How to Build an Internal Inbound Marketing Team

So you’ve decided that your company needs to start doing some inbound marketing. The question now is “Should I build an internal team, or should I outsource?” It really comes down to two things:

• What is your budget?
• How fast do you want to see results?

Outsourcing is faster in most cases and requires less money. This is because you are using an already experienced team at partial capacity.

If you don’t need to see results in the first three to six months and have a larger budget to spend, then creating your own inbound team may be the way to go.

But what do you do first?

Step 1: Hire a Copywriter/Strategist

You’ll need to start creating content right away, so your best bet is to hire a copywriter who can turn into a marketing strategist or a marketing strategist who is good at writing. This person will hold a dual role as both a marketer and a copywriter. As things progress, you can graduate this person into a full-time marketing role, then hire a new copywriter and repeat this process until you have a full staff.

Your marketing strategist will be responsible for the following:

• Inbound Marketing Execution
• Team Management
• Quality Control
• Continuing Education
• Other Additional Tasks

This person will need to undergo a three month training period, so consider that as well. Assuming you are using HubSpot, the HubSpot academy can be a great resource for training and educating your staff on inbound marketing.

Step 2: Hire a Designer    

The next step is to hire a designer. This person should be skilled at design as well as developing websites.  If you can’t find someone with equal capabilities, decide which is most valuable to you and hire the best talent you can find in that area.

Almost all of your prospects will visit your website at some point. For most, it will be the starting point in their journey with your brand. This makes it a very important part of your image that will affect how your company is perceived. Hiring somebody to design and manage your website is an absolute must once your inbound campaign picks up steam.

Step 3: Hire Full-Time Copywriter

Ideally, you want a three person inbound team to get things started. If your first step was to hire a dual role copywriter/marketing strategist, that person should have graduated to a full-time marketing role by now. This means you need to find someone who can write content for you on a full-time basis. They should have excellent writing skills and be able to produce several pieces of content each day. 

Now you have a three person inbound marketing team that can execute all the necessary tasks for a successful inbound campaign. The next step is to look for the nice-to-haves, otherwise known as speciaslists, to enhance your efforts and drive further results. 

Step 4: Hire Specialists

Your consultant, copywriter, and designer are essential to your inbound campaign. They are the must-haves. Once you have filled these roles, you can start looking for the nice-to-haves. Some additional roles you might want to fill will include:

• Paid media specialist – Also known as a PPC expert, a paid media specialist will handle all your pay-per-click advertising. This person will need to be creative as well as analytical. Unless you have prior experience with PPC yourself, you shouldn’t try to do it alone.

• Video marketing specialist – These days, video marketing plays a huge role in most marketing campaigns and inbound marketing is no different. Video specialists actually play a big part in shaping the overall marketing message as well the overall business strategy.

As mentioned above, these roles are not 100% necessary to your inbound campaign. If you do not have the budget or workload to support them full-time, these tasks can be outsourced to an agency.

Step 5: Speed it Along

When working with an agency, they will already have the knowledge and experience to create content right away. Outsourcing your inbound marketing will typically produce results within the first three to six months.

If you are creating your own team, you need to account for the time it takes to train your staff. There is typically a learning curve for someone who is new to inbound marketing. This means it can take longer to see results. During this learning period, three main tasks should be accomplished:

• Purchasing and learning HubSpot
• Training your team
• Building a library of content

You can speed this process along with the help of professional trainers and consultants. HubSpot has a great program in place to help businesses succeed with inbound marketing. They can provide basic consulting and training that will help cut down the learning curve and get you set up so you can start produce results much sooner.

The Choice is Yours

The choice between outsourcing and insourcing really comes down to two things: your budget and your timeline. Outsourcing produces faster results and requires less spending. However, if you have the time and resources to build your own team, you should do it. These steps will help you build your own inbound marketing team and execute that brilliant growth strategy of yours.