What I’ve Learned Building Marketing TeamS
Do you need to hire a marketing role? Just write a job description, post it, and pull the trigger. It’s that easy, right? Most people discover quickly that hiring marketing is rarely that simple. Whether you are a small business owner doing it on your own or a leader trying to scale, the decisions you make early on shape everything that comes next.
This isn’t a step-by-step playbook. It’s a reflection on the patterns I’ve seen and the questions that matter most when you’re building a marketing function that can grow with your business.
Starting the Journey
In one of my early leadership roles, I stepped in as the new Marketing Director to replace the company’s first one. During onboarding, they told me the owner would never invest in another marketing hire. Their point was simple: you are on your own, and you will be wearing every hat.
I understood they were speaking from their experience, but it was an important moment for me. I realized quickly that if I wanted to build a team, I had to connect every role to clear business outcomes and justify the return. Growth would not happen by accident. It had to be planned and earned at the right time. This lesson shaped how I approach building teams. It is the same mindset that should guide your first hire and the decisions that come after it.
This was at a moment in a business where the founder really was doing everything. He was the spark plug for ideas, he banged the drum for media and he was the face of content. So how do you separate a founder into a team of people you bring in to grow the process and expand it?
A lot of this is timing based on what you can afford. The first thing though is recognizing one person can do A LOT but there is a point where you have to diversify the team and skills to scale.
Let’s walk through ways you can begin thinking about building that team from small business to beyond.
"The best marketing is a reflection of your internal culture and what makes the heart of your business beat."
Before You Hire, Test Your Options
Before investing in a full-time employee, you’ve got options.
Contractors
There are many skilled marketers who have built their careers and now enjoy the independence of working with multiple brands. This doesn’t mean they’re lacking anything because they’re not full-time somewhere. If they come referred and you can find them, they’re most likely a rockstar. I have worked with a lot of contractors, even later in my career. It is a great way to fill gaps and sometimes find a fit that you can eventually hire on. You can control your costs and remove the huge investment of onboarding a full time employee.
The caution here is the time not spent in your company. There can be some tradeoffs culturally and it can show in the output at times.
Agencies
There are all kinds of agencies these days. The same logic applies as when hiring an employee. Look for expertise, a strong track record, and referrals. Ask if you can speak with one of their clients about their experience. Do your homework.
I’ve worked with some incredible agencies that reshaped how I think about marketing as a whole. But I’ve also looked at invoices and the return on their work and felt it wasn’t worth it. One key question to ask is how much someone needs to understand your product, service, or pricing to create content and execute demand generation. That’s where agencies can miss the mark, and where a full-time employee who learns your business inside out can drive real growth.
If your business isn’t generating at least a couple million in revenue with a decent budget, hiring an agency is probably overkill. Even more so than a contract employee, they also are very distant from your culture and the time spent understanding your business at its core is just not there.
Student Interns
If you want another option, look at students. When I graduated from MSU Denver, I had marketing internships and still struggled to land a job. It is hard to break into this field, and it has not changed. I serve on the Digital Marketing Board at MSU Denver today, and I see how many students are eager for a real opportunity. If you are a small business owner who cannot afford a full-time hire or want to test what marketing support can look like, tap into local schools. You will find motivated young talent who are ready to prove themselves.
No matter the path you take, whether contractor, agency, or employee, the important part is setting shared success metrics. Build and align on clear goals. Define how you’ll know the work is paying off. Make sure your CRM and data are good enough to track results clearly. If not, you’ll hit choppy waters when it’s time to evaluate performance. Data tells many stories, so make sure you’re aligned on which metrics actually show your business is growing.
In stating these maybe obvious solutions, I do want to finish with an opinion:
Great marketing only comes with a healthy understanding of your product, brand and how you do business.
I say that because the following options can fail, and fail fast, without a good time investment in understanding your value proposition and culture. The best marketing is a reflection of your internal culture and what makes the heart of your business beat. Everything else is fool’s gold. So if you choose any of these options, ask for and pay for the additional hours to be more connected to your business.
Making the First Hire
First things first, do you have the budget? That’s a good place to start. This role will need to bring in enough business to support their salary but you cannot expect that on day one. Ensure you have the means to get this person up and running in their role. It may take more than 90 days, depending on your customer acquisition lifecycle too.
We could go deep into marketing budgets and goals, but those depend heavily on your business and how you approach customer acquisition. The key thing is that you know you can afford the hire and have an idea of the pay scale you can work with. For reference, I had a 7% of projected sales would be allocated to marketing expenses when I took my first Marketing Director role. This grew over a decade to 15% including the headcount for the team.
If you don’t have a formal HR team, do some general searching online for marketing roles that fit your needs. Some people want a general Marketing Manager who can do it all. Others see a clear need for someone to run advertising and maximize ROI. No matter the title, it should fit the skills and needs of how you find customers for your business.
If you’re meeting people at events and building a solid pipeline of leads for your sales team, hire someone who can enable and scale that. If your business is completely off the digital map and you know your SEO needs help, look for someone who specializes in SEO and content. These may sound like obvious answers, but they’re the foundation of hiring well.
ONBOARDING
Now, you have a marketing employee and they have their defined role to start executing. I want to connect back here to my earlier point on culture. Being a marketer in a business can often feel like being on an island. Why do I say that? Because I have lived it. Most folks don’t know what “they” do and why “their” role matters. I have first-hand seen and talked to a lot of employees that think the product you offer and how you do what you do brings in the customers themselves. To be fair, if you really have a good business they may not be wrong to some degree.
