This is an informative piece as it clearly describes the field of marketing and what to look for when recruiting marketing professionals. Marketing is one of the most important disciplines to consider when growing your business, and it is an essential career path for those looking for a rewarding job with lots of options.
As a company, you should be looking for the following key success factors in marketing to make your position more successful.
Thorough marketing process
According to a LinkedIn article by Teresa Sprinkle, you should be looking for a marketing position with a solid marketing process. This basically means you’re looking for an area where your company, specifically your product, has some serious potential and needs to be developed.
You can view a listing of “marketing job title” job functions that contain this description of what a marketing position should be. Here’s a list of marketing job titles that describe this or have similar descriptions.
- Gaining market share.
- Gaining awareness and preference.
- Growing the business.
Marketing strategy
Marketing strategies are the overall steps you take to create marketing campaigns and improve your business. Marketing strategies can be broken down into three areas:
- Competitive Advantage (better your own position).
- Market Segmentation (narrowing your focus).
Marketing processes
Marketing processes are the processes you put in place to reach specific goals. You can see how these steps can be broken down in the different stages of your marketing program below:
Phase 1
These are the initial steps you take to get your company launched. During this stage, you will be working on setting up the company, hiring your team, and building a marketing plan to get your business up and running.
During this phase, you will have many one-time tasks that you need to complete before you can move to the second phase.
Phase 2
During Phase 2, you’ll focus on what Teresa Sprinkle calls the “marketing launch.” During this phase, you will be working on the following goals:
- Finding a good niche.
- Sizing your market.
- Setting your price.
- Reaching your audience.
- Organizing your products and services.
- Sizing your inventory.
Marketing plan
While you’re working on setting up the marketing launch, you will also create a marketing plan to run it. This will consist of your goals for the year and different components of the marketing plan to reach those goals.
Your marketing plan’s different components will differ based on the different goals you have for your business. Here are a few examples of the different marketing plans to look for during the hiring process.
Organization
There are a lot of things that need to be done to run your company effectively. During the first phase of the launch, you should be looking for someone with organizational skills.
You’ll want someone who will be able to keep your team organized and who will help with tasks such as keeping your team’s email inbox clean and up to date.
It would help if you also were looking for someone who can help develop a marketing calendar so your team will know what to focus on and where to go for certain tasks.
Skills
Another thing you should be looking for during the first phase of the launch is someone who has the skills you want in your team. In this phase, you will be looking for someone capable of handling email marketing, social media marketing, web design, website maintenance, content creation, etc.
You’ll also be looking for someone capable of working with graphic designers and copywriters to create content and marketing material for your company.
Different industries may have different requirements for this step. For example, if you’re working in a service-based business, you’ll be looking for someone with basic IT skills rather than someone who can write business plans and strategies.
Social media
In the second phase of the launch, you’ll work on building your social media profile and engaging with your audience consistently.
Since this phase involves marketing efforts on a social media platform, it is a good idea to include some of these steps in your interviewing process.
Understanding your audience
As mentioned before, the first phase of the launch is all about finding a good niche. By taking the time to understand your audience, you’ll be able to identify their needs and challenges, as well as their skills.
Once you’ve identified the market, you can then better determine your niche. One way to do this is to look at your company’s competition.
You can look at the websites they’re using and determine whether they’re even targeting the type of market that you want to be in.
Additionally, it would help if you looked at the most likely demographic to buy your products and services. For example, a casual business startup may not be a good target for many senior business owners.
While doing this step, you should also be looking for information about your target audience’s demographics. Use these public domain websites, such as the U.S. Census Bureau, to find demographics about your target market.
You can also conduct a demographic survey to gather the data you need. During this phase, you can conduct focus groups and hold focus groups to get even more demographic information about your target audience.
During the third and fourth phases of the launch, you will also want to include some analytics in your team. If you’re using Google Analytics, you can use the Audience segment to target your audience and better understand their preferences.
Determining your target market
In this phase, you will be looking for the ideal place to host your launch event.
You’ll be looking for the right size venue and the best time to hold the event since you will want to limit the amount of time the event will take.
Designing your launch
With your venue and audience decided, the next step is designing your launch event. The design should be tailored to your target audience and chosen based on whether you’re targeting millennials or Gen X. The time of the event should also be chosen for maximum impact.
Leading up to the launch, you’ll also want to build excitement for the event by posting content about your business.
