Hiring a marketer—6 ways your marketer needs to rock

TL;DR

• Marketers are creatives who can do math—and boost the bottom line
• The best marketers are often writers or creatives first
• You need a marketer who doubles as an expert in your field

So your business—perhaps a web3 or blockchain company? 😅—needs marketing. That’s understandable. You have many options to meet your marketing needs, ranging from hiring in-house staff to commissioning an agency to working with yours truly (ahem, a marketing consultant).

No matter how you choose to meet your organization’s marketing needs, you require talent that puts you ahead of the competition. Ideally far ahead. But what constitutes an exceptional marketer? Keep reading to understand six ways that your marketer needs to rock.

1. Your marketer aligns strategy with key business objectives

What matters most to your business? That’s the first thing that savvy marketers want to know. A marketer who clearly understands your business priorities is best equipped to map a strategy to those objectives.

How can a marketer learn about your business to create a tailored plan? Here are some tactics that marketers use to produce relevant marketing strategies—

• Conduct a content audit: Completing a content audit is usually a marketer’s first step to developing an impactful marketing strategy. A content audit is a lot like a wellness check for the content on your website and other digital platforms.
• Identify available resources: Effective marketers seek to match expected strategy output with the available human, time, and financial resources. Getting clarity on the resources available is crucial to creating a marketing strategy that can be successfully executed.
• Define the target audience: Who’s your tribe? Another early and important step for marketers is to define your target audience—the group of people who most benefit from your product or service.
• Meet the team: High-EQ marketers know the importance of face time—or, let’s face it, Zoom meetings—and want to meet your team! Synchronous meetings with engineers, product managers, community builders, and other creatives are all important as primary research for a marketer. 
• Research your competitors: Who are your primary competitors? Marketers always research your competitors—both the business and digital kind—to guide the development of your organization’s marketing strategy.
• Listen to your users: What are your users saying about your service or product? What pain points do they have? Empathic marketers hang out on all the right platforms to learn what your users need.

As your business evolves, so should your marketing strategy. Your shrewd marketer updates your marketing strategy to constantly match the most important needs of your business.

2. You want to consume what your marketer creates

What’s the last content that you enjoyably consumed? When’s the last time that you read or watched something especially informative? You need a marketer who produces content that genuinely educates and entertains your target audience. 

Let’s look at some examples of content marketing done right—

• Chainlink: The decentralized blockchain oracle network uses a tone that is informative and also slightly silly. Case in point—a 2022 blog explains the “reason why your grandma is probably not yet an active Web3 user.”
• Nexo: This crypto exchange and lending platform has content marketing on lockdown, using a tone for its newsletter that makes it hard to stop reading. The company describes itself as “disrupting the financial system, one bit at a time.”
• Slack: You may live on Slack all day, but do you ever read the platform’s blog? The Slack team uses content to show that, professionally, they’ve got your back. A February 2023 blog (for example) commiserates that “a meeting is just as like

3. The bottom line matters—a lot!—to your marketer

Your exceptional marketer is committed to using the right mix of marketing strategies to maximize the profitability of your business. Marketing can be fun—it usually is!—but ultimately is a business function like any other of your professional activities.

How can a marketer show that she cares about your return on investment? Check out these tactics that marketers can (should!) use to maximize your marketing ROI—

• Choose marketing tactics carefully: Some types of marketing content—like email—have historically high ROIs. Other types of content—like short-form video—have historically high engagement rates with certain user demographics. You can choose to execute only the most cost-effective strategies that are most likely to appeal to your target audience. 
• Prioritize distribution channels: Just like with marketing tactics, some distribution platforms and channels are more cost effective than others—and your audience doesn’t hang out everywhere. Meet your audience where they’re at (only there!) to maximize the profitability of your marketing.
• Repurpose and refresh: Your marketing content, especially evergreen content, can have a long shelf life and grow your business significantly over time. Marketers can stretch budgets and boost ROI by repurposing and frequently updating your existing content. This tactic is especially important as your marketing strategy matures and your mountain of diversified content continues growing.

You care a lot about your bottom line—so hire a marketer who feels the same as you.

4. Your marketer can do math

You might love the creativity and style of your marketer, but how strong are his quantitative skills? You can hire a marketer with robust analytical capabilities to ensure that the impact of your marketing strategy is being thoughtfully measured.

What exactly does it mean to thoughtfully measure and analyze a marketing strategy? You need a marketer who can—

• Get data: Is your marketer a master of Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and at least a few SEO tools? Your marketer’s first quantitative strength should be procuring relevant data. 
• Analyze the data: Analytical marketers review data, often from multiple sources, to identify strategy weaknesses, strengths, technical issues, and other focus areas for your strategy.
• Ask questions: A good marketer can gather data and use it to make a decision—but a great marketer understands the “why” behind the data. Your ideal marketer asks questions until she understands the why.
• Make data-driven decisions: Your numbers-loving marketer is comfortable with—and even prefers!—using data to help drive business and marketing decisions. 

5. Your marketer doubles as an industry expert

Is your marketer an industry professional? Many—not all—marketers have a niche, which often coincides with their professional work history. You can hire a marketer who already knows a lot about your business, boosting the odds of your company benefiting from a marketing strategy.

What’s so great about hiring a marketer who body-doubles as an industry expert? Let’s take a peek—

• Total know-it-all: Your marketer a.k.a. industry native understands many nuances of your highly technical business. She relishes in producing factually correct content that hits all the right angles throughout the buyer journey.
• Known by all: With so many years of experience in your industry, your marketer is known (and valued!) by many. This social capital is what you need to get valuable earned media and co-marketing opportunities.
• No shortage of ideas: A good marketer develops a strategy—but a great marketer devises many. A marketer with extremely deep industry knowledge can develop a customized strategy that’s well suited to meet your specific business needs.

6. You feel cherished by your marketer

Are you getting undivided attention from your marketing professional? Marketing is important to your business, not to mention expensive—meaning that you deserve the best from your marketing provider. 

What are some ways that a marketer can show the love? Let’s name a few—

• Allocate top talent: Your marketer may be a team of one, or perhaps operates as an agency. Whatever the organizational structure, you need top talent devoted to the success of your marketing strategy.
• Prioritize deadlines: A marketer is only as good as her last deliverable. You need a marketer who never (ever, ever) misses a deadline.
• Communicate well: In good times and bad, your exceptional marketer stays in contact. You need a marketer who excels at communicating as much as she thrives on producing innovative strategies for your organization.

And the best way to show the love—show results. What better way to feel cherished than by getting what exactly you need from your marketer? Your go-to marketing wizard knows just how to uplift your business, again and again.