Clever girl. Your how-to-hire cheatsheet for finding your first marketing hire.

i got scammed out of $300 at 12:07am outside a club in Stockholm.

it’s the only time i’ve ever been scammed and i’m still salty about it.

how did this happen…great question, we’ll get to it.

But first,

Most first marketing hires are a scam.

it’s not their fault.

it’s just too easy to hire the wrong-fit person for the wrong position when you don’t know what you’re hiring for.

And most founders have no idea what the need for marketing.

Which means they have no idea who to hire.

Typically, i’ve been brought in after a company has gone through 3-5 marketers with meh results. It doesn’t have to be that way.

This post will walk you through what to avoid, look for, and how to find a great marketer who’s a great fit for your team.

How to find them

It doesn’t have to be a game of hide-and-seek to find great marketers.

Here’s some pointers on finding your person

Decide what you’re comfortable spending for the first year, divided by months or quarters (range is fine) and state that up front. Really helps weed people out.

If you’re not sure what your budget should be, aim for between $5K-$10K/mo (for 10-20hrs/work a week)

• $5K = 3 years of experience,

• $7.5K = 5 years of experience

• $10K = 8+ years of experience

if they’re not based in a major - aka expensive - metro

Also ask from founders you trust and respect where they found their first hire - they might not know someone, but they know where to look/ask.

Don’t be afraid to go the fractional route. 

They’re (often, but not always) cheaper or more flexible than a full-time hire.

And have the accumulated wisdom and speed of having done this process 10, 20, 30, maybe even 100 times, not just in their 3 last roles. (i fall in this boat! 👋🏽)

Check the comments on a larger marketer or marketer-adjacent peeps’ posts you respect (and is fully booked) like Sarah Hart or Marc Thomas.

Often smaller marketers who have space for projects are virtual friends and giving insightful comments on their posts. It’s a great way to find some gems.

For your first hire, do not hire

someone who specializes…in any specific marketing vertical

If you’re getting your first marketing hire, you aren’t at a stage where you can afford a specialist. you need a generalist (more on what that looks like in a sec!)

someone who wants to start with paid

if you don’t have foundations in place, paid marketing is effectively lighting cash on fire. you know my marketing foundations wall? the brick house? where here’s where paid marketing falls in the brick house.

and while we’re on the topic of paid - very few organic marketers are also good at paid. and social marketers? they’re often a whole other breed. Like in the grocery store, go for organic to support your growing child - er - company.

Someone who isn’t interested in understanding your product to the point that they could run demos themselves

You need a first marketer who is as pumped about solving problems with your product as you are. If they are aloof about the product then customers will feel like they don’t give a rat’s patoutie about them. This is not the time to find a marketer who emanates “cool”.

This is the time to find someone who will dress up as a 1960’s postman outside of a convention.

Someone who adamantly has marketing channels they love and will not deviate from.

Buckets of channels (like i have for “content” and “distribution” and my whole brick house analogy are frameworks. They keep you organized and on a path forward so you don’t chase shiny marketing objects.

But someone who says “I always do super niche channel” before or without doing the deep research into your company and market - that’s a red flag.

Especially if it’s a pay-to-play marketplace like G2 or trade shows.

someone who doesn’t have a clear process (isn’t organized)

“we’ll just dive in and see what we see” isn’t a strategy.

docs do not mean stuff is getting done.

you want someone who can articulate in the interview we’re gonna do x, y, z and then see where that takes us.

not the other way around.

I repeat: they need a framework! Or borrow someone else’s if they’re a bit too green to have built one themselves.

(if they’re super green, i’m talking 0-3 years of experience, then you might need to give them a much stricter framework, like my Marketing Foundations one, but honestly, you probably shouldn’t hire someone that green to run your marketing!)

for your first hire, you want to hire

someone who puts customer research first.

yes, there are problems you can diagnose and things you can fix out of the gate. but you absolutely cannot set the marketing course until you know what customers think of the product, the brand, and the team that’s building it. Plus the ecosystem that each of those things fits into.

Those first two weeks need to be spent on customer research and asking a lot of questions. NOT building campaigns because they have no idea what they’re working with.

someone who wants to talk to the whole team (and ask questions!)

Marketers might not always be extroverts, but they should talk to everyone in the room.

i’ll never forget starting in what i thought was a brand refresh role at a SaaS co i was consulting for only to discover on a call with my 5th teammate that the product had been breaking for the last 16 months and that was why there was a churn problem.

The customers were pissed. 

Needless to say, “new website” got deprioritized immediately and “comms strategy” got bumped up to priority uno.

There’s no way a single person can fully onboard a new marketing hire. so take off some of the stress and have the whole team pitch in. A smart, flexible marketer will be able to put all the pieces together and ask for what (if anything) they’re still missing.

No one is going to remember to tell someone everything and the fastest way to get caught up to speed on what everyone else knows is to talk to everyone!

how to setup your new marketing hire for success.

Alright, enough about how to choose and what to do. here’s a cheatsheet on how to set them up for success once you’ve found “the one”.

Because no marketer can do great work with terrible expectations.

Here’s a graphic of what the first 30-90 days should look like:

30 days - onboarding and customer research

• talking to customers

• talking to the team

• getting a lay of the land

• seeing what’s currently being tracked vs what needs to be

• deliverable: a messaging report based on customer and team convos and marketing channels they want to test, how, and why

next 30 days after that (days 30-60) - fixing the small broken systems and prepping to fix the missing foundations

• small fixes like setting up basic analytics

• prepping to fix the missing foundations like doing a website audit

• setting up benchmark data for existing marketing channels

• deliverable: analytics dashboard and plan for the next 6-9 months

next 30 days after that (days 60-90) - executing the small fixes and starting on the big missing foundations

• implementing the new email campaigns

• choosing an onboarding an agency or freelancer to fix the website

• getting the CRM and the product data to talk to each other

• deliverable: 3 small wins (which you can see based on what’s been done from the first report and that analytics dashboard), one foundation knocked out

and finally, what you are hiring for first and foremost in your first marketing hire is intuition, gumption, and learnability.

Intuition - they can pattern recognize and get an inkling (and it be worth trusting because they understand how the fundamentals of marketing work)

gumption - they aren’t going to be easily daunted when something goes awry, behind schedule, or breaks,

learnability - they will be all-in on learning your customers, learning your product, and learning what works best for your company and where it is right now.

Oh, and how did that scamming incident in Stockholm happen?

i ignored the wisdom of many people who had come before me (yes, on Reddit!) and went with the taxi driver hawking at the airport lobby instead of going out to the parking lot where the legit ones were waiting - because i didn’t want to walk any further.

Word to the wise - it’s worth it to go a few more steps to find the right person for the job.

We’ll see you and your inbox next week!
Cheers!

Powered by that fresh cut lawn feeling & getting excited about new crocheting projects 🧶 

Sophia 💜👩🏽‍💻 & Aelia ⚡️🧕