🎙️ Episode #23

How to Build and Scale Your Marketing Team – with Lindsay Tjepkema

Show Notes

Marketing often begins as a solo effort, but scaling requires strategic decisions about hiring a marketer, structuring a team, and growing operations effectively.

In this episode, marketing leader Lindsay Tjepkema shares her insights on building a marketing team from the ground up. With a career spanning B2B branding across e-commerce, app development, and martech, Lindsay has collaborated with industry giants like Intel and LinkedIn, bringing a wealth of experience to the table.

Lindsay is also the founder of Casted, the first podcast and video marketing platform for B2B brands, with clients like IBM, Salesforce, and HubSpot. Additionally, through her consultancy Human Brands Win, she advises founders and thought leaders on crafting marketing strategies that drive meaningful growth.

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Thanks to Lindsay for joining us and providing valuable insights into hiring a marketer and scaling operations. Next week, we explore how to get the best out of fractional marketing talent with Margaret Kelsey.

plugin.fm is brought to you by Freemius, your all-in-one e-commerce partner for selling software, plugins, themes, and SaaS. If you enjoyed this episode, head to plugin.fm to check out previous episodes.

 

Episode Contributors:

Lindsay Tjepkema — Guest

Goran Mirkovic — Co-host

Patrick Rauland — Co-host

Vova Feldman — Content quality control

Zee Hazan — Audio and video quality control

Emiliano Pioli — Audio and video editing

Goran Mirkovic — Content research and preparation

Scott Murcott — Content QA


Chapters & Episode Notes

00:00Introduction: Taking the First Steps in Building a Marketing Team with Lindsay Tjepkema

1:31When to Make Your First Marketing Hire: Key Factors for Growing Teams

5:58Empowering Your First Marketing Hire: Building the Foundation Before Growth

10:45Founders as Visionaries: Amplifying the Story with the Right Partner

14:10Measuring Success with Thought Partners: Setting Clear Expectations

16:45Building Trust & Finding the Right Marketer: A Key to Successful Partnerships

22:06Testing the Waters: The Value of Fractional Expertise and Trial Periods

26:07Brand & Demand: Bridging Thought Leadership with Growth

31:31Building a Marketing Team: Tech, Culture, and Embracing Experimentation

34:21Outro

Transcript

Lindsay: I’m not a huge baseball fan, but if you want to score points, you have to fill the bases.

Patrick: Today, we’re going to be chatting with Lindsay Tjepkema about taking the first steps toward building a marketing team.

Lindsay: You don’t just hit home run after home run after home run. That’s not how marketing works. You have to get people on all the bases. You start making points when people run the bases and come home.

Patrick: She’s worked with some of the biggest brands in the world, including Intel and LinkedIn.

Lindsay: You need someone on your team from day one who understands that everything you’re doing is part of your story and how to tell that story to your audience.

Patrick: Lindsay began her career in marketing, building brands for B2B businesses in fields ranging from e-commerce and app development to talent consulting and marketing tech.

Lindsay: Facebook posts or LinkedIn posts, those are tactics.

Patrick: She’s also the founder of Casted, and she currently owns and operates Human Brands Win, where she shares her wisdom as an adviser with other founders and thought leaders.

Lindsay: You’ve got to have a high-level overview and understanding of where you are and where you can be before you can ever get into tactics. It’s a little bit more of a marathon than it is a sprint, so you gotta have patience.

Patrick: Hello, everyone, and welcome to another episode of Plugin.fm, where we extract key lessons from top entrepreneurs to inspire your business growth. My name is Patrick Rauland, and I’m here with my co-host, Goran Mirkovic, a content marketing specialist and the CMO at Freemius.

In today’s episode, we’re going to explore why you need to tell the story about your business, how to know you’re hiring the right person, how to set expectations for new marketing hires, and how to define your core marketing strategy. Welcome to the show, Lindsay.

Lindsay: Thank you so much. I am excited to be here.

