How To Create The Ultimate In-House Marketing Team For Your Business

Right off the bat, what’s the benefit of creating an in-house marketing team over, say, outsourcing the work to an agency or hiring freelancers? 

Dealing with things in-house means you put together a team that understands your business better than an outsider will. You gather and hire talented individuals and train them to learn about your company ethos, workplace culture, etc. Outsourcing means you hire people with no connection to your business, and therefore no loyalty. They don’t care as much about the long-term results and are simply pocketing a paycheck and doing the bare minimum. 

In-house teams also help you:

• Enjoy faster communication between team members
• Exhibit more control over your marketing campaigns
• Maintain the utmost brand consistency

The main worry businesses have – particularly small businesses – is that in-house marketing teams cost a lot more money to create. You have to hire a series of individuals, pay them wages, and offer the necessary employment benefits. In a world where so many businesses fail due to budget constraints, it’s easy to see why companies opt for the “cheaper” idea of outsourced marketing. 

Having said that, if you think long-term, then building an in-house team can eventually work out to be more cost-effective. Once you’ve hired people, they’re a part of your team until they or you decide they should leave. They’ll work around the clock to devise marketing strategies for your business, while an outsourced agency/individual will only work on a project-based schedule. This means you have to pay again for their services to handle additional projects/tasks, which quickly adds up. 

Taking all of the above into account, how can you create the ultimate in-house marketing team to ensure your business puts together successful strategies? Don’t forget that successful marketing pays off and will make your team a fantastic investment. So, here’s some guidance on how to make the most out of things: 

Hire Talented Individuals With Proven Skills

You need people on your team to have the right skills for your marketing needs. This means that every candidate must present a portfolio that demonstrates their ability to actually do the job you’re hiring them to do. Experience isn’t always essential – there are some shockingly talented people out there who’ve maybe only just stepped into the world of work and deserve an opportunity. 

That being said, it’s good to have a mixture of experience with new talent to keep things on the rails. Ideally, the people you hire should present case studies or examples of work they’ve done in the past with positive results. Someone can claim to have worked in marketing for years, but if they’ve not got any genuine evidence to back up their talents, then they’re not worth hiring. 

Cover The Core Marketing Channels For Your Business

You want to avoid hiring a bunch of talented marketers who specialise in the same things. What good is it if you spend all of your budget on a team of people who are SEO experts, yet nobody really knows the ins and outs of social media marketing? 

More to the point, modern marketing revolves around analytics and research; you need individuals who can track data and make as much sense out of it as possible. This enables you to prioritise future investments in the right areas for marketing campaigns to thrive. Again, it highlights the need to have a real mixture of individuals in your marketing team to cover all of the core marketing channels for your business. This may include: 

• Data analysts
• SEO experts
• Social media managers
• Paid advertising specialists
• Content creators
• Copywriters & web designers

Could the same person do multiple jobs on that list? Yes, and there are crossovers here and there that make sense. For example, your copywriter could also be the main content creator, or you could have someone who’s capable of managing paid ads and looking after your social media. The important thing is that you cover all bases. 

Implement Marketing Resource Management Tools

When you put together a marketing team, you need everyone to be on the same page. Collaboration and communication are essential for ensuring everything goes smoothly and you avoid productivity disruptions. As a result, you should look into marketing resource management tools that let you bring all the different processes onto one system. 

MRM software stops you from using separate things to manage different parts of your marketing strategy and combines them into one platform for everyone. Instead of setting up spreadsheets to track your marketing budget and opening up Slack to communicate, everything happens on the same system that the entire team has access to. 

In turn, you can manage all of your campaigns with ease and keep your entire team on the same page. It’s extremely useful for in-house marketing teams, especially if you all work remotely. 

Establish A Strong Brand Identity

When you’ve got a team together and have the systems in place to encourage productive collaboration, you’re almost ready to start setting up marketing campaigns. The final thing to take care of is your brand identity. Every single member of your team should understand your identity because your marketing strategies and content must reflect this. It’s one of the biggest mistakes companies make when putting together an in-house team – and it’s also one of the main reasons that outsourcing alone doesn’t always work. 

You need everyone to understand your brand ethos, what you stand for, the tone of voice you’re aiming to use, and so on. When people learn this and buy into your brand identity, you get everyone on the same wavelength, and the results follow. You’ll see way better consistency i every element of your marketing strategy, which makes it easier for consumers to connect with your brand on a personal level. 

Full disclosure: outsourcing still has a slight role to play for small business marketing teams. Handle most of your work in-house to keep things consistent and retain as much control as possible. However, if you need to outsource small web design or content creation tasks to others, then it can be useful to do so. Regardless, keep the tips above in mind if you want to build the best and most effective marketing team available.