How to Build a Marketing Team from Scratch

I own a startup and have seen a massive ROI on my marketing team. From talking to industry experts and my own experience, here’s how to build a successful marketing team from the ground up.

By Joseph Burns, Founder and CEO of Lupa

You started your own business and finally have an absolutely killer product or service. Plus, you’ve secured a nice amount of customers who will stick by your side. Still, you’re feeling stuck when it comes to growth, and I might know why: you haven’t sufficiently invested in spreading the word yet. It’s time to assemble a killer marketing team.

A study by Nielsen found that effective marketing can return up to 10 times the amount spent. This shows how much your business can grow if you invest in good marketing. I’m experiencing firsthand the impact of hiring marketing talent from LatAm. Here’s what I’ve learned from my wins and losses while building my first marketing team.

Are You Ready to Build a Marketing Team?

At first, when I began to grow my company, my biggest priority was to ensure we could attract a few client clients, provide exceptional results, and retain them. Most importantly, I needed to be confident that the service we were providing was the best in the market—or at least heading in that direction. However, no one knew about our service. I had to build a team to spread the word about what we do.

Even if you have a star product or service, as an early-stage company, no one knows who you are beyond your immediate circle of clients. You can’t rely on word of mouth alone if you want your business to last. So, spend significant time thinking about how to increase your company’s visibility to ensure as many people as possible know what you offer. Once you’ve done that, it’s time to start assembling your first marketing team.

First Steps to Build Your Marketing Team

Each marketing journey is unique. Here are some useful tips on how to create a solid marketing team that have worked for me:

1. Study what other people in your industry are doing

Find out what others in your industry are doing for their marketing efforts. Find some competitors that are doing things well, and aim to imitate what appears to be their most fruitful strategy at first. What channels are they using? What’s their main strategy? What’s working for them? Take all that information and figure out what best suits your product or service. Only then, you will know who to hire. Ideally that hire should have some knowledge in each of your top two or three options.

2. Define your main acquisition channel

Whatever you do, don’t hire until you have your first couple of main strategies of attack that you want to try. Is it going to be through SEO, email, content, community, product-led growth, or something else? Whatever you choose, make it your main focus when hiring. You may discover something that works even better along the way, but that’s not important right now. They say if you have one channel of marketing that works, you can build a big company, but if you have two, you can build a massive one.

3. Make sure the first people you hire are doers

Once your main strategy is ready, it’s time to start hiring. But, what should your first marketer be like? Don’t hire a fancy, big-name, Chief Marketing Officer right away. Get yourself a doer—someone willing to get their hands on everything and be operative. More importantly, they should be a marketer who can take a strategy, implement it, measure the impact, and change strategies or double down depending on the results.

4. Hire people with experience in the marketing channel you need

It might seem obvious, but your first marketing hire should be familiar with the channels you chose for your main attack plan. Whether it’s influencers, reels, blog content, SEO, or email, make sure they can handle the basic tools and have previous experience growing these channels for other companies. They can’t just know about it. They should have already implemented plans in these areas and be able to speak their results numerically.

5. Once you identify the strengths and weaknesses of your first hires, start expanding

Each marketer has unique talents and limitations, which is why marketing is about teamwork. When things start getting too complicated, it’s time to add new members to the team. Building your first marketing team involves some level of iteration and figuring out what works. Be patient, and you’ll get there. When you see something works, figure out who you need to operationalize to produce more volume in that channel and have your more experienced member of the team move on to improving quality.

6. Concentrate your efforts on what’s working best for you

As soon as you see something getting good results, invest more resources into that area—even if the initial metrics aren’t impressive. Focus on what works because it might have great potential in the future. Pour fuel on the fire. Remember, you only need one or two channels that work well.

7. Start with volume, then quality

When you’re first starting in marketing, the focus should be on producing a high volume of content. Initially, it’s important to get as much content out there as possible. Over time, you’ll reach a point where improving quality becomes more valuable than increasing volume. Once you’ve established a solid output, you can begin to fine-tune and prioritize quality. Operative-minded people are good for volume, and analytical and strategy-minded people are good for quality.

What to Look for in a Marketer

For me, this defines a promising marketer who can help your business grow—based on my experience and that of other CEOs and marketing leaders I’ve worked with on hiring:

Someone with a numeric and analytical mindset

They need to be able to tell you what’s working and what isn’t and explain why. Pay attention to how they use numbers to describe their work. If they can’t provide metrics, they probably don’t know what they’re doing. Competent marketers always back up their work with numbers. They can explain the impact of their work in a simple manner.

Someone who’s worked and learned in a company that’s at a similar stage as yours.

Hire someone who has worked in a company at your stage or one step ahead. Especially if you are a startup, you need someone who can build a strategy from scratch or grow a social media account from zero to a million.

Someone familiar with your industry

It’s not crucial, but very helpful to hire someone who knows your industry. If they’re unrelated, they’ll have to learn everything from scratch. While they can learn, it’s a big plus to have someone already in your world, especially when your team is small. This helps them better understand the customers, market dynamics, and competition. They’ll be able to take learnings of what worked for them in the past and also have the ability to make good content on their own.

Someone who can use AI tools

They need to be able to use the latest AI tools or at least show they are willing and able to learn. If they aren’t ever going to be able to use generative AI for images or text to speed up their work, your small team won’t be efficient enough on the volume front. There’s a huge advantage in hiring someone who knows how to use tech to make everything faster and better, especially in the early days.

Someone who is a student of the game

When hiring a marketer, find someone who is a real student of the game. They should know different brands and strategies, watch market trends, and learn fast. Ask them which companies in your industry or at the same stage are doing well with marketing and what’s working for them. If they give a generic answer, they’re not the right fit. Look for someone who dives into details about what’s working and why. They should also be good with new tools because the landscape of marketing tooling is changing quickly.

Someone who knows how to tell a good story

A good marketer can tell compelling stories that connect with people’s needs and aspirations. They should engage the audience across various channels, creating relatable content that shows the value of your product or service. They need to make people relate to your messages by tying them to everyday problems or situations. If their personal story isn’t interesting when they tell it to you, the story they will tell about your company will be boring too.

Someone critical of their work

They need to be very critical of themselves. For everything they produce, they should ask: How did it work? What was the goal? Did it achieve the goal? Why or why not? A good marketing team invests heavily in areas that show success. They should have a growth mindset and not be afraid to learn and change course. Ask them about mistakes they’ve made in the past and what they learned from it.

Someone curious and open-minded

They need to be very curious about what’s working and open to new ideas. Marketing is one of the most strategic areas of your business, and without a good strategy, you’re in trouble. Their curiosity and openness help them adapt to new trends and technologies, keeping your marketing efforts effective and innovative. They must be the type of person who is constantly patrolling other companies in their market and has opinions on why their new strategies may or may not work, and how they might translate to the business they work for.

Putting It All Together

Marketing is all about realizing that the strategy you start with will likely change along the way. What you expect at the beginning is probably not what you’ll end up with. Come in with the mentality that it’s a long journey with a lot of iteration to figure out what works and what doesn’t. You want to hire someone who can adapt to that and give you real results.

I love sharing my experiences, especially when building teams from scratch. If you’re building a marketing team (or any team for that matter), I’d be more than happy to sit down and learn about what you’re thinking. It’s fun for me, and I love to help. Let’s talk here.