Patrick: So we really want to talk about how you grow a marketing team, which positions you add, when you add them, should they be generalists or specialists. But before we get into that, how do we even know if our businesses are ready to make its first hire?

Lindsay: Okay, so my big broad answer with literally the entire day—but I’m not going to have it be lame, I’m going to have it be really good—is it depends, right? Because if you dig into where you are, who you are as the leader, where your business is, who it’s for, why you’re doing it, that’s how you really get to the right answer for you and for your business. So to specifically answer your question, how do you know it’s time? Look inward. Not all businesses are created equal. A lot of businesses are started by a very technical founder or somebody who’s very operationally minded or a serial entrepreneur, or somebody who gets the business of starting a technology and growing a business. Others, like any that I’ve done, are sometimes started by an industry domain expert, a marketer, a thought leader, and all of those equations are very different, right? So, you need to look at who you are as a business and what you already have in your leadership team. If you have a strong brand builder, thought leader, somebody who’s very opinionated and very outspoken about what the heck it is you’re doing, then that changes your timeline. As opposed to if you are led by someone who is developing a product or is really operational, then you need somebody on your team, absolutely, as soon as possible to tell the story of the why, right? So, in short, you need it immediately.
You need someone on your team from day one who understands that everything you’re doing is part of your story and how to turn it around and tell that story to your audience, literally from day one.

Patrick: It’s interesting, I was thinking about people who start companies, and I’d say they generally fall into two buckets. They’re either the person, a technical person who does the thing, or they’re very, I would say, sales-focused. But do you still need, you know, a marketing person from day one, if you’re that salesperson? Or is that something you can do yourself for a while?

Lindsay: It depends. You need someone because, okay, there’s also two different kinds of salespeople. There’s some that are very face-of-the-business, very forward-facing—the person who would be doing what we’re doing right now, who would be on the show, casting the vision, raising the hype, raising the buzz. Like, that’s one type of salesperson. And they are magnetic and charismatic, and people want to know what they’re doing. Sure, we understand the size of our market and the conversion rates at every single point in the sales process. Then you still probably need to bring someone in who is going to be more front-facing, and that can be a consultant, that can be a hire. That can be someone who takes who you have and helps turn them into that face of the business. But no matter what, again, you need to have that person who, as part of their role, is going out and publicly telling the story and being the hype person of this new thing that you’re trying to build.

Patrick: So, especially in the software world, you can sometimes make a thing, and then release it, and see if there’s traction. And sometimes it’s like, “Oh cool, I’m selling 10 a month.” It’s definitely not a full-time job, but it’s selling something. When a business is really small, do you still need that marketer? Or do you wait for a certain size?

Lindsay: I think it’s looking not at where you are now; it’s looking at where you want to be. Right? So if you have the luck and the luxury of finding some success as a side hustle or wherever it fits into your life, that’s enough. And you’re like, “Nope, I’m selling 10 widgets a month, or I’m getting enough subscriptions to keep this thing going in a way that makes me happy.” Happiness counts. But if you’re like, “Man, imagine what this could be if we were actually being more intentional about growth. If you have goals of reaching a broader audience and being more audacious,” then yeah, I think that you need to have someone who is perhaps not full-time—don’t go hire a CMO—but somebody who can chronicle your existence, can look at the little nuggets of milestones and the key points on your timeline and say, “These are important parts of our story; let’s make sure that we’re really being intentional about capturing them and telling them.”

Patrick: There are huge benefits to trying out new employees to see if there’s chemistry. Lindsay has some advice on the types of employees you can find that are open to trial periods. We’ll get into that in a minute.

Goran: Let’s say that we are looking at, like, in a situation where you decide, “I really want to be intentional with this. I don’t care if I have 10 widgets now; I’m shooting for the moon.” So you’re already kind of bought on the idea of bringing someone, but as a person who hasn’t really hired a marketer or, like, hasn’t built any teams, how do you basically prepare them on the field or the position for someone to enter? Because I’ve seen millions of times where, like, people want to bring someone, but they don’t really empower them. They don’t really give them enough space to actually do something meaningful. So do you have any advice, like if you actually commit to this, to kind of build the future with someone, how do you kind of enable them and empower them?

