The modern marketing team: An Authentic case study

Video Transcription

All right, let’s talk about the modern marketing team and what that looks like. I still meet. Well, before I flip slides, I’ll just say I still meet a lot of business owners and leaders who’ve been really successful in building a great engine in their company and they’re trying to get the marketing thing right and they’re guessing at it. And they all want to find one marketer with three to five years of experience, who’s not very expensive, who will do all the things, the unicorn marketer. Somebody who can be a designer, who can be a copywriter, who can strategically create a plan, who understands data and metrics and can run events and can do all the things, and it just doesn’t exist. And it’s no wonder that they and great marketers get incredibly frustrated with this cycle. 

And then you layer onto that the idea that they’re going to hire one marketer and then give them no marketing budget. And then you’re really asking for trouble and you’re just asking to pull rabbits out of hats all day long. So I want to give you a little bit better, more thoughtful, realistic expectation on this and also assure you that it is possible to build a strong marketing team in a small business. I want to start by showing you two contrasting slides. And this is again an Authentic case study of our own company. At Authentic, we have a very robust marketing program with a lot of different programs and channels and activities very thoughtfully constructed. And to manage all of that, we need a lot of different disciplines, which means skill sets. We need a lot of different unique capabilities to be working together. 

So this is what it looks like at Authentic, to have all those capabilities, we need the marketing leadership, we need branding and strategic communications, content strategy and production. And you can read all of the other pieces and these are all essential ingredients to almost any operating business when they are building a marketing program. And then there might be other boxes depending on your business model, but the good news is you don’t need to hire one to two people in every single one of these boxes. 

You can start to build a really thoughtful, capable team by having the right allocation of a senior marketing leader, fractional CMO or whatever title you want to give, directing all the activities of a couple of potential key staff people, even if it’s just one other staff person who can be kind of a generalist with project and program management, and then the right agency partners or contracted vendors for certain projects. So in our world at Authentic, what this looks like is a fractional CMO plus a full time marketing manager and a marketing coordinator and then the rest of our team is augmented with long term partner relationships supporting the pieces of our program that have to keep running all the time and then we hire the right partners for projects. 

So if we just need to do a website redevelopment of our site, that’s going to be a project basis, not an ongoing augmented relationship. So this is how we help clients build modern marketing teams and get access to the right people in the right seats with the right utilization for the right outcomes. One of the ways that we do that, since all we provide is the CMO layer, is we’ve curated what we call our Ally Network. So we have well over 30 vetted, trusted small agencies, independent people who are the ninjas of different kinds of disciplines of execution like the SEO copywriting, all the things you see on this list and more. 

So when our clients have a need to execute in a certain way and they don’t necessarily need that person on staff, we can help to connect them and keep the ball rolling.