How to structure a small marketing team
The first hire decides the next five, because whatever they are good at becomes what the company thinks marketing is.
Hire a commercially literate generalist who can own direction first, a content or creative owner second, and a performance or analytics owner third. Specialise only when a discipline has enough continuous work to fill a role, and buy it until then.
Small teams fail in a predictable way: they hire for the task that is loudest this quarter, repeat that three times, and end up with three executors and nobody deciding what to execute.
The first hire
Senior enough to own direction and argue with sales and finance. Commercially literate, comfortable with numbers, able to write. Not a specialist in the channel that happens to be urgent, because urgency changes and the hire does not.
The second
Usually a content and creative owner, because that is the work with the most continuous volume and the highest cost to outsource per unit. In product-led or ecommerce businesses the second hire is often performance instead. Pick based on where the continuous work is, not where the excitement is.
The third
Analytics and operations: the person who owns measurement, the stack and the reporting that everyone else relies on. Teams usually hire this one last and wish they had hired it second.
Buy the rest
Design, film, PR, specialist channel work and anything seasonal. These need range or capacity rather than continuity, which is exactly the trade examined in agency or in-house.
The structures that stop working
- Marketing as a service desk. When every department can submit requests directly, strategy disappears under tickets within two quarters.
- Channel silos too early. Three people each owning one platform, with nobody owning the customer.
- A head of marketing with no budget authority, which is an execution role with a misleading title.
The signal to restructure
When the team spends more time coordinating than making. That usually arrives around the sixth or seventh person and is a sign to split by customer journey stage rather than by channel.
Questions we get asked
What should the first marketing hire be?
A commercially literate generalist senior enough to own direction. Hiring an executor first leaves nobody deciding what to execute.
When should a team hire a specialist?
When that discipline has enough continuous work to fill a role. Below that, buying the capability is cheaper and usually better.
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