Lindsay: That is a great question. I think all too often, like you said, you’ve seen it millions of times. I have too. These kinds of conversations happen because it’s trying to get to this, like, “When do I get to hire a growth marketer who’s going to convert all the things and bring me all the leads?” You have to prioritize, first and foremost, the story, which is, I feel like, the opposite of what so many people say. It’s like growth, demand gen, growth hacking, conversions. It’s like, convert what? Grow what? Hack what? Like, you need to build a thing and then tell people you’re building a thing before you can optimize how people come to you.

And so what does that first hire look like? How do you make room for that first hire? What are the expectations for that first hire? And really it’s looking at who you are as the founder or the founder team, saying, “Are we telling a story now? Are we talking to people? Are we building in public? Are we telling a story about what the heck we’re doing and why we’re doing it? Who is this for? Why are we doing it?” If the answer is, “No, we’re not doing it yet,” then you say, “Okay, can I start doing that? Can you start doing that? Is that any sort of interest or expertise that exists in the team that we have now, whether it’s a team of one, a team of five?” If the answer is, “Yeah, I think that we could do that,” start there. Start posting on LinkedIn, start a Substack, start telling people what it is that you’re doing. It doesn’t have to be award-winning. Just be honest.

If the answer is, “No, we don’t have that expertise or interest. We’re already busy with other things and none of us want to do it,” that’s when you start making space for someone to come in as a full-time or fractional, whatever your business can support. Give them space to tell your story. I guarantee you it’s interesting. Let them be journalistic about curating your story and telling the world about it. And then, as that starts to take on and people start to hear your story, then you can start to say, “Is it time to optimize? Is it time to take how people are hearing about us and turn that into, then what do they do?”

Goran: I completely agree. You first need some data to optimize. So in order to get something, you first need to get some input and test the data and then figure it out.

Patrick: You mentioned storytelling. Maybe just drill a little bit more into what it means to tell a story because I don’t think it’s, you know, writing a novel. But then also, who does that type of work?

Lindsay: Well, actually, you raised a really good point, which is there are tons, there are so many, like search in LinkedIn for brand builder, storyteller, brand architect, brand strategist—there are millions. But they quite often get hidden behind the curtain because everyone is looking for the short-term wins.

You see so much more often, like, “Oh, you have to have data. You have to have in your LinkedIn bio and in your LinkedIn title and in all of your experience, it has to have data, has to have ROI.” It has to have growth. It has to have revenue. It has to have all of these stats, which, you know, what we were talking about before, all of that matters.
But you have to have something to grow. You have to have something to optimize. And so, do you need to hire somebody whose title is brand builder and storyteller? Not necessarily, but I think there are many different facets of marketing. One is that growth, one is that brand building.
And so I think it’s finding somebody who really knows and understands brand. The importance of capturing your why. Who is it for? Why are you doing it? Why does this company exist? How is the world going to be different because it exists? Turning that into compelling content, thought leadership, information that’s put out into the world. That’s where you start.

Patrick: If you need a little help telling your business’s why, Lindsay will share some advice on who you can hire to put that into your strategy.

I was just thinking of businesses I know and entrepreneurs I know, and I’d say many of them do that—maybe not to a super high level, but they do that. They understand or they try to understand who they’re selling to and why they’re selling to them. And then they’ll usually hire someone where it’s just like, “Hey, just make these Facebook posts or just make these Twitter posts.” That, to me, seems like a common dynamic where the founder does some basic storytelling and then they just hire people to do tasks. Are you kind of saying that you should hire someone at a higher level where they do the storytelling and the brand building and they can also manage their own tasks?

