Six years ago I founded a digital agency Portland. For all the complexity of organising a business, the most difficult thing was to build a good in-house marketing team. I was involved in building teams for clients. I will share my experience with you. Tell you what problems arise when forming a marketing department and tips on how to solve them.
Hiring Specialists Tips
It is convenient to hire ready-made specialists: there is no need to waste time on training. Also they can start working right away.
But there are also disadvantages: Internet marketing is developing rapidly, so it is difficult to find ready-made qualified specialists.
A good marketer should have experience of direct participation in the development of Internet projects. and the achievement of a satisfactory financial result. If at the interview a specialist colorfully tells what he did in the project, but cannot confirm his success with numbers and profits, then there is a reason to think about his qualifications.
When Hiring, Beware of Professionals Who:
- overestimate their skills and qualifications and therefore will not be ready to learn new things or delve into the specifics of your business;
- move from one place of work to another, staying with one employer only for a year and a half and not having time to do something meaningful for the business;
- due to their impressive experience, they will not be loyal to the company;
- will be difficult to learn.
In internet marketing, good specialists are in demand, so it is unlikely that you will meet pros in your job search. But there are more chances to meet a mediocre employee who pretends to be a good specialist and, perhaps, sincerely believes in it.
Important Details
In practice, it turns out to be a profitable option to train university graduates with the necessary soft skills. This approach requires resources to create grades, steps for the employee’s horizontal career in order to further stimulate him to develop, as well as training systems and time for the process itself. But in the long term, this approach is much more profitable: you will get a team of professionals who are loyal to those who trained them, to the company and share its values.
In our agency, the head of customer service and sales and the head of paid traffic are specialists whom we have educated and trained from scratch. They came to us with no experience in Internet marketing, but they had the right soft skills (a high level of responsibility and self-discipline, attention to detail, proactivity, systems thinking, etc.), and also a desire to develop.
But raising a leader from a specialist without experience is not an easy task: first you need to train him, and then prepare him to manage people. But even this investment justifies the risks and material costs that you can incur when hiring stars.
Work with those who have the character traits you need and a willingness to work and learn.
Motivation Tips
Many employees are accustomed to the standard motivation – a fixed salary plus, perhaps, a bonus for achieving an overall performance. This approach has disadvantages: a constant salary eventually ceases to motivate – they begin to treat it as a given.
In marketing, everything is measurable, and therefore it is logical to apply motivation that is tied to the personal result of the employee and coincides with the goals of the business. In this case, the motivation should depend on the growth of profits from the advertising channel, for which the specialist is responsible. And this is good, because the motivation of specialists coincides with the motivation of the business owner, and the employee sees the connection between the results of work and the level of wages.
We analyze general statistics on employees in the format of a monthly report, we can highlight successful and lagging specialists and use this data to further motivate their work.
Practical example
In the online store team, we changed the motivation for specialists from “salary plus bonuses for KPI” (the latter did not correlate with the company’s goals) to “salary plus a percentage of the channel’s profit”.
The motivation was introduced in February, and the profits from the work of specialists immediately increased. The graph shows the dependence of the profit from the channel on the salary of a contextual advertising specialist. The new motivation system helped to increase the profit from the advertising channel. The salaries of specialists increased proportionally to the profit. It was a mutually beneficial deal, everyone made more money.
Tips On Development Of Specialists
A good specialist is constantly growing and developing. And in this he is helped by the system of grades and training. It shows what skills and experience a good specialist should have. So each employee understands what he needs to do to become better and earn more.
The key point is that a specialist must see a benchmark for development.
The system must be transparent, real to learn, and accepted by team members.
A new specialist, joining a team with a grading system, will find himself in a clear and convenient environment for development.
Tips On Project Management
The team also needs a clear and fair task management system to understand each priority and urgency. Experts do not like to be faced with a haphazard flow of orders. Therefore, it is necessary to organize it. Determine how the task should be described, what acceptance criteria and who is responsible for what.
You will need an online service where you can record tasks, indicate their priorities, deadlines and acceptance criteria. It is also convenient to use kanban boards to see tasks by importance at different stages of implementation.
Tips On Communication Within The Team
In a marketing agency, there are several critical changes at once during the day. It is important to transfer information from employee to employee quickly and as accurately as possible.
To do this, provide the team with a convenient task tracker, rules for using the messenger, equipment for planning meetings. Create a communication regulation that will fix the rules of communication and their consistency.
The emotional component is also important for the inner atmosphere. In large teams, someone will always feel offended for various reasons. An experienced leader must transform negativity into a constructive development plan.
At the same time, open communication motivates the team to find points of growth and weak points in the organisation of the process. Scrum techniques for teamwork will help here. Planning meetings with retrospectives and motivating the team for a result, not a process are the good idea.
Participation In A Professional Get-together
Everything in digital marketing is changing rapidly. Advertising platforms are developing, new approaches and services appear that improve the efficiency of investments in the channel.
It is important for specialists to keep their finger on the pulse. They like attend conferences, master classes both offline and online, learn from market experts. If the company gives employees this opportunity, it will be a significant plus to motivation.
It makes sense to communicate in a professional environment not only for specialists, but also for business owners and directors of the marketing department. It will give them ideas for business development on the Internet and specialists in the market. They will also be able to form a portrait of a good specialist. They will be more confident in navigating Internet marketing.
More tips for digital business read here.
