How to Build a Marketing Team

If your business is growing, so should your marketing efforts. But the big question is how do you build an in-house team that will grow in the way you need, to achieve your goals?

Hiring a marketing team is a huge commitment. It requires time, money, and the right mix of skills to drive results. You need to define roles, hire and train talent, and ensure the team aligns with your business goals. While having an in-house team might seem like the best way to maintain control over your marketing efforts, the process of recruiting, onboarding, and managing a team is often far more complex than most business owners anticipate.

In this guide, we’ll walk you through how to hire the right marketing team members, the key roles to consider, and the challenges of building an in-house team. And, if by the end of it all, it seems overwhelming, we can have a conversation about how we can help you out.

Define Your Marketing Needs

Before you rush to hire marketers, take a step back and assess your business’s current marketing needs, and think about your pain points you may have in the business that need solving.

Key Questions to Ask:

• What are my business goals? Are you looking to increase brand awareness, generate leads, or drive online sales?
• Do I need strategy, execution, or both? Some businesses need big-picture thinkers, while others need hands-on marketers who can execute campaigns.
• Should I hire specialists or generalists? If your budget is limited, a generalist (someone with a broad range of skills) may be a good start. But if you’re scaling fast, specialists (such as SEO experts or PPC managers) may be necessary.

Marketing isn’t a one-size-fits-all approach. The team you build should be aligned with where your business is today and where you want it to be in the next 12-24 months.

Key Roles to Consider for Your Team

If you decide to build an in-house team, you’ll need to define the roles that will drive the biggest impact for your business.

Important Marketing Roles:

1. Marketing Manager – Oversees strategy, planning, and execution. These people are the workhorses of the marketing team and are critical to a good in-house marketing team. Be careful though; it’s easy to pile a lot of work onto these and for them to become overworked and overwhelmed. If managed properly, they’re your business leaders of the future but if not you risk burnout and a quick cycle of needing to hire for their replacement when they quit!
2. Content Marketer – Creates blog posts, social media content, and SEO-focused materials. You’ll always need content, and a good content marketer uses a combination of their own content creation skills, AI tools to improve efficiency and a great brain for supporting campaign ideas your Marketing Managers may have.  A good content marketer will bring your brand and your vision to life.
3. Paid Media Marketer (PPC & Paid Social Expert) – Manages online ads and analytics. In the ever-growing landscape of online business, it’s critical that you know that your marketing is proving it’s ROI and that you’re spending money in the right place. PPC experts are generally very analytically minded, with a good head for data and can be critical team members across the business.
4. Designer & Video Editor – Ensures brand consistency with high-quality visuals. It’s always important to have good quality visuals to bring your brand to life, it’s true that a picture paints a thousand words. With the growth in video content online too, it’s important that you’re keeping up to date with how your customers want to be marketed to. Access to a good design team can be the difference between your product being seen or being lost in the noise.
5. Social Media Manager – Engages with your audience and builds brand awareness. A good Social Media Manager will be spending their time social-listening, seeing what your audience are talking about, engaging with them and building social content around what they want to see. It’s not a skill-set that is just about making social posts, it needs someone who has customer service, relationship building and zeitgeist analysis skills.
6. Email & CRM Specialist – Focuses on customer retention and automation. Email marketing is still critical for eCommerce and many other industries, while it’s important to manage your CRM so that you can nurture your potential customers and turn them into actual revenue. A good Email & CRM specialists understands email flows, automation tool and how to manage your CRM in the background and usually needs a combination of creative and technical ability.

Which Roles Are Crucial for Growing Businesses?

The short answer is “it depends what you need” as with most solutions it isn’t one-size-fits-all, but in general,

• If you’re just starting, a Marketing Manager and a Content Marketer might be enough for you to get by; someone who can plan and execute campaigns and someone to produce the content for them.
• If you’re scaling, you’ll need a Performance Marketer and a Designer to handle growth campaigns. With a growing budget for marketing you’ll want to make sure that it’s being spent in the most effective way possible.
• If retention is a priority, an Email & CRM Specialist can help you keep existing customers engaged.

While hiring these roles in-house can provide more direct control over your marketing efforts, it also means additional costs; salaries, benefits, training, and software, so make sure that you’re looking for the right people with the right experience to make sure you’re getting bang for your buck!

