How to Hire an Effective Marketing Team: Our Step-by-Step Guide

The right marketing team has the potential to push your brand into the spotlight. 

Research from Bain & Company and Google shows that the most mature marketers are 4x as likely to achieve business goals, increase market share, and increase revenue than the least mature marketers.  

But how do you find and hire these top-performing marketing professionals?

In this Willo article, we’ll explore the important aspects of a successful marketing team and offer you some battle-tested tips for finding and hiring the best marketing team for your business. Oh, and you’ll also get an overview of some of the ways Willo can simplify the process.

What Are the Essential Roles on a Marketing Team? 

Right off the bat—there isn’t one, ideal marketing team configuration. 

Micro-businesses may be able to get away with hiring a single, well-rounded marketing employee. Meanwhile, larger companies may require a team of specialists working together towards a common goal.

To help you decide what personnel your business needs, here are some common responsibilities that need to be filled, whether multiple by one individual or specialists:

Marketing director

Marketing directors (or managers) are the leaders of overall marketing efforts, whether that’s a team of people or executing on the strategy they built. They're responsible for high-level work like delegating tasks, monitoring the progress of various marketing projects, and offering help when needed. 

If you’re hiring a “player” Director—meaning someone who will take on execution work in a smaller organization–you’ll need a balance of hard skills and management. If you’re in a bigger organization, Directors primarily tend to manage individual contributors (or even other managers), so proven leadership skills become more essential. 

Regardless of whether this person runs execution, they should be up to date on new marketing industry changes, since that can impact strategy and management style. 

Brand manager

Brand managers (also known as PR managers) focus on building and maintaining a strong brand image for your company. It’s essential that they have a genuine interest in your niche because they manage the overall perception of your brand in the market, so they need to stay as genuine as possible. 

Common tasks include:

• Developing and executing strategies to increase brand awareness and perception
• Conducting market research to understand your target market
• Creating and managing a branding budget
• Monitoring and analyzing brand performance data

Content manager & content creators

A content manager is responsible for planning and executing your company’s content strategy across all the channels you rely on. They typically manage teams of content creators and editors, with a range of responsibilities, like:

• Overseeing content production for your website and social media channels
• Monitoring content budgets
• Providing editorial support and direction to content creators
• Analyzing content performance and staying on top of emerging marketing trends

It’s worth noting that, like a Director, some Content managers also write and edit themselves. It’s more about a mindset and task that needs to be accomplished than necessarily a specific job. 

SEO specialist

Search engine optimization (SEO) specialists are important for any company that wants to stay relevant and visible online. Such individuals should have a great understanding of search engine processes, analytics, and keyword integration to help you boost inbound traffic to your website.

Social media manager

As every company today requires a strong social media presence, social media managers are essential to help you build and maintain it. They should have strong research skills and be able to effectively communicate and interact with your customers online. 

Visual designer

Visual designers often take on a diverse set of responsibilities on marketing teams. Whether it’s designing ad creatives or website visuals, your visual designers need to have a good understanding of brand image, current marketing trends, and a wide range of design tools.

Copywriter

Copywriters are important for crafting your written copy for various channels like your website, social media, ads, email newsletters and more. They often collaborate with SEO specialists and visual designers to optimize content and make sure it stays consistent across all your platforms.

With so many positions to fill, lots of companies look for solutions that simplify recruitment.

Source: How Lunio’s HR Team Saved Over $50,000 using Willo to Hire SDRs

That’s exactly why Lunio implemented Willo. Our async video interviewing platform saved Lunio’s recruiters 42 hours by eliminating time-consuming, ineffective phone screens entirely. But more on what we do later.

Skills to Consider When Building Your Marketing Team 

When building your dream marketing team, you’ll need to consider a broad set of skills to help you create a dynamic and effective group. 

Let’s take a look at these essential skills:

• Market analysis: To create a strong marketing strategy, your team needs to be capable of performing in-depth market research. This includes collecting relevant information about your niche, competitors, and potential customers, analyzing consumer behavior, and assessing market risks. 
• SEO: Even if you don’t prioritize it as a strategy, SEO is a valuable way to get visibility for the other elements of your marketing strategy. As a result, your marketing team should have enough SEO knowledge to help you increase your visibility in organic search results and paid ads. 
• Content creation: Since content is the way you express your brand story and establish your identity, expert content creation is vital for your marketing success. 
• Creativity: Beyond artistic skills, creativity in marketing involves thinking of new approaches to engage audiences, testing campaigns, and analyzing data to optimize strategies. In fact, according to the World Economic Forum, creativity is the most important skill in the current job market. 
• Communication and teamwork: Since marketing revolves around communicating messages effectively, your team members should excel in both verbal and written communication, being persuasive, clear, and concise. 
• Leadership: Effective marketing teams need strong leadership to guide strategy and inspire creativity. Leaders should be great listeners, innovative thinkers, and capable of motivating the team towards common goals. For non-leader roles, a leadership mindset is one of ownership, self-accountability, and commitment to delivering the best possible results every time (then iterating to get even better over time). 
• Analytical mindset: Data-driven decision-making is key in modern marketing. Team members should be able to interpret data to inform strategies, measure campaign effectiveness, and make logical decisions. 
• Problem-solving: As marketing is consistently evolving, your marketing team will need to be able to quickly identify any inevitable challenges like shifting market trends, fierce competition, limited budgets, and more, as well as come up with the best solutions under different constraints. 
• Adaptability and eagerness to learn: In the fast-paced marketing world, hiring individuals who are hungry to try new things and can quickly adapt to shifting trends is essential. Prioritize candidates who are not only skilled, but are also passionate about learning and taking on new challenges.

