Number 1 Mistake Entrepreneurs are Making when Hiring Their Marketing Manager

Did you know that 8 out of 10 entrepreneurs will fail in their first year of business? Sadly, just one bad hire has the potential to cost you 30 percent of your annual revenue. That’s why it’s so important to make sure you’re hiring a marketing manager that is the right fit for your business.

In the beginning, you’ll naturally want to do almost everything yourself. However, hiring a marketing manager so you can focus on high-value tasks you enjoy is something you need to keep on top of your to-do list.

Obviously, the two most important skills you need to outsource include sales and marketing. Hiring someone who’s skilled in these areas almost guarantees your success. Ideally, you should hire someone who’s a master at marketing who can perform the job better than you can. If you can’t afford that level, you can alternatively hire someone who’s eager to learn and willing to be trained.

Here at Balkan Hire, we’ve successfully matched over 50 marketing managers with growing online businesses. During that time, we’ve noticed one major mistake that entrepreneurs make when hiring someone for this position.

The Number 1 Mistake when Hiring a Marketing Manager

The biggest mistake entrepreneurs make when they hire a marketing manager is they expect them to do too many things. In other words, they expect them to be a jack-of-all-trades.

Of course, it’s common knowledge among entrepreneurs that multitasking is the wrong way to approach your work. It’s incredibly inefficient, and it can even affect your mental health. And yet, many entrepreneurs expect their marketing manager to do just that. They expect them to be their copywriter, graphic designer, SEO expert, and everything else.

This approach usually happens because the CEO overestimates their marketing manager’s skills and underestimates the time needed to accomplish these tasks.

In truth, there’s much more involved in marketing than you might realize. Just to drive the point home, let’s take a look at some common marketing tasks and positions.

• Technical marketing
• On-page and off-page SEO
• Website building and optimizing
• Landing page building
• Sales funnel strategy
• Upsell strategy
• Expanding to a new audience or market
• Product strategy
• Creating new content
• Social media management
• Copywriting
• Email marketing

Does that sound like the work of one man? Obviously, one person can’t perform all of those tasks adequately by himself. You don’t need one person to do everything. What you need is someone who can oversee the work of an entire marketing team.

How to Hire a Marketing Team

Now that you know one of the biggest mistakes recruiting marketing manager, let’s look at some more effective approaches to hiring a marketing team. Each of these strategies is equally viable. You should choose the one that’s most appropriate for your budget and situation.

The multi-tiered approach

With this approach, you’ll be hiring an experienced marketing strategist who can help make your vision a reality. Ideally, this person will have between 8 to 10 years of marketing experience and a portfolio that can back it up. Perhaps he even ran his own marketing business in the past.

This person’s job will be to create a strategy for growing your business. He’ll accomplish this by creating a budget, figuring out what tasks and positions need to be filled, and setting 3-6-12 month SMART goals for your business.

From there, you can hire a medium level manager. The ideal person for this position will have 3-5 years of experience with growing businesses. They’ll also be highly organized and have great management skills.

This person’s job will be to implement the strategy that was created by your marketing strategist. To accomplish this, they’ll work within your budget to hire freelancers and part-time workers that can perform all the necessary tasks. For this reason, it’s important that your medium level marketer is able to manage the fine details of your business without losing sight of the bigger picture.

Hiring a marketing director

Another strategy is to hire a marketing director who will more or less be your right-hand man. This person will essentially oversee your entire marketing department. This should be a person who has much more marketing experience than you do. Furthermore, he understands the vision you have for your business and how to fulfill that vision.

Some of the marketing director’s main responsibilities will include forming a strategy, creating a budget, and hiring a marketing team. A person like this is obviously a great asset to your business. However, because this is such a high-level position, they’ll also require a higher pay rate. Therefore, this plan is best for entrepreneurs who have a larger budget.

Hiring someone you can train

Maybe you have a gift for marketing yourself. Maybe you enjoy the work and still want to be involved with it. If that’s true, then you should consider hiring someone you can train to eventually take your place.

In this case, you should hire someone who has 1-3 years of experience in your industry. This person should be a fast learner, well-organized, and eager to learn.

The goal is for this new hire to eventually become your top marketing manager. They will then be in charge of onboarding and new hires. While this strategy isn’t ideal for everyone, it is the most affordable plan we’ve listed. This makes it a good option for entrepreneurs with a small budget.