Table of Contents Show
Summary
- In this case, a talented creative equipped with photo and video gear, as well as software for automation and assistance in generating textual and audio content, plus a solution to help establish an editorial calendar, will quickly make this investment profitable within your digital marketing team.
- They must be able to work autonomously based on objectives, while being a good team player in the digital marketing team to participate in strategic meetings and know how to align creative work with the company’s goals.
- Ask them, as a favor, to help you find a talented person who’s not too demanding, ready to join your digital marketing team to support you and grow with you.
Building Your First Digital Marketing Team on a Budget: A Step-by-Step Guide
Congratulations on your decision to build your first digital marketing team! This is an excellent move that will make a huge difference for your business. However, recruiting the right people and creating a high-performing team on a small budget can be challenging.
In this comprehensive guide, we’ll walk you through the process of building your digital marketing team from scratch, even with limited resources. We’ll cover the key profiles you need to hire, recruitment criteria, and practical tips to help you create a winning team.
First, we’ll discuss the importance of recruiting a talented creative as your first digital marketing team member and how to find the right person for the job. Then, we’ll move on to the next crucial step: hiring a digital marketing director to lead your team to success.
We’ll also explore the option of outsourcing your digital marketing efforts and provide valuable insights on how to choose the right provider. Finally, we’ll introduce you to PulseWeaver, a powerful tool that can help you assess your digital marketing needs and create an effective action plan.
So, let’s dive in and discover how you can build a high-performing digital marketing team on a small budget!
The First Profile to Add to Your Digital Marketing Team: The Creative
Let’s assume you have only one salary to allocate initially to your digital marketing team. In this case, a talented creative equipped with photo and video gear, as well as software for automation and assistance in generating textual and audio content, plus a solution to help establish an editorial calendar, will quickly make this investment profitable within your digital marketing team.
Recruitment Criteria for This Profile in Your Digital Marketing Team
An self-taught individual with at least some initial experience is ideal for joining your digital marketing team. Given the diversity of tasks, an academic profile may tend to say “that’s not my job”, while a self-taught person, by default, loves to learn independently and hasn’t been constrained by boundaries limiting their responsibilities. They must be able to work autonomously based on objectives, while being a good team player in the digital marketing team to participate in strategic meetings and know how to align creative work with the company’s goals.
The Risk with This Profile When Building Your Digital Marketing Team
The reality is that a reliable person with these skills is a rare find. Many companies don’t hesitate to poach someone who has demonstrated their talents with a brand. You can do the same to recruit for your digital marketing team – all’s fair in love and war. The issue is that if you lose them with little notice, the consistency and brand image of your digital marketing team could suffer greatly. So, as soon as possible, try to bring in at least interns or apprentices, some of whom may stand out and officially become members of the digital marketing team. This way, you’ll have solutions in place for a smooth transition. But if you don’t take proactive steps to ensure the continuity of your digital marketing team, it could hurt, and faster than you think. So take this seriously!
Where to Find This Profile for Your Digital Marketing Team
From experience, we can tell you it’s complicated. Most small businesses that have successfully built their digital marketing team have done so through one of these two approaches:
- Personal Network: Reach out to friends, family, customers… Ask them, as a favor, to help you find a talented person who’s not too demanding, ready to join your digital marketing team to support you and grow with you.
- Create Them: This is the most effective route based on our experience. Here’s the formula to create a talented creative for your digital marketing team:
- Proven web design skills: Able to use image processing and graphic design software like Photoshop, Illustrator… with web skills to create graphic content using blogging tools like WordPress, even if basic but open to developing them.
- A mentor: If you’re a Pulseweaver client, for example, we’d be happy to provide your protégé with a relevant learning path to know what to learn among the diversity of possible skills to join a digital marketing team.
- A self-development plan: Give your protégé hours during their work time to acquire new skills. If you have a good HR system, you can easily set up a skill development planning system with regular progress reports, and see the results in the creative work of your digital marketing team.
