If you’re familiar with inbound marketing, you’ve probably heard a lot of exciting success stories. You read blog posts and watch videos on how to do inbound marketing, but few of them give you practical advice on how to gather and deploy your resources to get the work done. We’ve been doing inbound marketing on a full time basis for ourselves and a growing number of clients for more than two years now, so we have a pretty good idea what it takes.
Here is our recommendation for putting together an inbound marketing team. Whether you hire your own team or choose to outsource, you will need these skillsets to get real, sustainable results. Job descriptions below are intentionally set to 120 characters or less (plus url to your job posting) to make them “tweetable” for recruiting purposes. All salary ranges are approximate and based on industry reports, depending on region and experience level.
Strategy & Oversight
Inbound Marketing Manager: 5+ years experience,business and marketing, online and offline marketing, strong communicator.
Notes: This could be one or two positions, but the primary responsibility is developing an inbound marketing strategy that fits your company. This person may also be the project manager who oversees and manages all activities and reports results to Management. Typical salary range: $70K – $100K.
Content
Content Marketing Manager: 3+ years experience developing and managing marketing collateral, blogs, videos, webinars.
Typical Starting Salary Range: $50K – $90K
Copywriter: 2+ years business/marketing writing, blogs, whitepapers, marketing collateral proofing and editing.
Typical Starting Salary Range: $30K – $50K
Web
Web Designer: 5+ years graphic and web design, html, css, javascript, good site portfolio, usability, web analytics
Typical Starting Salary Range: $40K – $80K
Search
SEO/SEM Manager: 3+ years SEO/SEM with solid track record, impact of social media, local, LBS on SEO.
Typical Starting Salary Range: $50K – $90K
Social Media
Social Media Community Manager: 2+ years social media content development engagement and monitoring.
Typical Starting Salary Range: $40K – $60K
Lead Conversion
Lead Conversion Manager: 2+ years lead generation strategy, landing page optimization, closed loop marketing.
Typical Starting Salary Range: $60K – $80K
Team Costs and ROI Considerations
If you hired all of these people today, you would be adding over $300K in annual salaries alone. You may have some of them on staff now, but some of these disciplines are pretty new in the past few years, so at least some training will be needed.
It is possible to reduce the overall team size by finding people with combinations of these skillsets. Finding people with both Web and SEO skills, or Content and SEO skills is challenging. The most likely combination might be Content and Social Media, since these disciplines have grown up together in the past few years.
Failure to find the right people for any of these skillsets will result in a significant “hole” in your inbound marketing strategy and results. By failing to consistently publish well-written, SEO optimized content, for example, you will find it difficult to attract new visitors to your website, let alone convert them into sales leads. By failing to build and nurture a community of brand advocates in social media, you have very little chance of growing brand awareness outside of the search engines. By failing to create and test valuable offers and landing pages, you have little hope of building your business via online marketing. In short, if you want to succeed in inbound marketing, you need to invest in a solid team.
We know how hard it is to find qualified people to join your inbound marketing team. The right approach is to develop a realistic set of expectations for inbound marketing. Is it realistic to build your own team based on needed skills and hiring costs? Do you know how much revenue is required to offset labor and other marketing costs and make your operation profitable? Would it make more sense to outsource your inbound marketing?
Before you start hiring your internal team or an inbound marketing agency, make sure you discuss all of the factors in depth in order to make the best possible decision for your company.
Photo credit: Official U.S. Navy Imagery
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