Lindsay: There are some founders who are really good at storytelling—or could be, right? Those that understand, “Hey, we need to tell people who we’re for, why we’re doing this.” They are comfortable with and clear about, at least on some level, why the business exists, what they’re there to do, what their why is, what their purpose is, their mission is. Even if they need a little bit of help articulating it, there’s people like me and lots of others who can help pull that out of them and shape it into something that’s much more compelling.

But yes, I think ultimately, if you can start with the founders, it can, and it absolutely should. Sometimes the founders can go out and speak and keynote and webinar and podcast all day long. Sometimes they’re a little bit more behind the curtain, and they need someone to pull it out of them. Either way is fine, but yes, the big why you really should start with the founders or executive team is because they understand the business mission. They understand the why, even if they need help really defining it and putting it into words that are clear, consistent, and repeatable.

But yes, to your point, one way that that can look—and that it often looks—is a founder and/or executive team that is leading the business, that is in the business, and needs a little bit of help, either because of expertise or bandwidth, pulling out that story. Turning it into something, a message that is clear, compelling, and consistent, and putting it into a strategy that is, “Hey, this is what it looks like. This is what we’re going to do. These are the different channels we’re going to use. These are the different formats we’re going to use. These are the different words we’re going to use.” But it all came from the brain of that founder. It’s just kind of molded in a way that works for their audience. And a lot of that exists. Lots of other consultants and advisors do that too.

Goran: So, in a sense, let’s say that you are starting a completely new team. Since you obviously can handle the strategy aspect of this entire situation, do you actually ever go and hire a thought partner or someone to help you execute your vision?

Lindsay: I think it should always be the vision of the founder. The founder is magic. It’s gold, right? It’s absolute. That’s the difference maker. And who the founder is, you know, especially in earlier-stage startups, is also magic. And I think quite often gets stomped out because the founder gets really busy. Investors and stakeholders have lots and lots of demands.

But when you can find someone that taps into the specific vision and the unique differentiators of the founder, that’s when magic happens. So yes, to your point, Goran, you want to find a partner that can capture the unique vision and differences that come out of the founder’s brain—not insert their own, but simply act as a megaphone, as an amplifier, and act to distill what’s already there.

Patrick: If you hire someone who just helps you with Facebook posts or Twitter posts or whatever, I think that’s pretty easy to have some KPIs or something that you measure. But, if it’s something that’s a little bit more, it’s a thought partner, someone who’s thinking about the business, how do you give them clear expectations and then know if they’re succeeding or failing?

Lindsay: That’s a really good point. One of them is being comfortable with a little bit more ambiguity, because I think today we have gotten so used to everything that matters can be measured, and everything that can, you know, like, if it’s not measurable, it must not matter—which isn’t true, right?
What you say, how you say it, why you say it, I would say matters more than anything, because of everything we’ve already talked about. How do you make sure, how do you hold someone accountable?

And so I think it is when you’re talking with potential thought partners, you want to make sure that they have a very clear plan for how they’re going to do it, that they have very clear timelines, that they have very clear goals and objectives of their own, because everybody has a different way.

I mean, to me, I lay out a scope of work and after understanding the founder and their goals and what they’re trying to do, if they’re going through a big pivot, if they just raised a whole bunch of venture capital, if they’re just trying to figure something out. And I say, “Okay, based on what I know about you and about your business and what you’re trying to do, this is what I think we can accomplish in the first month. This is what I think we can accomplish in the first three months. This is what you can expect from me.”

And sometimes it is deliverables. It’s an audit of this, a strategy for this. We will have put together a timeline for X, Y, and Z. We will have adjusted your budget to focus more on this, this, and that. We will have audited the team to see where your current talent lies and where there are some gaps that we need to fill and how. So it’s, to your point, it is a thought partner, and it’s saying, “Okay, what is this thought partnership going to yield in the first 30, 60, 90 days?”

