How to set up your marketing department

Marketing plays an important role in improving sales and brand awareness for every type of business. And having a marketing department is vital to meeting your marketing goal.

No matter the industry your business is in, marketing plays a vital role to attracting and retaining customers. And while the importance of marketing has remained steady over the years, the strategies are always changing, and having a well-prepared team will help you stay up to date with new strategies and tactics.

Here are some tips on creating and setting up your marketing department

Every marketing department is different

There is no one-size-fits-all approach to making a marketing department, the size, positions and strategies are different depending on a lot of factors that are unique to your business. Some of these factors are:

• Target Audience
• Size of your company
• Industry
• Lifecycle of your products
• Budget
• And many more

Let’s start by figuring out how would your marketing department look like.

Start by creating a marketing plan

The first step to finding out how many people you need for a marketing department is figuring the best strategy for your specific business. A marketing plan should be the first priority when deciding on a marketing department. It will tell you the tactics and strategies that your business needs to follow, and it will tell you the people you are going to need to conduct the marketing for your business.

You can start by hiring a head of marketing who will create a marketing plan for your business and tell you the people you will need to conduct the marketing for your business. Or hire a marketing agency to create the plan for you, and when you have your marketing plan you can start hiring based on the plan.

There are advantages and disadvantages to both of these, hiring a marketing expert involves the hiring process, finding out if this person is the best option, and setting up payroll while they are creating your marketing plan, but they are in close communication with you, and you can review every step of the process. When you hire a marketing agency, since it is external to your business, you don’t have as strong communication.

You can decide which option is better for you by carefully reviewing the pros and cons of each option.

Start out small

When starting your marketing department it may be tempting to try every marketing channel you can, but doing this can hurt your department in the long run. Focusing on quality over quantity is better when it comes to marketing. A marketing plan will help you focus your marketing efforts on the specific channels that your clients use. If you don’t have a marketing plan, directly asking your target audience will tell you the best way to reach them.

Trying to use every social media you can, so you spread out as much as possible can be tempting, but maybe your audience uses LinkedIn more than Facebook, so you have to focus your efforts towards creating a LinkedIn strategy that will get you, new clients. This way you can create more targeted and quality content to attract customers.

Hire people with diverse backgrounds and skill sets

A marketing department is always different and ever-changing so having people with diverse backgrounds and a wide set of skills can really help your team be prepared to change strategies, try new tactics, or think of new ideas to improve on marketing. You will need content creators, graphic designers, creative people, analysts, videographers, photographers project managers, PR, market researchers, and more. Having people with a diverse set of skills will reduce the number of people it takes to successfully run your marketing team.

Use metrics to keep track of progress and goals

Setting up metrics is key to keeping track of progress. In your marketing plan, you should have every strategy and tactic with the according metric to keep track of progress and completion. Having a recurrent meeting with your marketing team is important to keep track of these metrics and progress. And to do the according changes to the plan, strategy, or tactic.

A monthly meeting is good for keeping up with activities and tactics and how are they performing, but a quarterly meeting is good for keeping track of every strategy and tactic and making changes as needed.