What Do You Actually Need Before You Hire Another Marketer?

Having sat directly across from CEOs, CFOs and a host of other senior leaders throughout my career, I know all too well the exasperated murmurs of ‘we need to hire another marketer’.

Usually the marketing ‘to-do’ list is getting longer (with plenty of ‘can you jazz this up?!’ requests thrown in), campaigns are slipping, someone mentions an automation is broken, and the person responsible for it all looks like they’ve received one email too many.

If you’re nodding your head thinking about hiring another marketer, hang fire before you open up LinkedIn. Let me ask one question:

What do you actually need?

‘Another marketer’ can mean an awful lot of things. Do you need someone senior to set the strategy, or a content manager for your website and blogs? A technical specialist who understands automation? Perhaps you just need another safe pair of hands to support your Marketing Manager.

Very different requirements, but too often I’ve seen them bundled into one job description.

The rise of the Jack (or ahem, Jo) of all trades

I’ve always found it strange that a lot of businesses understand specialisms perfectly well in other functions. You probably wouldn’t hire one accountant and expect them to be brilliant at tax, payroll, audit, corporate finance and M&A.

Marketing, though? According to some frightful posts on LinkedIn, one person should be able to run paid media, write a cracking blog, build a HubSpot workflow, understand SEO, create event campaigns, double as an AI specialist, solutions architect and data scientist, analyse performance, manage the website, draft the sales deck and somehow still have time to think strategically.

Out of breath yet?

There are brilliant marketers out there, commonly described as ‘T-shaped’: someone who combines broad knowledge in many different areas with more specialist skills in a few.

ChatGPT, Perplexity and Claude can make a capable marketer faster, but they can’t manufacture judgement. An inexperienced marketer with an AI licence is still an inexperienced marketer. They haven’t suddenly acquired years of commercial instinct, brand judgement or the confidence to tell a board when the wrong question is being asked. We need to be careful that the rush to AI doesn’t become another excuse to devalue experienced marketing.

But naturally, there’s a limit to how many things one person can be genuinely an expert in. Especially now, when marketing is becoming much more technical. AI is changing how buyers research, content needs real expertise behind it, and sales and marketing need more alignment now than ever.

So it’s sensible to say that you can’t keep giving those responsibilities to one person and expect the results to stay the same.

Start with the work that isn’t getting done

Before deciding you need to make another hire, look at where the pressure is. Sometimes it’s obvious, like having one too many campaigns running and not enough hours in the week.

Other times capacity isn’t the issue, but nobody has the technical knowledge to fix a broken automation, and your sales team are wondering where the leads are. That’s where I’ve seen marketing take the blame. Poor follow-up, a database nobody is activating, a website that makes it much too difficult for potential customers to understand what you actually do.

Hiring another marketer will certainly give you an extra pair of hands, but whether that fixes any of those things depends entirely on who you hire and what you ask them to do.

What needs to happen in the next 90 days?

This is the part some businesses tend to skip. They jump from ‘we’re stretched’ straight into hiring.

Instead, take the next three months and look at the business priorities sitting in front of you. Maybe you need to get an event and follow-up done, or build a nurture sequence for a new service. Perhaps the team’s pestering you for refreshed sales collateral, and your case studies haven’t had an update since two websites ago.

None of those automatically mean you need a permanent hire. Instead, you need to be clear on the right expertise and capacity that will help you to save time and, more importantly, make money.

Sometimes you just need the cavalry

A lot of the work we’ve been doing recently at Marmalade Marketing has come from some of these exact situations. The internal team is strong, they know the business, but they’re stretched one project too far, or don’t have the technical skills a particular campaign needs.

We’ve seen so many projects slip that could make a real difference to the bottom line, so we created Marketing As You Go.

It gives businesses a flexible bank of experienced marketing support that can be pointed at whatever is the highest priority, whether that’s executing a campaign, creating content, or giving strategic marketing direction to the board.

That’s why access to an entire team is so useful. At Marmalade Marketing, those flexible hours draw on more than 100 years of combined experience across strategy, content, campaigns, CRM, MarTech, brand, lead generation and sales enablement.

So, do you need another marketer?

Maybe, but work that out after you’ve understood what the business really needs. Look at what isn’t getting done, what calls for specialist skills, and ultimately what will help to bring you more revenue. Then decide the smartest way to fill the gap.

Sometimes that will be another brilliant person joining the team permanently.

Sometimes ten focused hours from the right people will get you a lot further.

If your marketing to-do list keeps growing and you’re not convinced another full-time hire is the answer, take a look at Marketing As You Go.

You’d be surprised what we can get done in 10 hours.