Are you looking for tips on how to come up with a good digital marketing team in Singapore? When you first got into the business, you and a few of the people you had pulled together to help you out wore all the hats. You were the business owner, which by default made you the CEO, accountant, marketing rep, clerk, and secretary.
But as your business grew, you found it necessary to branch out and establish different teams of specialists. One of the units you considered setting up was that of digital marketers.
While you have an option to hire a digital marketing agency at this point, you might want to build your digital marketing team to help you spread out your promotional efforts and drive more sales and revenue.
Your marketing department needs a complete overhaul, more so if you’re interested in transforming it into a lead-generating machine that will be driving in new sales then you have a chance to bat your eyelashes.
There’s only one trick to get this done right — and that is, getting the right talent.
Inbound Marketing is all About Talent
Get over the hoopla of discovering about inbound marketing. That alone isn’t enough to deliver the results you crave for. What you need instead is a qualified team of specialised marketers, handling the different aspects of inbound marketing to the best standards possible.
But before we get to the meaty part of this, it’s crucial that you understand what’s meant by company size, so you can decide where you fall in all this.
Small to Medium-Sized Business (SMB): This includes any business that operates with a total of 5 to 100 Employees.
Mid-sized Business: Any business with 101 to 1, 000 employees qualifies as a mid-sized business.
Large Enterprise: An enterprise has an upward of 1,000 employees, except for fortune 1000 and high-profile brands where things get even more complicated and extra huge.
By understanding where you fall in all this, you’ll have an easy time figuring out how to structure your marketing team so you can start driving in massive sales and keep your business on a growth curve.
SMB — The Utility Player
Small businesses usually don’t care much about marketing, not more than they care about keeping their business operations running. If they’re lucky, they’ll have one or two marketers that are dedicated to bringing in new businesses. Otherwise, it’s mostly the owner who’ll be dedicating a few hours of their time to pitching to new prospects, and that’s it.
This article focuses on companies that are serious enough to establish a dedicated marketing team. First, if you’re planning to hire a solo marketer, it’s critical to go for an all-rounded player that’s smart.
At this point, you’re NOT allowed to go for a specialist, so forget about finding a pure-play journalist or graphics designer. You want someone who’s average in a few critical areas that may come in handy during your marketing campaigns.
Here are a few areas you want to make sure the person you’re hiring understands to the bone:
Content Creation
You want to start by finding out if the person has been involved with blogging before. Have they ever owned a blog or have they at some point worked as content developers for an agency, corporate firm, or as freelancers?
How well do they understand SEO? How about keywords research and what approach do they use to come up with a list of keywords they target.
Analytics
The marketer you hire must have a basic understanding of the role Google Analytics and HubSpot play in tracking their marketing campaign. A more advanced analytic specialist should also double as an excel junkie. But for an all-rounded marketer, a basic understanding of marketing funnels and some basic tracking using Google Analytics should be enough.
Basic Understanding of how the Internet Operates
The person you hire must have a clear understanding of how the internet operates. They must be equally knowledgeable about how everything else comes into play, starting with how the web functions, how search engines come in, and the relationship they have with social media channels, and so forth.
Also, they must at least be active on one or two social media networks that matter, particularly Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
Creative
Let’s face it: unless you go for a graphics designer specialist, you’ll probably never find an all-rounded marketer that’s skilled enough to crank out a logo and the artwork you might need to accompany some of your campaigns.
But it’s possible to get someone who’s at least taught themselves the basics of illustrator or photoshop, and who at least knows how to whip up some CTA, posters, and banners for your campaigns.
This is crucial as it will help you save the money you could have otherwise used to hire a contractor.
Campaigns
Has the person you’re about to hire ever run a campaign across multiple channels? Starting with an email campaign and call campaign, how well do they understand what an email marketing campaign is?
Not only is the player expected to know how to run the campaign, but they must also be in a position to see how the different pieces of the campaign fit into the bigger puzzle.
Finding a Utility Player in Singapore
Back then, before the internet became a thing, you could have just whipped up a job post with all the listed descriptions of a utility player, and the next thing you know you’re interviewing a bunch of them But sadly, things have changed and only a few college programs are cranking out individuals that fit the bill.
So your best shot is on preying on marketing, PR, and communication graduates that happen to have worked with a marketing agency before.
You want to make sure that the person you’re hiring has at least three good years of working experience with an agency across a broad range of skills and that he or she is willing to dedicate all their effort to raise the marketing stakes of just one company.
Their satisfaction should be on seeing how their marketing efforts work and impact the company’s growth in the long term.
Mid-Size Company
You’re reminded that your company fits into the mid-size category if your workforce is made up of 101 to 1000 employees. Or it could be that your business has grown from an SMB to a mid-size company. For such, you might want to upgrade your marketing department from a utility player to a real team of marketers that will be helping you push your business to even greater heights.
At this point, your business needs more leads than your utility marketer has the capacity to pump in all by himself. You also need to update your marketing resources and bring in more tools so you can sustain your current workforce.
