How to Hire the First Marketer for Your Startup
Have no idea where to start?
This week we have a special guest post from .
Jessica is one of the most talented marketers I know and runs Organic and Greene, an SEO Consulting company.
I run into a lot of founders who are ready to hire the first marketer for their startups but have no idea where to start.
I empathize deeply with these founders. Marketing is an incredibly broad discipline. There are dozens upon dozens of job titles, channels, and acronyms. If you haven’t spent time working with a marketing team before, it can all feel like a foreign language.
To make matters worse, marketers are very good at marketing themselves. But unfortunately — as I’ve learned through a number of hiring mistakes — sounding like you know what you’re doing and actually being a great marketer are two very different things.
The starting point in hiring a founding marketer is figuring out exactly what type of marketer you need. And that requires more than just picking a job title, posting a job description, and using your gut to make a decision based on interviews.
Intro to the different types of marketers
The starting point for finding the right marketer for your team is understanding what the three core marketing disciplines do.
Brand marketing
Brand marketers help you build awareness of your product so it’s top-of-mind when your audience is in the market for a product like yours. It ensures you’re on prospects’ shortlists when they start shopping.
To do this, brand marketers focus on channels with broad reach and tactics that are generally more entertaining and/or useful than they are sales-y. They tend to specialize in content marketing, email marketing, event marketing, community marketing, and social media marketing.
Brand marketing is something that every company should do for long-term reach and results.
However, keep in mind that it takes time for brand marketing to deliver results. The discipline is more focused on creating future demand for your product than capturing existing demand.
Additionally, it’s difficult — and often impossible — to directly attribute leads and revenue to brand marketing efforts. If you’re going to hire a brand marketer, it’s important to let go of the idea that you’ll be able to rely on attribution to prove the ROI of your marketing efforts.
Technical marketing
Technical marketers are part-marketers, part-scientists. They thrive on data, experimentation, and psychology to grow your business both in the short and long term.
To do this, technical marketers focus on channels and tactics that can be analyzed and measured. They tend to specialize in search engine optimization (SEO), search and social media advertising, conversion rate optimization (CRO), outbound, lifecycle marketing, and account-based marketing (ABM).
Often, these marketers are highly specialized in one specific discipline and will have titles like [Discipline] Strategist/Manager/Director. For more generalist technical marketers with a broader understanding of all of the disciplines, look for titles like Demand Gen, Growth Marketing, or Revenue Marketing.
Technical marketers excel at getting your product in front of people who are actively shopping for a solution like yours. They’re also usually more familiar with more technical tools and systems and can do things like manage your website, marketing automation tool, CRM, and analytics/reporting system.
However, technical marketers tend to be (but are not always) more comfortable with behind-the-scenes marketing, so they may struggle when their role requires them to do more of the in-the-spotlight types of marketing that product and brand marketers excel at.
Product marketing
Product marketers help you gain a deep understanding of your target market and ideal customer profile (ICP). Then, they translate that understanding into website copy and sales assets that turn prospects into customers and existing revenue into expansion revenue.
At an early-stage company, product marketers are focused on market, competitor, and customer research. They use what they learn to develop a messaging and positioning framework for your business, create copy for your website, help with pricing and packaging, and arm your sales team with enablement materials.
As your company grows, the role of the product marketer shifts. They’ll work closely with your product team to determine which features you need to build to be competitive and win new business, and they’ll organize new feature launch plans. They also support account management/customer success with retention and expansion via customer marketing.
The skills a product marketer brings to the table can be a huge asset to an early-stage business in finding product-market fit.
However, product marketing isn’t necessarily focused on demand creation or capture like brand and technical marketers are, so they’re generally not the best choice for businesses who are expecting all of their leads to come from marketing.
If you’re going to hire a product marketer as the sole marketer at your company, you’ll likely need to have another motion in place for lead generation, such as founder-led or outbound sales.
3 questions to answer before beginning your search
Having a better understanding of what the different types of marketers are responsible for is a good first step in deciding who to hire as your founding marketer. However, it’s only step one. To further refine your wants and needs, there are a few questions you need to answer.
1. Are there any channels or tactics you’re particularly passionate about?
This is the area where I see founder + founding marketer relationships go wrong most often.
Most of the time, marketers have a core speciality. That speciality generally falls within one of the three disciplines I listed above. (Unicorns who are exceptional across all three disciplines are extremely rare. I’ve only run across one in my entire marketing career.)
What I see happen is that a founder will hire a marketer based on a project they completed in the hiring process where they defined the strategy they’ll use to grow the business. The strategies they recommend are all things within their core discipline, and the founder really likes and believes in what was proposed.
