This article was originally published in the Elevate Your Marketing newsletter and has been repurposed and republished here with the author’s permission. Here is the link to the original article.
Let’s admit it first. No marketing budget is ever enough!
But there are times when you are not at the luxury of putting together a large team to meet all your marketing goals – especially when your business is in the early stages of growth.
Following are some of the reasons why there might not be enough budget and/or focus on marketing:
- Reducing costs.
- Having to allocate more budget to activities like developing the product/service, running operations, building the core team, etc.
- The initial few customers in many cases are gained using the founders’ and leaders’ network, referrals, word of mouth, etc., without any marketing.
Given all these, many entrepreneurs and business leaders would want to start slow with their marketing efforts.
But you gotta start with some marketing, especially if you want to scale your business to the next level. So, where do you start? What are the roles you should consider hiring for? What kind of skill sets should the candidates have? I attempt to answer some of these questions in this article.
Your Lean B2B Marketing Team
While the structure of a marketing team entirely depends on the nature of the business and its objectives, if I were to generalize it, these are the roles I would have in my LEAN B2B MARKETING TEAM:
Lean B2B marketing Team
- SEO content writer
- Social media manager
- Video editor/graphic designer
- Website developer/manager
- Email marketing/demand generation manager
Let us look at each of these roles in detail.
1. SEO content writer – the core of a lean B2B marketing team
Content writing and SEO are typically seen as two different skills. However, you could also find writers who understand how to apply SEO and bring traffic organically to your website. So, if you are able to find both in one individual, nothing like it. You could make use of the resource to get a variety of SEO-based content created – including blog posts, web pages, landing pages, etc.
It can be noted that SEO content writers tend to come at a heavier paycheck since they bring more value compared to traditional writers. You could also consider hiring part-timers (such as freelancers or contract employees) if you cannot afford a full-time resource.
Also Read: Getting Started With SEO-led Content In 3 Days
2. B2B social media manager
After the website, social media handles have started becoming the face of the company. Even though social media platforms might not bring you results immediately, every bit you do on them adds up over time. Here as well, you can consider hiring an agency, given that you have enough content to share and things to talk about. Social media marketing doesn’t work if you don’t have the right stories to tell.
You could also think about hiring someone with other (or complementing) skill sets – such as content writing or graphic design – in addition to social media management. This would be an added advantage and can help not just save you cost but get a few things done without too much dependency on other resources.
Related: Top B2B Social Media Marketing Trends For 2024
3. Video editor/graphic designer
If you are starting up, you might not have enough design and editing work on the table. Hence, it might be a good idea to outsource this to someone, especially when the tasks you have are not frequent.
Design is a domain where there are a ton of freelancers available on websites like Fiverr or Upwork. Many of them come with diverse experience and tend to deliver quality work.
Also read: The Only B2B Video Marketing Strategy You Need
4. Website developer/manager
If you have a heavy website with a lot of pages, it is recommended to build a website team in-house over the long term. However, you could opt to work with an agency or freelancer if the website is simple and does not have any complexity and frequent updates.
5. B2B email marketer/demand generation manager
This person can be made responsible for running email marketing campaigns as well as maintaining your lead database. This might also involve managing a marketing automation platform or CRM. So it is a good idea to look for someone who has some experience in using such tools.
In addition, the same resource can be used to run other demand generation campaigns. Examples of such campaigns include LinkedIn outreach, cold calling, and third-party sponsored email campaigns (such as newsletter campaigns, product updates, whitepaper blasts, etc).
To facilitate this, you can adopt either of the following approaches:
- Hire someone who comes with the different skill sets required.
- Train the email marketer to perform other demand/lead generation campaigns.
That’s all I wanted to cover in this article. Hope this was helpful for you to start planning to build your ‘lean marketing team’.
Also read: 5 B2B Email Marketing Hacks You Should Try In 2024
Skalegrow – B2B marketing agency
Skalegrow is a B2B marketing agency aimed at making life better for marketing leaders and founders in the B2B space. It was founded to address two key challenges in the B2B world:
- The lack of quality of services offered by marketing agencies
- The misalignment of marketing activities with organizational level goals
By introducing a consultative approach to offering marketing services, Skalegrow strives to make growth simpler and predictable for B2B companies. From SEO-led content and video marketing to LinkedIn organic marketing and email marketing, we offer a complete suite of marketing services to the IT, SaaS, tech, and embedded systems industries. If you are looking for help in implementing marketing tactics that work, please write to us at info@skalegrow.com.
About the author
Naseef KPO is the Founder and CEO of Skalegrow. He comes with rich experience across multiple areas of B2B marketing including content marketing, demand generation, SEO, account-based marketing, marketing analytics, revenue attribution, marketing technology, etc. He writes thought-provoking and relevant articles on The Skalegrow Blog and his weekly LinkedIn newsletter Elevate Your Marketing.
Prior to starting Skalegrow, Naseef led large marketing teams in multi-million dollar B2B organizations where he made significant contributions to the topline growth of the business. He has also appeared on numerous podcasts where he shared his thoughts on trending marketing topics such as the application of AI in marketing, startup marketing, ABM, and B2B content marketing, just to name a few. Being the founder of Skalegrow, he is currently focusing on helping its clients stay ahead of their competition by using innovative yet practical marketing tactics.
You can connect with Naseef KPO on LinkedIn.