And then from there, you need to have the conversations and say, “Okay, where are we at? What have you learned? What are we learning about the business?” And from there, start to hold them accountable for the deliverables, the results that they say are going to be produced, and then what they think is possible, given the strategies that they’re putting into place.

Because to your point, you’re getting into Facebook posts or LinkedIn posts—those are tactics. So you’ve got to have the strategy first. You’ve got to have a high-level overview and understanding of where you are and where you can be before you can ever get into tactics. So it’s holding them accountable to create the strategy. And it’s a little bit more of a marathon than it is a sprint. So you gotta have patience.

Patrick: You need to hire someone that you can trust. Lindsay shares some of the things that she looks for in a marketing hire to make sure that they are trustworthy. That’s coming up.

Goran: What I think Lindsay is saying is like education with whom you’re working and like actually giving that person power. It probably requires people to first understand whom are you actually hiring and why?
Big picture, right? Are you looking for retweets, likes, and shares, or are you looking for big picture impact and like identity and like a story and stuff like that? Because you work with so many different brands and well-known brands, how do you actually get them to give you power to do what you do because I think that is a big part of it?

Lindsay: How goes back to credibility, right? And credibility starts with trust, and trust starts with a relationship. And that answers the question of how do you work with big brands and get them to trust you, grant you power to make real change. That also answers the question of, as a marketer or as someone in a company, how do you get the founder to loosen the reins a little bit so that you can actually make real change? Credibility, which starts with a relationship—it’s all about trust.

First, you have to seek to understand: Who is this for? Why are we doing this? What is the story? You have to go so far back, which starts at the top, which starts with the leader. With a really, really large company, it’s a leader of a division. At a startup, it’s the founder. That founder, that leader, has to be brought in and has to say, “Okay, this is what we’re trying to do. This is why we’re trying to do it. We understand that there are things that we need your help with. Please help us get there.” Like that’s where it has to start.

And then you have to listen and say, “Okay, I’m here to help. Tell me the story. Tell me the ‘why’.” And I start with tons of questions, and I listen and I listen and I take notes before I ever get to tactics of like, “This is how often we should post on LinkedIn,” or, “We should start a podcast.” You know, it’s: Who is it for? Why are we doing it? What makes this business unique? What makes this project unique? Why us? Why now?

And when you just listen, whether you’re a marketer in a company or a consultant coming in trying to get something real done, you have to start by listening. This is why you should trust me. This is why you should trust this business. This is why you should trust us to do what it is that you want to achieve. And you start there. It’s listening first, going back to “why,” building out a strategy, and then starting to execute on tactics.

And yeah, that takes a longer time. That is a little bit more of a marathon. And in the meantime, that leader also has to be going out and using their network and their influence to drive the immediate results that are needed.

Goran: I have a follow-up question since I know that you were both a leader of a marketing department and also a founder and the CEO who went out and got people. And from my experience, since I worked for really small startups but I also worked with well-funded B2B SaaS companies.

It’s a whole different beast because, from my experience, the leader in the B2B SaaS business that’s well-funded and like already established has a different type of performance plan. It’s looking for a change, but the small founder, it’s his baby. He’s like really holding that close to his heart.

And, as a person who is, for instance, finally figuring out, “I need help, I want to do this,” how do you actually vet the right marketer to bring in? Like, how do you know that you are giving the power to the right person and kind of building trust to actually build a partnership?

Lindsay: I mean, to me, it’s again going back to how they listen—do they really get you, the business, the situation, the project, and the goals? Do they seek first to understand, or are they trying to push on you some growth hack or formula that they use every single time? Because that growth hack and formula—I mean, we could be sitting here in this podcast, and I could be like, “Well, first you do step one, then you do step two, then you do step three.” And that might be more like, “Well, let me get my notepad and write down steps one, two, and three.” But insisting that there is some programmatic, one-size-fits-all growth hack easy button doesn’t serve you. It would serve me—that would make me, in that instance, the thought leader because I have the answers to everything. But the fact of the matter is, it’s not that simple.

