Hire a marketing manager, or work with a team first?

If you don't yet have a clear marketing plan, work with an experienced team first and hire once you know what works. A single marketing manager hired into a business without a plan tends to end up doing a bit of everything, and you'll struggle to tell whether the problem is the person or the plan. Once the plan is clear, the hire gets much easier, because you'll know exactly who you need.

One hire is often asked to be six people

Read a typical job ad for a marketing manager at a growing company. It asks for strategy and positioning, the website, search, paid ads, social media, email, content, events, sales materials and monthly reporting. Each of those is a real skill, and very few people are good at more than three or four of them.

So the person you hire does what they're best at. If that's social media, you get a steady stream of posts. If it's events, you get events. Six months in, there's plenty of activity and a newsletter goes out every month, but the sales pipeline looks much as it did before.

You can't tell whether you hired the wrong person or gave the right person an impossible job. And if they leave after a year, much of what they learned about your market leaves with them, because nobody had time to write it down.

Reporting tends to drift the same way. A manager working alone reports what they can control, such as posts published and emails sent. What you need to know is whether the work brought in inquiries and clients, and that's harder to show without a plan to measure against.

The plan has to come before the person

Marketing works when a handful of questions have clear answers. You need to know exactly who you're selling to, what they buy from you and why they pick you over the alternatives. You need to know where they look when they need what you sell, what you want them to do first, and what a new client is worth to you over a year or two.

If you can answer those with confidence, a good manager can turn them into a plan and run it. If you can't, the manager will have to guess, and you'll end up judging their work against a target nobody set.

A team that has done this many times can usually help you answer those questions within a few weeks, test the answers with real campaigns, and leave you with a written plan that someone else can then run.

A useful plan fits on two or three pages. It names the customers you're going after and the message that will reach them. It lists the few channels you'll use, the budget for each, and the numbers you'll check every month to see whether it's working.

Show the draft to your best salesperson and one or two good clients. If they disagree with it, you want to know before anyone spends money.

When working with a team first makes sense

A team is usually the better first step when:

• you don't have a written marketing plan, or the one you have isn't followed
• you need several skills at once, such as brand, website and paid ads, to fix what's holding you back
• you don't yet know what a sensible marketing budget looks like for your business
• you want work going out within weeks rather than after a three-month search
• you don't feel able to judge marketing work, and want people who'll show you what's working in plain numbers

A team also gives you more than one senior opinion. When a campaign isn't working, you hear about it from people who have seen the same problem in other businesses and know what usually fixes it.

Choose carefully, though. Meet the people who will actually do your work, not only the person who sells it to you. Ask how they report results and how often. And make sure from the first day that every account they set up belongs to your business.

Agree, too, on what the end looks like. A good team works toward the point where you can run more of it yourself, and says so plainly.

When hiring first makes sense

Some businesses should hire first. If you already have a plan that's working and you mainly need someone to run it every day, a manager is the right call. The same goes when your marketing depends on deep knowledge of a complicated product, or when there's a constant flow of in-house work, such as events, product launches and partner material, that needs someone inside the business.

A first hire also works better when someone senior can manage them. A marketing manager reporting to an owner who has no time for marketing is set up to struggle, however good they are. If that describes your week, be honest about it before you write the job ad.

Think about which kind of person you need, too. A senior marketer who can set strategy costs a lot more than a coordinator who can keep campaigns running. Some businesses do well with a coordinator on staff and a team behind them for the senior thinking and specialist work.

If you do hire first, give the new person their first month to talk to customers and to your sales team before they launch anything. What they hear will shape a better plan than any brief you could write for them.

Compare the full first-year cost

The salary is only part of what a hire costs, and it's the easiest part to see.

Say you're weighing a marketing manager at $85,000 a year. Add payroll taxes and benefits at, say, another 20 percent, and you're at about $102,000. Add the tools they'll need, perhaps $6,000 a year, and you're near $108,000.

Recruiting can take two or three months of your time, and a new manager often needs another three months to learn the business before their work has much effect. So in the first year you might pay that full amount for about six months of real output, and that's before any advertising budget. If the hire doesn't work out, a second search takes you back to the start.

Set that against what you'd get from a team over the same twelve months, both in cost and in how soon useful work starts. Be fair to both sides, because a team needs some of your time as well, for briefings, approvals and monthly reviews. The comparison won't always favor the team, but it should be made with the full numbers. These figures are illustrative, so replace them with your own.

How to make the later hire go well

If you start with a team, plan the hire from the beginning. After six months or so, the job description almost writes itself. You know which channels work, what the budget is and what the weekly work actually involves. The team can help you interview, because they know the job better than any recruiter will.

Make sure the handover is clean. Every account, including ad accounts, analytics, the website, social profiles and the domain, should be in your company's name with you as the owner from day one. The new manager should inherit documented campaigns, results to date and a list of what's been tried and dropped.

Record why the main decisions were made as well as what they were. A new manager who knows why a channel was dropped won't spend three months trying it again.

Allow a month or two of overlap, with the new manager working alongside the team before anything changes hands. Many businesses then keep the team for specialist work, such as design, ads or technical search, while the manager runs the day-to-day. You get someone inside who knows the business well, backed by skills you couldn't afford to hire one at a time.

Where to start

1. Write one page answering who you sell to, why they choose you and how they find you today. If you struggle to fill it in, start with strategy before you hire anyone.
2. Work out the full first-year cost of a marketing hire, including recruiting time, ramp-up, tools and benefits, using your own figures.
3. Ask two outside teams and one strong candidate the same question: what would you do in the first ninety days, and how would we know it's working?