What to Look for in Candidates

Finding the right people isn’t just about qualifications, it’s about ensuring they fit your company’s culture and can adapt to evolving marketing trends.

Key Hiring Considerations:

• Hard skills vs. soft skills: Do you need someone highly analytical, or do you need a creative problem solver? It’s uncommon to find people who can do both, so you need to make sure that you’re addressing the key pain points that you may have.
• Experience vs. potential: Should you hire someone with proven experience, or would you rather train someone with potential? If you’re looking to scale and grow quickly, then usually you need someone who can hit the ground running, but if you’re further along in your business journey maybe you can afford to give some their foot in the door?
• Cultural fit: Will they align with your business values and goals? Someone might be the best marketer in the world, but have a toxic attitude that doesn’t align with your company values. Are you happy hiring someone who might drive other staff away over time because they have to work with them five days a week?

Hiring the right person is challenging, and making the wrong hire can be costly, both financially and in lost time. Something that business owners can be all to aware of!

In-House Team vs. Outsourcing: What’s Right for You?

Building an internal team isn’t the only option. Many growing businesses find that outsourcing to a marketing agency is the more efficient, cost-effective solution.

Pros of Hiring In-House

• Full control over your marketing efforts
• A team that fully understands your brand
• Long-term investment in talent

Cons of Hiring In-House

• High costs (salaries, benefits, tools, training)
• Takes time to find, hire, and onboard talent
• Requires management oversight

Pros of Outsourcing to an Agency

• Access to an entire team of specialists
• Faster execution with proven strategies
• No hiring, training, or management headaches

Cons of Outsourcing to an Agency

• Less direct control over day-to-day operations
• Potential learning curve for the agency to understand your brand

When Does It Make Sense to Outsource?

• If you need expertise but can’t afford a senior hire right now
• If your marketing needs are varied as your business changes
• If you want to hit the ground running and scale quickly

If you’re a growing business without the resources to build an in-house team, outsourcing could be a smarter move. A great agency acts as an extension of your business, providing expert marketing services without the cost and commitment of a full-time team.

Take a look here at our cost of hiring a Marketing Team breakdown insight for more information on the overall costs involved on hiring internally vs outsourcing.

Hiring Marketers & Avoiding Common Mistakes

If you decide to go ahead and build an in-house team, here’s how to do it right, in our experience.

Steps to Hiring the Right Marketers:

1. Write clear, results-driven job descriptions – Be specific about expectations, KPIs, and what success looks like. From experience, it only leads to disappointment when people don’t know what success looks like in a role, make sure both sides are happy with it.
2. Find the right candidates – Use job boards, LinkedIn, and industry referrals to connect with top talent. This might annoy recruiters (sorry recruiters) but you don’t need to pay recruiter fees for them to bring you candidates, the job market is huge and there are people out there searching for them every day. If you’ve got the time to sift applications, you can save yourself a hefty amount of money.
3. Conduct structured interviews – Ask candidates for real-world examples of how they’ve solved marketing challenges. Some people are charismatic and good at smoke-and-mirrors in an interview (especially as us Marketers can sometimes be creative…sorry Marketers!) so it’s always good to ask for evidenced, clear examples. A good marketer will always be over the moon to show you their successes from previous roles.
4. Watch out for red flags – If they lack adaptability, struggle to show clear past results, or overpromise, they might not be the right fit. Also, sometimes you just know if someone will be the right fit or not. An interview is a time for both sides to get a feel for the other. You’ve got to work with his person five days a week, make sure they’re the right fit for your team.

Even with the best hiring process, it can take months to recruit and onboard a strong marketing team, another reason why outsourcing can be a great shortcut to success.

Is Hiring an In-House Team Worth It?

In short, if you’ve got the time, money, will and skill-set then yes, absolutely. But, hiring an in-house marketing team is a major investment in all of these.

While having an internal team offers control and consistency, it’s almost always more expensive and slower to get off the ground.

If you’re at a stage where you need marketing expertise but don’t have the resources to build a full team, outsourcing some or all of your marketing efforts to an agency can be a game-changer.

At Qoob, we act as an extension of your business, giving you access to a team of experts in paid media, content marketing, SEO, email marketing, and more, all without the overhead of an in-house team.

Hopefully you found this useful, if you’d like to know more just reach out and we’re always happy to talk.

Get in touch today and let’s chat about how we can support your growth.