A modern digital marketer needs to live up to tremendous expectations. A decade ago, digital marketers had a few responsibilities for ads and SEO. Today, digital marketing is an umbrella term for many responsibilities. Anything that gets a product to a potential buyer is considered digital marketing. This includes content marketing, social media outreach, website design, and Google ads.
Since marketing continues to grow in accessibility and complexity, building a successful digital marketing team is becoming more difficult. You can’t just say “website designer, social media expert, writer, and data analyst required,” although that’s what you are searching for.
The aim is to come up with an adaptable team. This means, you will have to hire creative, ambitious, and flexible people who possess the ideal tools to learn fast. Use these key pointers to build your team:
Hire for hunger
You may be tempted to hire individuals based on their industry expertise alone. Nevertheless, the marketing landscape keeps changing, and their experience may become obsolete in no time.
Rather, focus on balancing experience with potential. This means searching for individuals who are self-driven, quick to seize the initiative, and eager to learn. Filter the people you choose by expanding on the application requirements. Here is how you can accomplish this:
Find creative aptitude – Look for people who can work independently and come up with unique and creative ideas even when given a deadline.
Include a project – Present your interviewees with a real marketing problem your startup company is facing and request them to solve it. Ensure that you subject them to real constraints like time, budget, and resources.
Request for work samples – Sample works will help you to get a glimpse of what a person is capable of. Ask for the motivation behind the work created.
Encouraging employee specialization
Now that you have selected the high potential employees, it’s time to think of the team dynamics. Don’t encourage all employees to do everything in digital marketing, but rather encourage them to develop expertise. This teaches them the underlying principles of excellent marketing, and this doesn’t change since tech isn’t involved.
The best way to accomplish this is by constantly communicating with the members of your team. Sit down with them, one person at a time and learn their aspirations. Get to know what they intend to get by working in your company. Use the knowledge you have honed from a leadership development program to build a path for them through a specialized role.
This can be accomplished by:
Holding monthly one on one meetings – Set some goals during these meetings to assist your employees to work towards their aims. Find out if they have any problems and assist them to focus more.
Offering learning opportunities – Look for books, conferences, and webinars based on the interests of your team. Continue training them with more tools so they can keep growing in their field. Motivate each employee to perfect a certain skill set. Once they have grown professionally they will become better and efficient employees.
Making collaboration easy
Through a dynamic work environment, your employees can keep learning even from their workmates. Forcing employees to stay at their respective desks all day long isn’t the way to go. Lonely work environments put a lot of pressure on each employee. The team is also wasting the opportunity to know how to collaborate and learn from other people’s mistakes. Consider assigning some tasks to more team members and see how fruitful it will be.
You can also use collaborative software to help your staff to learn more from one another as they work together. Get started by using:
Quip – This software is a word processor designed for collaboration. Several people can work simultaneously to create an email, a blog, or a website copy while chatting within that same window.
Teamwork Project – Your digital marketing team can effectively collaborate when they use this software to manage their projects, track progress, and communicate. The software has a chat tool they integrate with the projects directly. This gives team members the ability to turn their conversations into follow up tasks and they do not have to leave the chat environment.
IDoneThis – This software is a checklist tool which allows employees to talk about their goals, blockers, and accomplishments. The tool gets people updated on the tasks on the same page without disruptions.
When the project, experiment, and campaign are browsable, your team can work hand in hand while learning from one another. This will increase the growth speed of each employee, making it easier to iterate the campaign processes. Efficiency is increased and so is the output.
Stay lean
Staffing up is a common mistake marketing teams make. Managers think that by hiring smart people, the output will automatically be great. They think that staffing can fix performance problems the team faces.
However, more employees should only be hired if the work has increased and the current employees can’t handle everything. Otherwise, it’s better to focus on hiring a smaller team so as to improve their research methods, optimize internal communication, and help them become good at repeating and testing their campaigns.
A small team also means that the payroll expenses will be reduced. Adding more employees will only mean more expenses no matter how smart they are. As long as the system is lousy, you will only make things worse.