It’s important that these skills be balanced across team members, ensuring that you have a comprehensive set of capabilities to address all aspects of modern marketing. 

How to Hire an Effective Marketing Team

1. Think about your team structure

The first step in this process is to work out what your ideal marketing team looks like.

There are a few different ways of looking at this:

• Leadership: Who manages the marketing team, and who is accountable for ultimate results? If you already have a strong marketing leader in place, you can focus less on leadership positions and more on specialist positions. If not, hiring a marketing director or manager is a top priority—they’ll be able to help with subsequent hires. Reminder: at a smaller scale, you may want a director who can also execute; at a bigger scale, prioritize people leaders.
• Specialization: What marketing channels do you need to support your business goals? If you’re filling in an existing team, look for skill gaps you want to fill and opportunities you want to capitalize on. If you’re starting from scratch, figure out what channels are currently driving results and start with them.
• Size: How many team members do you need? This will depend on two main factors—budget and workload. Ideally, you want to have enough team members to cover all of your marketing needs without overworking anyone.

The goal of these different exercises is to come up with a realistic list of positions you want to fill.

Once you have one, you can start prioritizing hires based on how important they are to your overall marketing strategy. This is important for businesses that don’t have the budget for high-volume hiring campaigns.

2. Create compelling job descriptions

Creating your job descriptions is a major step to attracting the talent you want. 

Your job descriptions should be clear, concise, compelling and accurately represent your company culture. By letting potential candidates know what it’s actually like working for your company, and the type of support and growth they can experience, they’ll be able to decide whether they're genuinely interested in being a part of your team before they apply. 

In your job descriptions, you should include:

• A specific job title
• An engaging introduction that highlights your company vision, values, and perks
• A job summary that includes key responsibilities and required skills
• A clear explanation of your application process (which shouldn't be long and complicated)
• Inclusive language to reach a diverse candidate pool

As a bonus tip, consider including a short video showing life at your company or answering questions that give candidates a window into your company culture. 

Source: Willo 2024 Hiring Trends Report

Employer branding is a top priority for recruiters according to the Willo 2024 Hiring Trends Report—41.1% rated it as “very important” while 42.5% rated it as “extremely important”. But remember, the goal is to be authentic and genuine rather than flashy.

3. Think carefully about talent pools

The talent pools you draw from have a massive impact on the makeup of your team. Every channel you use to advertise a job will connect you with talent pools that have slight (and often not so slight) differences in demographics, skills, and experiences.

It’s important to think about this if you want to attract a competent, diverse pool of applicants.

Diverse teams bring a range of perspectives, experiences, and ideas, which can lead to better problem-solving and higher revenue. Incorporating DEI into your recruitment plans includes writing inclusive job descriptions and advertising open roles through diverse channels.

Some of these diverse channels are: 

• Job boards (like DiversityJobs, PowerToFly, or Workplace Diversity)
• Niche websites
• Blogs
• Podcasts
• Webinars
• Social media

Nowadays, social media isn't just a channel to reach your clients, it’s also great for reaching job seekers around the globe. Your social networks help tell the story of your company, so potential candidates have some insight into whether you’re the right fit for them. 

4. Leverage tech for efficient screening

Like we mentioned briefly earlier, candidate screening tools like Willo can help you save a ton of time when you need to process hundreds (or even thousands) of applications. 

Routine tasks like scheduling interviews, taking notes, gathering internal feedback, and sifting through resumes can take up a huge chunk of time. Willo either eliminates or simplifies all of these by having applicants record responses to interview questions asynchronously.

When you’re writing screening questions, be sure to target the specific qualities and skills you’re looking for in a candidate. For example, if the role involves a lot of presentations, you could use Willo to have candidates record themselves giving a mock presentation or upload the file of a previous presentation they’ve given.

Once recorded interviews start rolling in, it’s time to evaluate them. Willo make this process easier with features like:

• Scorecards: Score recorded interviews on customizable rubrics to help recruiters keep assessments relevant and unbiased.

• Showcase: Quickly share recorded interviews with team members and gather feedback in the form of notes and comments.

Willo also integrates with ATS like Workday, Workable, Teamtailor, and Lever to help automate your entire recruitment process.

5. Develop the right marketing interview questions

As you approach the interviewing stage, you’ll want to prioritize candidates who are eager to learn and try new things. Especially for startups or smaller teams, finding individuals who are hungry for challenges and willing to take on various tasks can be more beneficial than hiring specialists in every single area. 

This approach allows for flexibility and innovation within the team. 

When crafting your interview questions, prioritize culture fit over skill. After all, you already know candidates have the skills you’re looking for since they passed the screening stage, so this is where you can see if they’re a good company fit. 

Some starter questions you can consider are:

• “How did you get started in marketing?”
• “What gets you excited about this role?”
• “How do you stay up-to-date with the latest marketing industry trends and methods?”
• “How do you measure the success of a campaign?”
• “Which platforms do you think fit best with our brand, and why?”
• “What motivates you at work?”

If you’re struggling to come up with interview questions that suit the specific roles you want to hire for, leveraging one-way video interviewing tools like Willo can be a game changer. Our platform offers an AI-powered question generator that automatically suggests questions to help you evaluate your candidates more efficiently. 

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Hire Your Dream Marketing Team With Willo

Hiring employees for your marketing team requires a little more than just checking for the right skills. This is because your marketing team is essentially your group of brand ambassadors tasked with shining a spotlight on what your organization has to offer. 

With that said, while hiring a full marketing team is no easy feat, the right set of tools will make the process much simpler. Using a one-way interviewing tool like Willo, you can evaluate your candidates much faster and more fairly. But don’t just take our word for it, our customer stories can speak for themselves. 

So what are you waiting for? Try Willo for free today and get started on building your dream marketing team!