Let’s take two minutes to appreciate the good times we’re all enjoying right now. A rising tide floats all boats and for the most part inbound marketing agencies and creative shops in general are all doing well in today’s market.
The economy is good and businesses are investing in their own marketing. Let’s take advantage of this situation.
With that success comes growth and many of the inbound agency owners I speak with are asking who they should hire, when should they hire and into what role should this new person move into. All very valid questions. Hiring for inbound agencies is challenging but not impossible.
When it comes to inbound agency growth here are the roles you want to consider and I might also recommend you consider them in this order. Now if you already have one of these, then your next move is to decide when to move to two, or three or more.
Inbound Marketing Consultant
No matter what, you need people to take care of clients. Not account management, let’s get that out of the way, these people are responsible and accountable for teaching clients inbound marketing and for ensuring your clients get the results they’re expecting. When you’re agency is small, the people in this role handle a wide variety of tasks. They write, they manage projects, they execute tactics. This provides the flexibility a lot of smaller shops need in the beginning of their transition to inbound. This also gives the consultants a healthy perspective of what goes into managing an inbound program.
As you grow, you add marketing consultants to the mix. Typically we’ve found that a consultant is usually able to handle around four or five clients before their work begins to degrade and the client experience suffers. This is going to be 100% dependent on how you run your shop and what specifically you expect from this role within your team.
Content Creator, Copywriter
As you grow, one of the best ways to manage the transition is to move the writing responsibility away from the consultants and to people who are trained to write. This transition is also going to be dictated by the shear amount of content you need to create to meet your client obligations. If you’re selling a lot of content as part of your inbound engagements then pretty soon building your content team is an inevitability.
In the short term, you can outsource or freelance this to outsiders, but our experience is as you evolve your content strategy and content production playbooks having internal team members who you train, mentor and manage proactively is a big advantage. Once you take the writing responsibility away from your consultants you’re freeing them to handle more clients or spend more time with clients working to optimize their inbound program and deliver even better results.
Project Manager
Whether you need a project manager or a traffic manager or not is usually dictated by the amount of clients and amount of projects running concurrently. Another macro measure is the number of consultants. Once you get more than one consultant, having a project manager should be on the radar. Again, taking project management away from your consultants further frees them to get even better at the really important, high pay off activities like client education, inbound optimization and lead generation.
I’ve noticed that a lot of smaller shops appear to be adding this person earlier than perhaps necessary. Remember, this isn’t really a client facing role and when you’re small you want to focus your investment on those people who are going to spend time with your clients. This is why we emphasis the marketing consultant and content people as the first set of new hires. Hire the right people into these roles and you can make a big difference in the experience your clients receive from your agency.
The project managers are ultimately responsible for keeping your people happy. They make sure your production people don’t get over allocated, they make sure that work is delivered on time, which makes your consultants and clients happy and they should be keeping an eye on key metrics for your agency like billable hours, project profitability and client profitability.
Campaign Interactive
his role might not be familiar to you. We use what might be described as a junior developer to help our teams be more responsive to web and interactive needs. While tools like HubSpot make it easy to create landing pages, post blogs, build an email campaign or lead nurturing workflow, we’ve found that if people who have technical skills are able to work faster and more efficiently then when we have non-technical people (like consultants) doing this type of work.
Having someone like this also frees your more senior developers to work more exclusively on more complex website work which also goes towards helping clients get better results.
Designer
Finally, we should talk about designers in the context of content, web and to freelance or not to freelance. All these elements are intertwined when you’re growing an inbound agency. The design work an inbound agency does isn’t traditional. Meaning you won’t need a team of people to create ads, mailers, brochures, trade show booths, or complex graphics.
You will need a team who creates amazing content like ebooks, whitepapers and infographics. You will need a team who can design for the web, creating landing pages, home pages, and website pages that are responsive and tell a compelling story. This means UI/UX skills and interactive design skills.
It’s likely you’re going to want to train your designers on the nuances of design for conversion. If these resources don’t work for you directly, you have to consider how you train them and then, if that training is going to benefit you or the other clients that freelancers is working for too. In our opinion, owning is better than renting.
Growing your inbound marketing agency won’t be easy, but it should be highly rewarding and when you hire the right people you should see a major improvement in your agency’s ability to delight its clients.
Start Today Tip – It might feel like the time to hire is never right. “Make it hurt” may be ringing in your ears, but that’s the wrong advice. Hiring means you're growing and the faster you hire the faster you’re going to grow. In reality, as you add more team members, you end up growing INTO your new team. You take on more clients, you challenge the team with new projects, your clients get better experiences and refer you to more prospects. Don’t resist the urge to hire. Hire your next team member with confidence and watch your agency grow, grow, grow.
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