The Three Most Costly Marketing Hiring Mistakes

The Three Most Costly Marketing Hiring Mistakes

Have you ever wondered about the three most costly marketing hiring mistakes? These mistakes silently drain budgets and stunt growth. Stay tuned because understanding these pitfalls can save you a lot of time, money, and heartache. And that is what I'm going to dig into in today's episode.

Hi, I am Tim Fitzpatrick with Rialto Marketing, where we believe marketing shouldn't be difficult, and you must remove your revenue roadblocks if you I want to accelerate growth. Thank you so much for taking the time to tune in today.

So these three mistakes that I'm going to share today happen all the time. I talk to people each week that are making these mistakes. I do not want that for you, which is why I'm going to walk you through these three mistakes today. So let's just get into it as a solo episode, and I'm going to bang this out for you and give you as much value as I possibly can.

The Marketing Manager Mistake

First mistake, I call the Marketing Manager mistake. And this could be a marketing coordinator, too. Typically, it's that first marketing hire that you make as a marketing assistant, coordinator, manager. You are hiring in-house. And one of the first mistakes I see with this is expecting a Marketing Manager to be strategic. In the majority of cases, it would be the exception rather than the rule. But most of the time, they're just They're not strategic. They don't have that experience. They can be great implementers. They can be great at just following plans and getting things done. But don't expect them to be able to put together your entire marketing strategy. It's just totally unrealistic. They typically need that leadership and strategic guidance, which means you as the owner have to give it to them or you have to have somebody else that can help provide that leadership and strategic guidance. The second thing I see with marketing managers is expecting too much of them. Unicorn Those do not exist. I've glanced at Marketing Manager ads, and the expectations of what they want this person to do, it's like a five-year-old's Christmas list. You're rolling out the the tape and the paper is just rolling along the floor for 30 feet. It's ridiculous. It is not realistic. It is never going to happen. Frankly, I think when you do that, you're also communicating that you don't have a good handle on what actually needs to happen from a leadership and a strategic standpoint with marketing. So if you expect them to do everything, it ain't going to work because marketing is too broad and nobody is going to be great at everything. One person can be really good at getting a lot of various tasks done, but don't expect them to know every single one of those tasks in and out from a strategic and a higher level standpoint. It's just not realistic. So recommendation here. I would recommend hiring a virtual assistant first. Much cheaper. You can do it on a part-time basis. I think it's going to be equally as effective, and it is a great way for you to dip your toe in the water before you actually hire full-time. Because I think sometimes people are hiring for a full-time person in-house, feeling, Oh, they've got to be in-house. I want them to be here. When they don't, they're skipping a few steps. I think hiring a virtual marketing assistant, and there are a number of great companies that have marketing virtual assistants, that that's all they do is marketing. So I think that is a great intermediary step here to help avoid this problem.

The Marketing Agency Mistake

Number two, marketing agency mistake. Agencies are not strategic. At least the majority of them aren't. Some will argue with me on this, but they're not. Okay? Many agencies are great at execution, but they often require clear guidance and strategic direction from the client if what they're doing is going to have the highest likelihood of success. The strategy is the fuel. If you do not give them the fuel, they have vehicles that they're using and they don't have fuel for those vehicles, which is, in my opinion, why a lot of times people hire agencies agencies, and they have a horrible experience. Oh, I did that. It didn't work. Well, it didn't work because they didn't have the strategic guidance and the leadership that they needed to be successful. Do not expect your agency to be strategic. Do not approach them and say, I don't know what to do. I need a plan. What should I do? What do you think they're going to do? They're going to recommend what they do as the solution solution to your problems and the silver bullet that's going to miraculously fix all of the marketing issues you ever had. And that's just a horrible experience waiting to happen. So don't do it. You need to go to an agency with the strategy, and then they can actually implement the vehicles. I also think having one company put together your plan and handle all the implementation is a conflict of interest. Again, it goes back to the point I just made. If they are making money off of what they recommend in the plan, there's a conflict of interest. I don't care how objective they are. If they make more money doing one thing over another, there's always going to be that baseline in the back of their mind going, Oh, yeah, this will work. We can make this work. They're not objective. You need to have the people that are leading your efforts and putting your plan together and driving strategy separate from those people that are doing implementation. Just my opinion. Take it for what it's worth. If you want to go down that path, and because you think it's going to be the easy button, go ahead. But in the vast majority of cases, you are going to find that it doesn't work well. So there I said it. It's out on the table.

The Chief Marketing Officer Mistake

Last one, number three, the chief marketing officer mistake. There's cost and efficiency here. A full-time CMO can be a significant expense, which may not be justified if your business doesn't acquire a full-time strategic leader. So oftentimes I'll see people thinking they need a CMO, but they don't realize, can I get somebody on a part-time basis? And the answer is, yes, you can. Because when you hire a full-time CMO, but you don't need a full-time CMO, you end up with underutilization. Smaller companies may not have enough work to keep a full-time CMO fully engaged, which leads to wasted resources. They expect... I can see this happen in job ads when they're advertising for a CMO, and in the laundry list of things that they expect that person to do, there's a bunch of tactical, more implementation-focused work. We expect you to post and manage our social media accounts, or we expect you to manage and update our website. That is a horrible use of a higher-level executive person. You're paying high-level dollars for something that doesn't cost that much to actually get done. So it doesn't make any sense. So if you're thinking you need to hire a full-time CMO and you're not doing at least 15 to $20 million in revenue, you need to have a really good reason why you're doing that. Because most people that are even up to 20 million, 20 million seems to be that transition point where, okay, it might make sense to hire somebody full-time. Below 20 million, you should have a very strong reason why you're going to hire a full-time. And if you don't, hire somebody part-time. We offer those services. There's plenty of other people that offer those services. You can hire a part-time or outsourced marketing executive or a fractional CMO, which a lot of people refer to. You can do that. It is a much better utilization of your resources. Because if you have the budget to hire a full-time CMO, but you don't need one, hire a fractional for a fraction of the cost and utilize the rest of that budget to carry out the implementation and execution of what they put together. It's a far better use of resources, right? That fractional CMO solution is just... I highly recommend considering a fractional or part-time Chief Marketing Officer to get that higher level strategic input, that leadership input without the full-time cost. Now, if you need a full-time CMO, cool. Hire somebody full-time. But the majority of people I see hiring for a full-time CMO do not need one. And that is a big, big mistake.

Conclusion

So let me run through these really quickly again. You've got the Marketing Manager mistake. You've got the marketing agency mistake, and you have the chief marketing officer mistake. Please do not make these mistakes. I have brought them to your attention now. I hope this has been helpful. If you've got further questions or roadblocks with this, you're just not sure, reach out to us, rialtomarketing.com. It's RIALTOmarketing.com. You can connect with us. Schedule a call with me there. I'd be happy to talk to you. The other resource we have for you, when we work with clients, we help them remove nine revenue roadblocks with marketing. If you've got roadblocks in any of these areas, it is slowing down your growth, and you need to remove them. If you want to know which of the nine are slowing down your growth, you can do that at RevenueRoadblockscorecard.com. Revenueroadblockscorecard.com takes less than five minutes. It is a customized report, tons of value, so take advantage of that there. Or like I said, connect with us at rialtomarketing.com. I hope you have found this helpful. Until next time. Take care.