What you need is a team of marketers. Then again, you’re NOT yet big enough to target specialists. So you’d want to settle for a team of all-rounded members with the characteristics of a utility marketer, with the only difference being you’ll be assigning each member to a few services areas that they’re exceptionally good at.
In other words, you should be focused on creating a melting pot of talents that aren’t too confined in what they do, and who can jump to the aid of the other team members on short notice. Here are the talents you need on your team.
If you’re upgrading from a utility marketer to a real team of different marketing talents, the default leader of the pack is the utility player. In other words, this is where they receive a promotion for having done a spectacular job for the company before.
It’s to be however noted that their role will be drastically changing here. Or if you’re bringing in someone fresh, then it’s essential to ensure the person has a deeper understanding of all the disciplines involved in marketing your business online.
They should be well equipped to create quality content; and, at the same time, be able to use analytics to track progress while still motivating and empowering their team members to be more successful at what they do.
The work of a team leader isn’t to boss everyone up.
But to take the initiative of rolling their sleeves once in a while to help their team members create content, resolve some tough execution challenges, keep track of the progress made, and even manage the social media account whenever they’re stuck.
Blog and Social Media Lead
Your content should be all over the net. Here’s one way to look at it: someone scouring the internet with a search query relating to your field should be able to find you with just a few clicks. Whether it’s on search engines or social media, your company should be among the few top results that show up whenever someone attempts to find a relating product or service.
And speaking of which, this is the team member responsible for getting your name out there. He’s the person in charge of your blog as both the writer and editor.
This is the person responsible for creating and sourcing content from the rest of the team members. So for this position, you might want to go for a utility player with a knack for writing and who’s pretty good at coming up with witty and engaging posts for social media. But most importantly, you want to make sure that the person is also good at motivating the rest of the team to contribute to the effort by sharing their content as well.
Content Offer Leads
This member of the team will be responsible for conversions. They’re responsible for converting your site or social media visitors into leads. He’s the person responsible for all the offers you come up with. That includes webinars, ebooks, whitepapers, and so forth. Meaning, this person has to be good at content creation, but with a creative twist to it. The person must also be pretty comfortable at using both webinar and essential email marketing tools.
It’s also crucial that the person is empowered to source content from external sources should there arise a need for it.
Product and Customer Marketing Lead
The product or customer marketing lead is the person responsible for educating your visitors and salespeople about your products or services.
This person has to be very articulate, both in written and verbal communication. They should be able to translate all your offerings and make them simple enough for everyone to understand. This person should also be involved with blogging, but their focus should be more on the products or services you’re offering.
They’re the people on the ground, the closest link you have to your target customers. So you expect them to understand your customers better than the rest of the talents on your team. Which is to say, they’re also expected to create offers that appeal more to your target customers.
Budget for Creative and Tools
None of these rules is written in stone. You’re the person in charge here. You understand your budget to know how far it can stretch. If it allows you to hire only three marketing members, then don’t force yourself to hire ten of them. Use your own wisdom to break out their roles so they can understand what’s expected from each one of them.
Also, there’s no harm in outsourcing for some of the business activities from outside your business premises. But as your team of marketers grows, it will be wise to hire someone whose skill set cuts across a diverse range of the marketing needs you have.
For instance, you might want to hire a graphics designer that’s also good at writing or can code in HTML and a few other programming languages.
Managing the Marketing Team
It’s been noted that none of these roles absolves anyone from also doubling as a content creator. If anything, that’s one skill every member of your team needs to have.
Every member of your digital marketing team should have direct access to your social media account and email silo. That’s important considering they’ll also be helping with updating content and drafting email copies.
Another trick would make the team members swap roles every now and then to ensure that none of them is missing out on a critical skill or feels like they’re being overworked.
Make it appear like no role is permanent. Meaning, each one of the utility players should be able to fit into another role snugly and keep the ball rolling should there arise a need for it. However, while doing this, you might want to keep your mind open to finding out which role suits a particular utility player best.
It’s only then that you’ll want to assign some little bit of ownership of that role to that player. But even with this, they should be willing to swap and help each other should there arise a need for it.
The Takeaway
Some of the advice we provide at MediaOne might appear simple enough, but admittedly some of them are extremely difficult to follow through. We still struggle with some of them ourselves.
There’ll come a time when you’ll be enamored by an approach another company is using or be tempted to feel like you need to move fast and perhaps bring in more talents to your marketing team. It’s your call.
This post is mainly aimed at helping you set up an all-star marketing team in a more manageable manner.
It takes a great deal of focus and cares to bring onboard a fully functional marketing team, and this is just but the tip of the iceberg on the list of things that you should be doing to establish a strong marketing force that you can still count on several years to come.
For more clarification or further help in setting up a strong team of marketers for your business or firm, feel free to contact MediaOne today via our mailbox or by chatting up with one of our customer representatives via the live chat below.