So when you’re looking to bring someone in to do something that, frankly, is ambiguous, like “We need to change,” “We need to grow,” “We need to break through this wall,” or “We need to get beyond our competitors,” that’s ambiguous. There is no answer, no one-size-fits-all solution. You can’t just start a podcast or launch a new website and expect that’s going to do it. You need someone who’s going to get in, roll up their sleeves, get their hands dirty, listen, look, audit, understand, examine the landscape, and come up with the way forward for you.

So, I would say, beware of anybody who has a one-size-fits-all formula and go instead to somebody who seeks first to understand and provide a plan that’s meant specifically for you.

Patrick: My personal bias towards hiring is I’d rather hire someone expensive and good than hire someone affordable and then have to spend six months a year cleaning up all the mistakes they made. I guess I just want to talk about compensation for a second. How do you compensate someone who is a really good thought partner? Do you ever give them some sort of equity or maybe not equity, but maybe some sort of like a bonus? Is there anything like that that would entice someone who is a really good thought partner who really thinks about the business and then has that ownership mindset as well?

Lindsay: Yeah, I think, one thing that worked really well For me, and I know I am fractional. I’m an advisor, like just full disclosure, that’s what I do now, but before I did this and when I was a CEO, I worked with a lot of fractional consultants and partners and fractional CMO and fractional CRO.

Because I was able to tap into super duper top tier expertise, people who had done this a hundred times in their sleep, because I would get a fraction of their time for what I could afford and what they could do in an hour a week, five hours a week, 10, 20 hours a week was exponentially more. Then what somebody else could do that I could afford full time.

They made huge change. I could also scale up and scale down. Like if we had a big initiative, I could say, Hey, can I get some more of your time for the next two quarters? Or like, Hey, you know, things are tight or we got to focus in other ways. I need to like pare down for a little bit.

So I absolutely recommend that. If that’s not an option, for whatever reason, I think it is absolutely worth putting on the table. There are some people that are at a point in their careers that it’s less about the cash, and it is more about, like, long term investment. Not everybody’s in that situation. But I think, long story short, it’s worth first who, then what, right? Good old Jim Collins. Like, find the people who are, who you really believe in your gut can help you get to where you want to be. And then just talk to them and say, what would it take to get you to help me out? Does that look at it like an advisor role?

Does that like, here’s what I can give you. Is that fractional? If you were to come in full time, what could I possibly do to make that worth it for you? You know, I think that’s where you start.

Patrick: I do kind of think fractional is underused. And I think I agree with you that for five hours of their time, someone who’s done this a hundred times at a couple of different companies will do so much more for you than someone who’s affordable and works for 40 hours is just, is not as much.

Lindsay: It also lets you get really niche. Like, let’s say you’re going to launch a new category, right? That’s a very specific need, not every CMO has done that. If you have a couple, maybe it’s two or three different marketing initiatives. It’s category creation and a product launch and also employer brand, right? That’s two, three very different things. You could bring in three different fractional marketing people that have expertise in those areas, probably for less than you could hire one marketing leader who I guarantee you would not have the breadth of expertise that you would need in all three of those areas. 

Goran: Interesting story. When I joined Freemius, I came in as a fractional CMO. And then after a couple of months, I went full time. So I’m just wondering, like, because it was beneficial for me to actually kind of test the relationship and see what’s going. Do you think for a lot of businesses, it could be useful to first start with someone fractional to see, like, if this is a good fit, if there’s any value before they kind of move on to like a bigger offer, basically like a trial period or to kind of test if there’s chemistry.

Lindsay: I mean, all of us here and everybody listening and watching has started a new job. And I guarantee you the thought has gone through all of our minds of like, I wish there was a way to try this because you don’t know the team and you don’t know the culture and you don’t really fully know the way they communicate. It’s a really good way to not only do everything we just talked about, about being able to bring in the talent that you need and what you can afford, but also for both sides to try each other out and say, wow, I really like to be a part of this team. Or like, wow, imagine what we could do if this person joined us full time. And that’s a win for everybody. 

