What Roles To Hire First?

When hiring your first Marketing team you need a certain set of basic capabilities to get going. Writing is always my first priority. Next are basic digital skills (web front end, analytics, some marketing automation). All your early hires need to be so called “T-shaped” Marketers. They need to versatile and willing to learn a broad set of skills. That being said, I do have my ideal sequence of competencies to optimize for.

Here is the ideal first set of hires:

Copywriter - Understand your audience. Quality over quantity. Positioning. Support your sales team with the first materials. Website content. Emails. SEO.

Growth hacker - Tools, data, analytics, web developer. Marketing automation. A competitive edge is a plus

Product Evangelist - Product training- & content. Demos. Webinars. Tradeshow. Sales calls.

Product marketing - 5ps. Research and insights. VOC. The product roadmap, competitive research & pricing. Promotions, campaigns, product launches. Your first MBA hire?

Full-time Team Lead - ABT. Manage agencies. Dashboard. Planning. Sponsorships. Has done two of the other roles.

Marketing Intern - Consider hiring one as soon as you have at least one person in the team who can mentor her/him.

Depending on needs you can add versatile campaign managers (Events, Channel Marketing, Tradeshows, User Conference). If you're mandated to drive awareness and market share fast you should consider a PR/influencer marketing role next. If you're building for scale, I would prioritize an "Editor in Chief" to get your Content marketing from good to great.