But later, the founder’s priorities shift. Another company leader, advisor, or board member (or random LinkedIn post) tells them a story of how they grew massively using X channel. Or they see competitors getting attention on a channel their marketer isn’t focused on.
The founder then gets hung up on that channel and insists that the marketer shift their strategy to focus more there. But the new channel is outside of the marketer’s field of expertise.
Ultimately, the marketer ends up without enough time to focus on what they do well because they’re spending time on a channel they don’t know how to succeed with. The end result: subpar marketing across too many channels and subpar results from those efforts.
So before you begin your search, think deeply about if there are channels or tactics you really want the marketer to focus on. For example, if getting more LinkedIn followers is really important to you, hire a brand marketer — not a technical marketer.
If you don’t, you’re setting both the marketer and your results up for failure.
2. What channels/tactics have you seen success with so far?
If you’re very early-stage and haven’t done any marketing at all, you may not be able to answer this question yet.
If that’s your situation, you might want to consider hiring a fractional marketer or marketing agency to help you experiment and find channels that work before you hire someone full-time. Why? You may discover later that the best channels for your business are outside of your full-time marketer’s areas of expertise.
Knowing which channels and tactics work for your business is a huge asset in making sure you hire the right founding marketer:
If you know paid search works for you, look for a technical marketer who has experience with paid search and SEO and can help you scale those results.
If you’ve seen a lot of results being very active on your personal LinkedIn profile, look for a brand marketer who can help you with social media, getting on podcasts, speaking at events, and creating engaging content you can share with your followers.
If you’re seeing a lot of traction with outbound, look for a product marketer who can help you refine your messaging and positioning and equip your BDRs and AEs with the tools they need to be more successful at winning deals.
If something works, hire someone who can scale it. You can experiment with new channels later when you’ve seen enough success that you can grow your marketing team.
There’s a lot of noise out there from a lot of people who are trying to sell you on a marketing channel or tactic because they want you to pay for their product/services. Ignore it. There are endless ways you can grow a business with marketing, but the best one for every business is one that you’ve proven works.
3. What budget and resources will your marketer have access to?
The answer to this question has huge implications on the type of marketer you need to hire.
If your marketing budget is just what you’ll pay for the full-time marketer and you don’t have any other internal resources who will support them, you’re going to need someone extremely scrappy who can get things done on their own.
In addition to being able to do 100% of whatever type of marketing they’re planning, they’re also going to have to be able to create designs, manage a website, and do their own ops work. Not all marketers have skillsets that branch out beyond their core discipline into these sub-areas, so look for someone who can do it all.
If you have a budget for or internal resources to help with things like web development, design, and ops, then finding someone with these skill sets is less of a concern because they can rely on other internal resources or hire contractors.
I’ve found it’s helpful to have a budget component to the project stage of the hiring process. Too often, companies will make the project requirements really broad, so they end up with pie-in-the-sky strategies that could never actually be implemented given your constraints.
Adding budget as something to consider makes the applicant really think about what they can accomplish on their own and what they’re going to need help with to be successful in their role.
So how do you use all of this information to hire the right person?
Broadly, here some quick ways to determine what you need from a founding marketer:
If you know there are channels you are personally passionate about -OR- you already know which channels work for your business, refer to the “types of marketers” section at the beginning of this post to select the specific marketing sub-discipline that will best meet your needs and expectations.
If you don’t already know what works or have very little budget to experiment with, you have two options: look for someone who’s been in the founding marketer role before, or hire a fractional marketer/marketing agency. These individuals tend to have broader marketing experience, larger networks, and a more scrappy approach.
If you need to bring revenue in quickly, have existing competitors, and are depending on marketing for lead gen, hire a technical demand gen, growth, or revenue marketer. These marketers are skilled at getting your product in front of people who are looking to buy it right now.
If you have a lot of runway and are creating a truly new category, hire a brand marketer. You’re selling a solution no one’s looking for that solves a problem people don’t know tools can solve. Great brand marketing can help you create demand where it doesn’t exist.
If you haven’t found product-market fit yet or are relying largely on outbound or founder-led sales, hire a product marketer. They can help you find product-market fit, better understand your audience, and get leads who are already speaking with your sales team more engaged and excited about your product.
Beyond this, it can also be helpful to make sure that the person you hire has experience in your industry and growth model. Ecommerce marketing is very different from B2B SaaS marketing, and marketing a PLG product is very different from marketing a sales-led product.
Finding someone who’s done the work you need them to do before will give them a fairly large head start on being successful because they’re not starting from scratch.
