When you want to launch an internal marketing function, a marketing director is your first hire.

The marketing director builds the rest of the team, then develops the vision and oversees the execution of your whole marketing apparatus. Deciding to hire one is a big step. You already know any new hire adds complexity and overhead. Starting up a new function multiplies that exponentially.

But hiring a marketing director can be the right move – the solution to a growth bottleneck.

How do you know it’s time?

The Most Common Sign You Need to Hire a Marketing Director

Mid-sized businesses considering whether to hire a marketing director are at a fork in the road.

When a business is young, the founder is often its greatest marketing asset and brand ambassador. That doesn’t necessarily mean they’re engaged in a lot of marketing – blogging, social media, and the rest. Instead, simply by fostering relationships and doing the best work they can, they draw the right customers to them.

First-time visitors become repeat customers. They may bring their family next or tell their friends.

The truth is, that most service-based businesses can go a long way in this mode.

Sooner or later, though, the growth stops. The fork-in-the-road moment is this: You need to stop chasing every opportunity and start getting people to come to you. A founder and the surrounding leadership team can only do so much. After all, there are only 24 hours in a day no matter how many employees you have.

If you have the operational capacity to serve more people, but your growth has peaked, marketing is one of the first places to look. If you don’t have the capacity, more marketing could be a disaster – but that’s another story.

If organic growth is stalling, you just might not “look the part.”

Ask yourself:

• Have you been “doing things” related to marketing, but without clear results?
• Are you leaving marketing tasks to interns, freelancers, or an employee’s kid?
• Do you spend on marketing in an inconsistent way without clear categorization?
• Are you looking at marketing tactics more than you are at marketing strategy?

If any of these ring a bell with you, you’ve reached a point familiar to many business owners before you. Making the right move now is critical. A marketing director can help you with two of the biggest steps: Rationalizing the expense categories in your marketing budget as rigorously as possible and creating a strategic marketing plan.

A Marketing Director Helps You Build Brand Confidence

In the early years, you are your brand, and your brand is you. You need to focus on delivering excellence, doing it consistently, and creating a great customer experience along the way. But as you grow, you get more audiences to deal with: employees, vendors, partners, investors, and ever more discerning clients.

Once a business reaches that higher level, these stakeholders can make or break it.

And while each group has its own wants and needs, they all respond to effective branding. Branding that widens the scope beyond what you can deliver personally, building a bridge so everything you publish can reinforce your company’s promised experience. Above all, that demands consistency.

Consistency requires a strategic plan that connects the dots (and removes the dots that shouldn’t be there). With a strategic plan in place, it’s easier for each marketing contributor to really own their role within the process. That sense of ownership brings in the accountability that true consistency is built on.

Without those two things – accountability and consistency – what are you left with? The answer is simple: A fragmented approach that simply doesn’t add the value you want. That results in an outcome that’s usually much less like scientific, data-driven marketing and more like throwing things at the wall to see what sticks.

With a marketing agency on your side, you can get the benefit of a team that combines vision, strategy, and execution under one roof. And it all comes to you without the headache of a months-long hiring search, an employee onboarding process, or the ongoing investments you can’t easily unwind.

After all, a marketing agency you can trust should:

• Consolidate all the marketing skills and talents you need under one roof.
• Bring experienced perspectives that merge creativity and practical results.
• Come packed with all the training and software they need (no extra fee).
• Be eager to help with that strategic marketing plan you’ve been needing.

Ready to begin? Contact New York Ave today to find out more or get started.