How to build a marketing department from scratch: one random girl experience

Illustration by Tatiana Shulgina

At first, I gotta confess that I’ve never meant to establish a department. It has just happened naturally together with growing scope of work.

A few words about myself: I’m in charge of organizational development in a web studio of 36 employees. And 4 of them work in the marketing department that didn’t exist when I joined the company.

In this article, I’ll share my experience of building a department from scratch, pitching its necessity to a boss and applying the systems approach towards it.

Initially, I was hired as a PR manager with a super wide area of responsibility. That time I was the only not a developer in the company, so I was supposed to:

• Organize educational events (IT meetups)
• Manage SMM (with the emphasis on local social network)
• Write and manage content
• Represent the company at other events
• Organize corporate events, parties, and develop corporate culture
• Manage the office: order water, food, stationery, etc.
• Deal with documents

Sounds like a lot of stuff to do, huh? But I got experience in many of these processes, so I could handle all of them. However, after a half a year, I prioritized all the processes and calculated the time I was spending to each of them. And I got a terrifying insight from it:

I spent more time to less important processes than to the most important ones.

One of my main priorities was building a strong employer brand because even though our clients are from all over the world, we hire only local developers that can work indoors (not outsourcing) to ensure the best quality our services. Therefore we need the best talents we can get in our city. A logical conclusion is that I must allocate most of my time to local PR and HR branding events. But operational routine ate a lot of my time and attention. For example, if I had forgotten to order water, the whole team wouldn’t be able to work. So I constantly interrupted working on the company’s promotion in order to fix small office management issues.

How to pitch hiring more marketers to your boss

Having analyzed the time and processes, I came up with 3 different ways to solve this paradox and allocate more time to important processes.

1. We could hire an office manager to take care of all the operational routine and documents.
2. We could hire a junior PR / SMM / Event manager who would take a part of my responsibilities.
3. We could agree that I keep doing everything I’m doing, but there won’t be any fast growth in the important processes.

I got myself together and decided that it’s time to talk to our CEO about this situation and see what his opinion is.

Semi-annual report

First part — show your results

I prepared a semi-annual report and presented it to my boss. The first part of the report contained the results of my work. Particularly I displayed the increasing number of social media and newsletter followers, event attendees, and listed other achievements I’ve accomplished since the first day in the company.

Relative increase in amount of social media followers; Illustration by Tatijana Shulgina

The goal of this part was to show to the CEO that my work did bring results and it was worth allocating more time to the processes of SMM and HR branding events.

Second part — prove your commitment

Taking in consideration that I work for a company not only to get a salary, but also to contribute my knowledge, efforts, and skills to its development, I added a slide with a list of things I can do for the sake of the company. This part of the report included specific KPIs I can influence and achieve. On the second column at this slide I put a description of experience I’d like to get working for this company. I did it because I believe that if a person is passionate about their activity, the results will be much higher. I’m planning to write about value-based approach to delegating in another article.

The goal of this part of the report was to demonstrate my commitment to the company.

Third part —show the opportunities

The next part of the report included the analysis of the processes mentioned above. On the left side of a slide I put the whole list of processes grouped together by the functional areas.

Then on the right part of the slide, I made bold the processes I have enough time for. I commented this slide with my thoughts on what more can be done within a particular area if I got more time. For example:

Comparison of all the processes that are needed to be done to those (in bold) that I actually had time for

The CEO and I had a long and productive discussion about the company’s focus areas and what role my work played in it. We agreed that allocating more time to essential areas of my work was a good idea, so I moved on to the final slide of the report.

Forth part — come up with solutions

The final slide included the list of solutions I prepared earlier.

1. hire an office manager
2. hire a junior PR / SMM / Event manager

Tip: if you need an approve from your boss or another teammate always prepare two or three options for him/her to choose from. In most cases, it drastically decreases the time for negotiations. And the person will choose from the options you suggest, which means you are already prepared to work with any of them.

Speaking about my situation, my boss didn’t want to delegate some routine but important processes to a new person, therefore he agreed to hire a half-time SMM manager to help me with social media and content creation.

I didn’t realize it that time, but that was the start of my marketing department.

How to apply a systems approach to growing your department

As you remember that in the beginning, I had (and still have actually) very diverse job responsibilities. So I know firsthand that a lot of not connected tasks cause distraction and lower effectiveness. I could manage such a crazy set of duties because I can switch between tasks very quickly and I developed for myself a specific method of not forgetting anything important. But I totally understand that it is much better to be concentrated on one major area, and that will lead to a faster professional growth.

I didn’t want a new person in my team to be demotivated by many tasks from different areas. Therefore I decided that it’d better be me who has a job description consisted of many pieces of a puzzle than my employees. That was a key principle I used for opening new positions in my department.

Step 1.

Define why you need to hire more people. Anything goes better with a concrete goal. You shouldn’t offer people a job before answering the question why it is needed. Without this answer, people you hire won’t feel committed to the company because they won’t see the connection of their work with the company’s goals.

Step 2.

Once you know exactly what functional areas are needed to be covered, you’ll know how much workload they generate. That will lead to understanding how many people you can provide with logically composed job responsibilities. For example, you need to cover some office management and content management for social media, but none of these processes separately will occupy a person full time. The decision to hire a content manager with additional office management duties is a wrong decision. It will lead to a failure in at least one of them or even in both. The team will suffer without the water not ordered on time or the content will be made in a hurry.

I guess you get my point. It’s better to hire a part-time content manager than distract him/her with anything beyond direct duties.

Step 3.

Explain to a new employees the role of their area of responsibility in a company’s strategy. How those persons can influence the company’s success and develop themselves at the same time. That will create a solid understanding of the importance of their work and commitment to achieving the goal as a team.

All these three steps are based on the principle described above: assign one area of responsibility to one person. That will drastically speed up the professional growth of this person in comparison to the one that has many different duties. Your role as a leader of this team will be just to make sure all your professionals are good team players. Because great professionals do not necessarily make great teams. So together with fast professional development, you need to provide them with the opportunity to improve their social skills.

Not to forget:

1. Don’t expand your team until you do some research and make sure that you will have good enough job responsibilities to occupy new members.
2. To analyze your workload and get insights on what’s better to delegate, divide all your activities into functional areas and check which ones suffer lack of your attention.
3. To pitch hiring new people to your boss, create a report that shows your current successes and predicted growth in case a new person is hired.
4. To help your employees grow faster as professionals and create their commitment to your company, assign each of them to a particular area of responsibility and explain its importance.

Conclusion

That was my experience from establishing a marketing department and growing it to 4 people including me. I’d appreciate if you share your stories in comments or advise me on improving this process.

My team and I

Find out what your leadership style is in order to benefit from it when you start creating your team or department:

There are 4 leadership styles. What’s yours?

As as an international public speaker Marina Paych shares her experience in leadership, organizational development, and marketing. Follow her work on Twitter or join her mailing list.