- An adaptive contract: Business is business – what you’re doing is an investment and ensuring its profitability is your right. So, depending on local legislation, try to include in your protégé’s contract the necessary conditions to ensure they’ll stay in a way that extends the notice period for each skill the company invests in for them. You can even require them to reimburse the training if a certain time doesn’t elapse between acquiring the skill and their notice period. That way, even if a competitor tries to poach them from your digital marketing team, they’ll have to pay the release clause, allowing you to have a good recruitment budget and transition time.
And as mentioned in the previous chapter, once your protégé has become independent, high-performing, and their output is creative, don’t be sentimental: prepare for their replacement within your digital marketing team. No one will ever blame you for being too cautious!
Next Step: The Leader of Your Digital Marketing Team
Once you start to see the results of this good step and the impact on your business, the logical next move is to want to develop this department within your company. But here, you’re moving to the pro level. You may be tempted to name your protégé as the head of your digital marketing team because they’re part of it and you want to further build their loyalty… Bad idea! Don’t forget that not long ago, they didn’t know much, and likewise, they still have a lot to learn. So, if you want to do things right, you need a seasoned professional to lead your digital marketing team.
Your protégé can be promised the role of managing the creative division under the supervision of the Marketing Director (MD), and if you can even avoid that, all the better. Instead, give them financial bonuses, but let the MD set up their staff without constraints.
How to Recruit a Good Digital Marketing Director for Your Team
You can already hear those voices saying the DMD role doesn’t really exist and that instead, you need to… Let’s remember we’re talking about a small business that has just barely stabilized a visual content creator. So we’re looking for precisely the expert who will build the digital marketing team, knowing that the budget will be very limited, expectations very high, and competition fierce. They’ll have one team member who’s probably frustrated by their arrival, and above all, they’ll need to quickly make their salary profitable, otherwise they’ll rapidly be seen as a burden for your digital marketing team! Is that an accurate summary?
From this summary, you have the keys to find your digital marketing team’s star player. In short, they must combine technical skills and prove their knowledge in digital marketing; business skills, realizing that their salary is a cost to be made profitable; and leadership skills, even if in another sector, but proving their talent management know-how and ability to bring out the best in each digital marketing team member.
They must also have strong planning skills and set SMART goals, whether in terms of marketing or HR within their team, and clearly define the key stages: when the digital marketing team will need to recruit which profile, as well as taking over the editorial calendar.
Beyond their technical expertise, a good DMD must demonstrate leadership, creativity and excellent communication to unite their digital marketing team and carry the company’s digital vision. Look for someone who has already successfully managed large-scale projects, achieving or exceeding objectives, while knowing how to involve and motivate the members of their digital marketing team.
Like any leader recruited to build a digital marketing team, “lead by example” should be their motto. It’s not the time to play boss, but rather to get into the arena to perform the tasks for which no one has yet been assigned on the team, or handle complex cases to serve as an example. This is an essential trait for this profile.
Where to Find This Profile to Lead Your Digital Marketing Team
What you need to know is that unlike the creative, this profile is very difficult to poach. The status, benefits and challenge itself are highly motivating for a digital marketing director. If on top of that, it comes with good financial advantages and a strong development plan, ideally proportional to results (the more successful they are with their digital marketing team, the more they earn), it becomes very challenging to get them to move. However, it’s not a fatality, so think about securing their replacement.
According to our expertise, the best young Digital Marketing Directors we’ve met have a university degree in marketing, understand the fundamentals, and know how to interpret the numbers and methodically create good plans for their digital marketing team. They combine this with a solid first sales experience with real challenges where they had result responsibilities with serious constraints and a team objective, not just individual.
If the sales experience was for a digital services company, even limited to certain services, that’s the holy grail for leading a digital marketing team. But if they haven’t had a first experience, 2-4 weeks of support from a communications company to assimilate the different tasks and mechanisms to optimize the performance of their digital marketing team will be enough to give them a reference for what’s expected of them.
