team is paying for itself many times over.

Some companies may achieve this zen stage sooner. Well into Stage 3, you should have a functioning marketing team that can operate without much oversight or direction. If your content creation and channel management needs are low, your team may already have negligible reliance on external vendors and freelancers. And a healthy Stage 3 marketing team will grow only as needed, and each new role will pay for itself.