Patrick: Love it. So I think we’ve covered hiring the first person. Okay, what steps do you take after hiring that first person?

Lindsay: Okay. So there’s this cute little poem that I wrote a long time ago, unintentionally, that is brand and demand, they go hand in hand. That’s very cheesy, but it’s true. So, my dear friend, Andy Culligan, who is now doing his own fractional stuff, he and I worked together at a company called Amarsis, a billion years ago. And I ran brand and content. He ran demand for this global company. And the reason that what we did worked was that he and I worked so well together. We’re good friends. He lived in Vienna. I lived in Indianapolis, in completely different countries, but we worked so well together because we appreciated each other. We respected each other. We knew that neither one was more important than the other. And also that we couldn’t do our jobs without each other and each other’s teams. If I went and created content with my team all day long and he didn’t use it. All of my KPIs, all of my metrics would fall short. If he didn’t talk to me about what he needed, I would be creating stuff that he didn’t need.

He was relying on me to get his job done. So I think that the next important hire is to have that thought leader or somebody who’s optimizing the thought leader. The next step is to say, cool, this stuff is starting to work. We’re starting to build an audience. We’re starting to build a presence.

We got to do something with what we’re creating. You need somebody who really understands and appreciates thought leadership and has ideals all day long about how they can use it to get the funnel going and to say, okay, what are we gonna do with this audience? How are we going to capitalize on this attention? how do we turn it into leads? How do we turn it into something that actually can grow the business? So in short. First thought, then growth, brand, then demand. 

Goran: This is awesome, I love it, but one thing that could be potentially interesting to explore further for our audience is: how do you actually test or understand if someone gets your thought leadership? Because I think this is also kind of an ambiguous thing. You can’t just give someone a writing assignment and say, “Just replicate my thought leadership.” You obviously hire people for that type of thing to kind of scale up your thought leadership. Can you share some advice on how to see if this is aligned?

Lindsay: Yeah, I mean, let’s say you’re hiring, right? Because I think fractional is also, as we’ve talked about, a great place to start. This is also where you can bring in an agency and say, “Okay, this is what we’re doing—what would you do with it?” But if you’re looking to hire, like actually build a team, I think some of the questions you ask are: How have you worked with thought partners or thought leadership? What are your thoughts on brand? How do you work with a brand team? What do you do with content? How have you worked in LOTEP with content marketing in the past? What role do you think content marketing and thought leadership play in a business?

Starting to suss out their respect—or lack thereof—for content and thought leadership is crucial. I mean, sometimes you will have people who quite openly say, “That’s not me, that’s different, that’s over here; we’re going to do our own thing. We first look at what the market does, and it’s all about keyword research and SEO, and it’s all about what’s happening outside the business and how to take what’s happening outside the business and pull it inward,” which is a completely different strategy. Or if instead, you have someone say, “I love working with thought leaders; I love working with content marketing,” understanding that it has to be a relationship, just listening for that and understanding how they’ve worked with that team in the past.

But again, I think there is always an opportunity to, at that point, start working with agencies to optimize what you’re doing and make it work for the business.

Patrick: I was going to say, I think I want to take this a little bit broad because, okay, so let’s say we hire a thought partner for marketing employee number one. We’ve created these assets, but we want to leverage them. Where is the greatest leverage that you’ve seen for maybe like a second marketing hire? 

