Signs You Need to Hire a Marketing Manager

If you’re wondering whether your business needs to hire a Marketing Manager, the answer is probably yes. Just asking the question is a sign it may be time. Here are other signs that indicate you’re ready.

Signs You Need a Marketing Manager

Don't have brand guidelines? Team members asking questions no one has the answers to? These might be signs you need someone at the helm of your marketing department:

• When Your Business Stops Growing on Its Own
  When word-of-mouth and social media aren't bringing in the sale volume you need, it’s time to find a pro that can help you crank up your inbound and outbound marketing efforts. Word-of-mouth and referrals are great, but they will only take you so far. A Marketing Manager will help you create a sales funnel that develops interest, generates leads, and delivers potential customers.
  
  
• When You Can’t Keep Up
  As companies grow, needs change. You reach a point where you need to add more salespeople to the team to reach more customers. The more customers you attract, the more product or customer support you need. It’s the same with marketing.
  
  When you have grown to the point where you can’t keep up with the demand on your time, you need a Marketing Manager to handle things. The job is too important to do in your spare time.
  
  
• When You Want Consistency in Your Marketing
  Great brands have a consistent image. That means color schemes, logos, styles, and everything else has a consistency to it. Employees will tend to create things that are similar to your brand style, but not exact. You need someone in charge that can keep everybody — and everything — true to your brand.
  
  When you hire this "captain of brand standards," they will make sure there is someone on your management team that's always thinking of the customer first and making sure your advertising and marketing align with customer needs.
  
  
• When You Need to Shake Things Up
  A great Marketing Manager can find different ways to market your product or service or help you transition to a new approach. Their job is to bring fresh perspectives and approaches to your business.
  
  
• When You Need Brand Awareness
  It’s hard to create traction when people don’t know who you are. Before people can buy your product, they need to know about what you offer and what makes your business different. You may be in the top three results on search engines, but it still may not be good enough to get that click when you’re surrounded by better-known brands.
  
  One of the key elements of selling is creating trust with the buyer and mitigating risk. They have to trust that you will deliver whatever you are selling. Knowing a brand not only cuts down the clutter from the sea of competitors, but it also minimizes the perceived risk.
  
  
• When You Need Structure, Systems, and Processes
  Every once in a while, you may stumble on a viral moment that catapults a business into the public eye. But don’t fool yourself — great marketing rarely happens by accident. As they say, hope is not a strategy. A Marketing Manager can create that strategy and implement systems and processes to make it happen.

• When You Need Market Research
  In addition to managing your customer research, your Marketing Manager can oversee how marketing tools and research fit together to evaluate whether your strategy is working. The promise of digital marketing is transparency: you can see the numbers yourself and decide what works. The amount of data, however, can be paralyzing. You need someone that not only sees the numbers but can interpret them.

7 Things to Look for in a Marketing Manager

If you have decided it’s time to get some help and bring a Marketing Manager on board, here are some of the traits you will want to make sure your candidate demonstrates:

1. Initiative
   This is not a person you want sitting around and taking orders. Look for examples of how they identified an issue and created a solution on their own.
   
   
2. Creativity
   Have them show their creative chops by presenting concrete examples of how they generated fresh ideas and came up with new solutions rather than just recycling existing ones.
   
   
3. Research and Math Literacy
   They don’t need to be math geniuses to be good at marketing. They do need to understand the importance of data and how it can be used. They should also know how to A/B test various scenarios to constantly optimize processes.
   
   
4. A Legal Mind
   In any industry, there are things you can do and things you can’t. Your Marketing Manager should be able to navigate legal language and privacy laws. With the increasing focus on personally identifiable data and how it is used, this will only increase in importance.
   
   
5. Omnichannel and Social Savvy
   When marketing any company, you must find customers and target them. Marketing Managers should be digitally savvy, familiar with omnichannel marketing strategies and social platforms as they relate to your customers — and able to communicate your message across all of your marketing channels.
   
   
6. Inquisitive Nature
   Someone that is innately curious and always examining things from different perspectives will be incredibly valuable. In business these days, it seems like there’s a new challenge every day. You want someone that looks at that challenge and seeks ways to overcome it.
   
   
7. Positive Attitude
   This is the person that may shake things up, challenge the old way of doing business, or launch new initiatives. They need to be able to sell it both internally and externally. A positive approach and attitude can make a world of difference.

Now that you know what to look for, here's how to get started.

Starting the Search

Before you start the search, it’s important to clearly define exactly what you’re looking for. You may want a different person when you’re in startup mode than when you’re a mature company.

Some questions to consider:

• How important is experience versus enthusiasm?
• Do they need to have proven skills with a strong track record?
• Can you afford to gamble on an up-and-comer with great potential?

Make no doubt though, hiring is hard. Leaving a seat unfilled slows your growth. Making a bad hire can set you back. Finding the right candidate can propel you forward. When hiring a Marketing Manager, you can’t afford to make a mistake.

So How Can You Hire the Best?

Get help.

If you need to hire a Marketing Manager or other talent to lead your creative or digital team, a staffing agency is a great partner. Learn more about working with an agency like Artisan.