Getting your company from a one-man-team to growing it to scale up and suddenly having 10, let alone 50, can be daunting. There are many balls to juggle in the air and Marketing will be just one of them.
Once you’re ready to focus on it, however, it will assist your company’s growth in aspects from brand strategy all the way down to day-to-day consumer engagement.
Establish the Brand
If you haven’t at this point already considered what exactly you want your brand, voice, and personality to be, this should be the very first thing you do before growing your Marketing and its team. If you don’t know ‘who‘ the core of your company is, how will your customers know if they can trust you?
Integrity may sound like an arbitrary thing for a company to uphold, but people notice. They see when you say one thing and do another. They know when you’re awake. Ok maybe not awake, but posting on social media! Stay true to the core of the values of the company and its mission and you will drive the brand’s voice and strategy.
Next, determine what exactly your company stands for. The topics, links, images and more that you will be voicing on social media, advertisements, things customer service representatives say, and even conversations between employees will permeate throughout.
Have a guide that explicitly provides all of the details about who the company should be and what customers and employees should expect. Outline exactly what the company likes or doesn’t like, give it its own persona. This will allow your marketers and CSR’s alike to know exactly what to say (or not to say) to customers.
This personality will also contribute to the culture – keep reading for more on this as well.
Scale up the Team
Staying competitive in the growing business culture is, of course, a massive challenge. As a scale-up, you will need to have a great core team within each department to begin with as they will be your champions and your go-to for deciding upon new hires.
Your Marketing department in particular should contain the following core team at a minimum:
- Manager
- Graphic designer
- Writer/Content manager
- Strategist/Marketing Assistant
This team will be just the beginning of your building phase but a crucial aspect of being able to scale.
The next piece of maintaining your foundation while expanding is going to be building this core team’s skills up. Investing in your people’s knowledge will not only benefit your company’s growth, but their own, and the loyalty between you both.
This also provides an opportunity for management to support their team. There are softwares that can help track progress and even offer feedback according to SelectHub. It’s also been shown that you’ll hire better people to begin with because they’ll see the high value in a company that’s willing to invest in them and be happy to do the same in return.
Keep the Culture
Many entrepreneurs start a company with hopes of developing a unique brand, a great environment for employees and customers alike, and successful team. Scaling up, however, has often been credited with the loss of culture, and subsequently the motivation, for the employees. There are a number of articles out there to help you prevent this, but the Marketing world has a bit of its own culture within the company.
Navigating the growth of this department starts with creating clear goals. When there is no real definition of your company’s success, there will be confusion with what data to focus on, what market to target, even what to say when someone asks what your company is all about. Defining this will also help the management to focus on the goal instead of tasks, freeing your team to be creative and develop innovative techniques to reach your audience.
What this does is allow management more freedom to grow the company. They’re also free to encourage team members to contribute, ensure its success, and guide each individual in improving upon each experiment. They can also utilize the culture and company’s brand to create a clear voice to current and potential customers. If the posts going out are scattered and without clarity of personality, then the customers will not trust you – and we know trust is everything.
Bring it All Together
Whatever route you choose in creating and building your company, make sure it’s at least a glimmer of what you hoped for by planning ahead. Combine these efforts and involve your team and everyone will be much happier to not only work there, but become invested in its success. Best of luck to you and all of your ventures and if you need a revamped Marketing Strategy, contact me today!