In-house marketing agencies are now considered a necessity for many businesses. In fact, in 2018, 78% of the Association of National Advertisers’ members were part of an in-house marketing team. These in-house marketing teams work on sensitive projects, address the needs of other internal departments, and develop guidelines that establish a company’s brand identity. Building a marketing team, in-house or otherwise, is no small task.
If you’re looking for ways to further develop your own staff and build marketing team success, follow the suggested tools and tips below to see real improvement.
How to build a marketing team supported by online tools
Whether you have staff already or plan on building a marketing team from scratch, here are some steps and tools you’ll need to get started.
Conduct a thorough analysis of your current team with project dashboards.
With any marketing department audit, your goal should be to discover both strengths and weaknesses. First, get a big picture overview of all relevant documents, systems, recent projects, goals, and activities. Use tools such as project dashboards to review all of this information in one place.
Afterward, focus on two main areas: strategy and execution. Does the current strategy align with existing business goals and make the best use of their available resources? And how effective is their execution of this strategy in terms of ROI and revenue?
Use project management software to organize your internal marketing job application process.
For example, Wrike users can create a new task for every viable candidate. From there, they can attach their resume, add important details, and start an approval for that particular job applicant. Search all your candidate task profiles for terms related to the five most important marketing team positions: marketing strategist, social media manager, content creator, data analyst, and technical specialist.
Maximize the impact of your current marketing team through a holistic system.
Even if you’re not yet in a position to hire additional personnel, there’s a lot you can do to help your marketing team become more effective in the short term. Besides providing skill-building courses and certifications, you can help your team achieve more by giving them the right tools.
We recommend a comprehensive marketing project management system to help streamline communications, organize the nitty-gritty details of all active projects in one place, and achieve measurable results.
Top tips for building your in-house marketing team
If you want to improve your marketing operations, consider your current hiring, onboarding, and daily workflow and processes. A comprehensive approach to employee development will also help you maximize the impact of your existing staffers. Follow these 22 in-house marketing team tips for how to do all of these things and more.
- Create niche teams within your department for categories such as video content, social media, and press releases.
- Ask new hires to take a free Google digital marketing class.
- Schedule employee training that covers expectations, responsibilities, and current marketing data.
- Consider hiring freelancers who can fill in the skillset gaps of your existing team.
- Use a marketing project collaboration tool to evenly distribute the workload across the entire department.
- Implement a time tracking system to uncover new productivity and financial opportunities.
- Try an Agile workflow if you want to consolidate all relevant marketing communications to one accessible space and eliminate the clutter of messy email chains and messaging platforms.
- Take advantage of advanced analytics and reporting tools once you fully switch over from an agency to an in-house team.
- Turn goals into tangible benchmarks with visual tools such as charts, graphs, and color-coded workflows.
- Hire employees who are creative, skilled at creating content across a wide range of mediums, and understand how to engage with leads at all stages of the sales process. Consider a resource planning analyst, who can show you exactly where your resources could be best put to use.
- Use short (one to two hours) paid test projects to find marketing team candidates who work well with others and can follow your existing systems.
- Consider hiring a digital specialist and an SEO specialist if you don’t already have them in your department.
- Build an accessible digital marketing framework with an emphasis on SEO strategy.
- Prioritize job candidates who have independently positioned themselves as thought leaders in their chosen marketing niche. Seek them out through LinkedIn title searches and YouTube.
- Help employees stay up to date with the latest social media trends and tools through regular workshops and guest speakers from outside your organization.
- Build a work culture filled with creativity and joy through a thoughtful, long term strategy.
- Use a dedicated hiring team or professional to find and vet new applicants.
- Budget for certifications, classes, and conferences to help your entire team improve their marketing skills year after year.
- Invest in key employees who will stay with the brand long-term and become leaders in their individual specialties within the marketing department.
- Build an onboarding program that increases engagement right from the start.
- Make your marketing team more efficient by measuring their progress with real metrics and setting appropriate goals.
- Prioritize the following marketing team characteristics, each of which indicates high performance: a desire to authentically connect with their audience, an interest in tying marketing spend to sales ROI, the creativity to come up with on process improvements, and a mindset rooted in curiosity plus achievement.
Skyrocket marketing success by supporting your in-house marketing team
Taking the time to evaluate your marketing team’s progress, streamlining your hiring process, and improving day-to-day project systems through online tools can have a positive impact on success. To accomplish the items above, make sure you adopt a project management system like Wrike that was built to help marketers maximize their impact. Start your two-week free trial today and develop an effective in-house marketing team.