Our advice, even if it may sting, is to bring in a headhunter or executive recruitment firm. It won’t be a loss, because the success or failure of this recruitment will have a big impact on your digital marketing team.
Beware: Conventional Marketing Is Not Digital
In some companies, there may be a temptation to recruit a marketing expert with years of experience in conventional marketing and name them head of the digital marketing team. We’re convinced that somewhere in the world, in a large company, this choice has paid off for their digital marketing team, but if you find that example, we’d love to see it.
This profile can excel as the head of all marketing operations, and have on their team an assistant director responsible for the digital division, who reports to them and analyzes the scores compared to objectives, and sets the broad strokes for the digital marketing team’s goals. But someone experienced in field marketing automatically has certain bad reflexes that are very harmful if applied online, and they’ll never suspect these could be the cause of their digital marketing team’s poor numbers.
As a Good Entrepreneur, Don’t Insist!
Always think first about your profitability and return on investment. We’ve given you the most important advice to set up your digital marketing team in the best way, but it’s not a foregone conclusion that you’ll succeed in finding the right profiles and that the journey will go as planned.
All sorts of factors can spoil this project, like simply not finding suitable profiles for your digital marketing team, which will be the case for many depending on the population in their geographic area, local competition, existing job offers… Or even at other stages of the process. If you clearly see, on concrete bases, that you’re on the wrong track, then don’t completely give up on the idea of developing your digital marketing team, but this time, you’ll need to explore another avenue: outsourcing!
Outsourcing the Recruitment of Your Digital Marketing Team
Depending on your budget, your situation in terms of your digital presence, and what your competitors already have in place, you have various local and offshore solutions to build your digital marketing team. Beware of dream and lifestyle sellers; look for those who have understood your real needs for your team and are interested in you. Small tip: favor support proposals over one-shot deals! This way, you’ll make an excellent first cut in the proposals to recruit your digital marketing team.
If you choose this path to find your digital marketing team, please don’t be attracted only by the price. Take into account the verification of the confidentiality of your data, copyrights and their display, the conditions and commitments, especially the respect of deadlines and instructions, and what will happen in case of non-compliance with instructions or damage to the production or, worse, the brand image of your digital marketing team… Generally, these elements will all be included in the offer of a quality provider, but some will avoid addressing the subject, so keep that in mind.
Hybrid Solution for Your Digital Marketing Team: Mixed Opinion!
Some companies try to optimize their digital marketing team by having an internal structure and an external part. If you’re a small business, we advise against venturing into this territory and we can cite various recurring scenarios that happen in this configuration. This approach is generally viable in larger structures where this system provides control over private data by internalizing production processes, and outsourcing top management and planning.
This service, being the essence of the external company’s expertise, is consequently passed on in the invoice, which in total may be lower by outsourcing the entire digital marketing team because the external party will have its optimization mechanisms in place. But the company prefers to pay more in the end to keep control over its copyrights and private data. Aside from this case, your digital marketing team will not perform better internally than with a specialized firm, with whom you’ll also have the assurance of continuity, regardless of the continuity of the members you have to manage yourself by keeping a part in-house.
Take Advantage of PulseWeaver
For entrepreneurs who want to benefit from an expert and objective view of their digital situation, PulseWeaver offers a comprehensive, personalized analysis. This audit will allow you to see more clearly your positioning, your competition and the opportunities to seize, thus giving you all the keys to build a high-performance digital strategy and recruit the right profiles to implement it.
This analysis, which is offered exceptionally during the launch phase of PulseWeaver, will be useful to plan the actions you will automate via PulseWeaver, but also serve as a reference to validate proposals during your recruitments, whether for a DMD or outsourcing, by comparing proposals and gauging the quality of the offers received.
To take advantage of this assessment, simply create a free account by visiting this page: pulseweaver.ai. Once you’ve decided to take at least the “Conqueror” package, you’ll receive an email within 24 hours inviting you to fill out a form that will allow us to better understand your needs and provide you with an excellent assessment along with an effective action plan.
