How to Build a Marketing Team as a Startup

Did you know that 90% of startups fail during the first three years? One of the reasons is the lack of a good marketing team. According to a study by Nielson, ongoing  marketing efforts drive business longevity and generate more than 31% increased incremental sales.  

To achieve this, you need a team of skilled marketers who know how to allocate their time and resources in the smartest way. If you have launched your venture and haven't set up your marketing team yet, now is the perfect time to get started.

But wondering how to build a marketing team? Worry not – this blog got you covered.

Let’s dive right in and break it all down.

7 Steps to Building a Marketing Team for Your Startup

An effective marketing team can help your startup thrive in the business world's cutthroat competition. Here is how you can bring individuals on board and start building your marketing team.

1. Study Your Target Audience

Start by hiring marketers who deeply understand your target audience. For this, you must have a 360-degree understanding of your customers. You should know the social media channels they visit mostly, events where they spend their time, and their biggest pain points.  

With this information, you can hire proficient marketers in these areas. This helps you improve your overall conversion rates and customer retention. With only 5% increase in customer retention, you can achieve 25% increase in profit – according to Bain & Company.

2. Hire Adaptable Team Members

To stay ahead in the evolving business world, you need a team that can grow with it. Look for marketers who are flexible and ready to adapt to emerging opportunities and try new things.

All startup team members should be prepared to get their hands dirty with various tasks and be operative. Additionally, team members should not only take a strategy and implement it but also measure the impact and change it based on results.

3. Outsource Expertise

For a startup, it can be pretty expensive to hire full-time experts, especially when you do not need them full-time or may struggle to attract and retain them. Better yet, opting for agencies of freelancers can help you get experts while reducing financial strains.

When your marketing team gets equipped with the startup's strengths and needs, you can better decide which roles are worth bringing in-house.

4. Start with Volume, Then Quality

This may sound counter intuitive but, in a startup, producing a high volume of content is the main focus initially. Operative-minded people in your team help you get as much content as possible. Once you have established a solid output, shift your focus to improving quality.

Over time, you can begin to fine-tune your content and prioritize quality with the help of analytical and strategy-minded team members.

5. List and Audit All Marketing Projects

As a startup, following best practices and trends is a daunting task, especially when you're on a budget. It's important for you to free up your marketing team's time so they can focus on valuable activities that need their attention.

For this, you need to list what's going on in your marketing team. This enables your team to assess what's worth continuing to spend time on, eliminating any activities that don’t align with your goals.

6. Check Your Marketing Tech Stack

With a strong marketing stack, you can empower your marketing team and streamline operations. By putting the CRM tools at the center of your operations, you can centralize data and carry out all tasks like marketing automation and content management in one place.

7. Focus on Continuous Improvement

Undeniably, at one point you'll realize the need to expand your marketing team. While bringing in new experts, it's important to set only realistic expectations. Don’t expect new marketing experts to deliver instant results. You should help them know your company’s audience and understand brand voice and values.

Once they align with your target audience they can contribute more meaningfully over time. Ultimately, with the right team and strategy in place, you can drive sustained engagement and growth.

Conclusion

Building your marketing team rightly is essential for startup success. Having the right people in appropriate roles is key to generating leads and driving more sales.

Hopefully, this guide will help you build a marketing team of experts and enable you to improve your current operations and reach even more potential customers.  

Ready to put these tips into action? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.