Every company wants to have a great in-house marketer, whether your focus is solely on social media marketing or a mix of other marketing tools. Here are five things a lot of companies mess up or miss.
Don’t Overreach
Often, companies send out job postings that are basically asking for a marketing Renaissance Man. If your posting asks for coding skills, graphic design prowess, content development expertise, traditional marketing and public relations talent, AND community management experience…there’s a very real possibility that you’re going to end up disappointed.
Few people are equally good at all things; those who are great site builders may have shoddy customer service skills, making them a nightmare for channel management. Likewise, a great creative marketer who comes up with genius ‘guerilla marketing’ ideas may take ages to struggle through some basic HTML that could have been outsourced. If you’re stuck and really want both a tech-savvy and a marketing-savvy person working for you, consider hiring two separate positions, even if that means you split the payroll budget and have two part-timers.
Provide Incentives
In-house marketing roles are fraught with all kinds of stresses that weren’t there ten years ago. Answering tweets at midnight, following breaking news, dealing with tech glitches, have all become tasks marketers face every day, or even every hour. It’s often a job where you’re on call 24/7.
So how do you attract, and keep, a great in-house marketer? Incentives. Give me free reign to arrange my office. Let me pick my tech equipment and apps. Offer a system for keeping track of some of the weird overtime that becomes a regular part of a social media manager’s life, by giving me extra time off or a trade-off in training and conference opportunities.
Encourage Creativity
Fear of being shot down or punished will kill creativity. If you want fresh, new, contagiously cool ideas coming out of your in-house marketer, make sure they feel safe to take risks. Picture your marketer as a kid scribbling with chalk on a sidewalk: your job is to create an umbrella over him that keeps the rain off—whether that rain is red tape, budget nitpicking, liability panic, or other bureaucratic creativity killers. Be honest with her when there’s something that just can’t be done, but encourage her onwards again with a ‘yes’ on some aspect of the project idea.
Let Go of the Reins
You hired your marketer for a reason. Trust in her experience when she shares her opinion, and don’t try to micromanage her process. If you’re not careful, she’ll end up feeling like she has to have a justification/education talk with you or the team every time she shares a new idea.
Letting go of the reigns also means letting your marketer find her creative rhythm. You may find your best creatives go home on Thursday frustrated with a new project, and come back Friday morning with a glorious first draft because the muse kicked in at midnight and they stayed up ‘til 4am to finish it. Creative minds don’t work from 9-5, and you may need to allow for some unorthodox working practices if you really want the juices to flow.
Admit You Might Have the Wrong One
This is pretty simple: you thought you needed A-B-C when you hired, but now you’re finding you need a B-D-F skill set. Instead of rehiring or adding to the staff team, you attempt to get your pre-existing marketer to fit their square peg into a round hole.
The reality is, a company needs change, and sometimes additional training isn’t enough to make your current staffer fit your needs. It’s hard to make a cut, but it can be much harder to find yourself spending tons of extra money on hiring a contractor to fill in the skill gaps your poor staffer just can’t fill.
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