Lindsay: The second marketing hire is taking that thought leadership and building campaigns around it. I think it’s less about paid—again, it depends on the company, depends on the industry that you’re in. Sometimes paid is a really, really good fit; other times it’s a complete waste of money. Usually, it’s somewhere in the middle. But to me, it’s taking that thought leadership and saying, “Okay, what events can we go to? What webinars can we turn this into? Oh my gosh, you have a podcast—what if we started doing this next step? How can we own that audience?” They start asking the really good questions about how they can take the very top-of-funnel stuff. They see the top of the funnel as a great opportunity and also as a threat if somebody doesn’t do something about it, and they know that they’re that somebody. They say, “Okay, you’re building all this top of funnel. If you don’t bring me in there and start to capitalize on what you’re building, it’s going to be a waste. So, let’s start taking all that top-of-funnel stuff and start pulling it down.”

Then they start to have ideas about how to pull people in from social media, how to start a newsletter instead of only posting on LinkedIn all the time. They say, “We’re going to do a newsletter, and it’s going to have this conversion opportunity. We’re going to start doing webinars, and it’s going to require…” They start to think in terms of, “Okay, great, you’ve started to drum up interest—brand people, thought leader partner—how do we start to take that and turn it into an owned, engaged audience that does something?” And where exactly I would put that is like events, webinars, newsletter opportunities to build your own audience.

Patrick: Let me also ask: In addition to bringing on people, you also bring on technology, or that’s just how companies grow. As you’re growing your marketing team, at what point do you bring in marketing tech software, and which do you recommend? 

Lindsay: HubSpot has fit every single time because there are ways to start literally for free, and then you go from there into an extremely discounted startup level. It’s a great place to start because it has a way to start a website—everybody needs a website. It has a way to send emails and newsletters, and to have a basic CRM. That, to me, is what you need to get started. A lot of it can be a distraction if you start thinking you need all of these bells and whistles. Really ask yourself why first, because it can be really easy to spend all your time bringing in new tech and not bringing in new people and new audience members. So that’s my recommendation.

Patrick: It seems like with any marketing tool, they’re always sending you numbers, so it’s just a lot of noise that you have to sift through, and it’s not always true. So I appreciate that. All right, I want to ask you one culture question here as we’re getting near the end: How does company culture play into building a good marketing team? What are the values that you need to have to build a marketing team the right way?

Lindsay: One is that your internal audience is every bit as important as your external audience, so internal communication is really, really important and needs to be a priority. Then I think there’s something with curiosity, candor, and openness. As the founder and whatever team exists, as you bring in a marketer, you need to be open to somebody kind of poking at things and saying, “Why do we do it that way?” and “What if we said this another way?” Asking the tough questions, kind of pulling back the curtain, and saying, “What if we shared that with the world?”

So, I think you need to be ready to try new things, to be open and flexible, and willing to share your stories. I think it’s about communication and openness.

Patrick: Easily said, I was trying to think of what podcast I was listening to, but they hired a “Chief of Failure” or something. They encouraged—I don’t want to say failure, but experimentation and allowing failure. I loved that, and if I ever built a marketing team, I’d want to encourage a lot of experimentation.

Lindsay: I think that’s super, super, super important because some of what we’ve been kind of poking at this whole conversation is like, “Yeah, but what about the quick wins? What about the need to prove results? What about ROI? How do you make sure that you’re doing the things that are going to be measurable and drive results?” Well, you have to be comfortable with saying, “You know, Seth Godin says this might not work,” and that has to be okay. And then come back up, yeah, because along with that, I mean, you have to be willing to accept failure because it’s how you learn to win.

Patrick: I’m going to end the podcast on that note. Thank you so much for joining us and sharing your insights. 

Lindsay: Thanks for having me. 

Patrick: And thank you to our listeners for tuning in. If you enjoyed this episode, like, subscribe, and tell all of your friends so that we can entice more awesome, influential guests to join us and share their remarkable journeys with you. If you subscribe through the plugin.fm website, you’ll get early bird access to our future content. plugin.fm is brought to you by Freemius, your all-in-one payments, subscription, and taxes platform for selling software, plugins, themes, and software as a service. If you’re struggling to grow your software revenue, send a note to [email protected] to get free advice from Freemius’s monetization experts. My name is Patrick Rauland, and thanks for listening to plugin.fm.

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