This is where I want to stress the importance of onboarding and keeping that team connected to the rest of the business. Whether it is through simple marketing headlines to the business through Slack or stand up meetings, little touch points where they can highlight their work and accomplishments can go a long way. It can also give you better connection to the marketing work outside of a dashboard too.
Ensure your marketing team shows interest in the business too. Setup introductions with leaders, or subject matter experts, around the business when they come on board. Make them “drink from the fire hose” of learning more about what and how your business operates. I have been thrust into positions having to do this myself and I have had that roadmap laid out for me, the latter is so much more enjoyable.
The key takeaway here is keep awareness and interest in how your marketing fits in with the day to day operations of the business. It will keep your brand and culture unified in a way that will result in more success for your business.
Growing the Team
Once marketing starts to click, the next challenge is how to scale the team itself and sustain it as you grow. This stage is about how you structure your team, and it should connects with how your company operates overall.
As marketing has become more digital, roles now live in different corners of a business such as product, customer experience, and design. I’ve seen companies split up designers in the name of efficiency, but it often backfires. It disconnects the people who bring creative ideas together and share what’s working. Another tricky area is the website. So much of the front end is marketing-related since on-page SEO, AI visibility, conversion, and brand consistency all live there. I view these roles as marketing, but they balance technical and brand responsibilities.
A very simple way to determine the next hire is to stay close with your current marketing employees. Through 1:1s and quarterly or annual check-ins, stay curious about where their skills are and where their passion is in doing what they do. Some people are craving career advancement and may want to lead your team to the next level. Others may be in a zone of happiness where they want others to come onboard to take things off their plate they do not enjoy doing.
EOS (Entrepreneurial Operation System) has a tool called “Delegate to Elevate.” It is a very simple tool in defining what you Love- Good At / Love - Okay At / Don’t Love - Good At / Okay At / Don’t love, I am paraphrasing their terms. The point is that I used this several times when I needed to hire, I would have people look at their job descriptions, reflect on what they do every day and fill it out. There were a few times it brought real clarity on exactly what next role I should hire.
A great example of this is if someone loves creating a lot of content within a role but does not like social media management. They may be the perfect person to bring your brand to life, but they are not the right person to write copy and engage with your customers on social channels.
There’s no single formula for how to organize a marketing team as you grow, maintain brand consistency across channels, or create clear measures of performance as your structure evolves. Talk to your team before making these decisions. Don’t finalize them in a leadership offsite without input. Getting buy-in and laying out career paths helps everyone transition smoothly and honors the people who got you to this point.
And when your team grows from a few to many, reporting and coordination matter more than ever. I learned this firsthand. When I had four people, we could summarize results together. Once we passed five, coordination became critical.
Knowing When and How to Scale
So how do you know if your marketing team can scale? That question has layers, especially now that AI has entered the mix in a big way. I look at three things:
Budget, including the percentage of revenue you plan to allocate to marketing and what that means for headcount and growth expectations.
Roles and efficiency, ensuring responsibilities shift in a healthy way as new hires join and support the growth you’re aiming for.
Alignment and culture, so the team understands how a new hire affects their work, what success looks like, and how you evolve together.
Scaling a marketing team isn’t just about adding people. It’s about building a rhythm where the team knows what to measure, what to protect, and how to evolve together. When those pieces stay healthy, you can scale confidently.
Protecting Culture as You Grow
My definition of culture is the energy within a group of people.
When I was at StickerGiant, we gave tours constantly to local business owners, tourists, journalists, school groups, and more. There was always a buzz. One visitor once said, “I think every single person I came across was smiling.” That was the energy of the place. It wasn’t just leadership or marketing. It was shared enthusiasm for what we were doing together.
That same energy became the standard I wanted to protect when I started building my own team. When I built our marketing team, I saw firsthand how every new hire changed that energy. Not always negative, not always positive, but always a shift. I felt that weight as our team grew from two to twelve. It made me hyper-aware of how each person impacted the dynamic.
Here’s what I learned about building and protecting culture while growing a marketing team:
Observe energy and engagement. When possible, I liked to meet candidates on-site. I’d give them a quick tour, show them the product, and watch how they interacted. Did they ask questions? Did they want to pick up stickers to take home? You can learn a lot from those small cues. Even over a virtual call, you can still feel someone’s curiosity through their questions and energy. The format is different, but the presence still shows up if you’re paying attention.
Value different perspectives. I never wanted a team of people who all thought the same way. The best creative work comes from different backgrounds and experiences.
Involve your team in hiring. I included two or three team members in every hire. It added perspective, surfaced better questions, and helped me avoid blind spots. It also showed candidates the kind of culture they’d be joining.
It’s okay to make mistakes. Not every hire works out, and that’s part of the job. The book Radical Candor changed how I thought about leadership and helped me balance honesty with empathy. I’ve coached someone out of marketing into a production role because it made them genuinely happier.
Closing Reflection
I’ve learned that marketing teams aren’t just built, they’re shaped. Every hire, every conversation, and every piece of work adds to the story you’re building. Building a marketing team isn’t a formula. It’s a mix of structure, experimentation, and people. If you focus on fit, alignment, and culture, your team can thrive.
