How to build a marketing department for an IT company?
In order to qualitatively understand the question “how to build a marketing department for an IT company?” you need to understand what marketing is.
Marketing, simply put, is the process of attracting consumers using various methods and tools for the subsequent sale of goods or services to them.
The key word in this definition is “sales”. If someday a marketer comes to your interview and cannot explain that the main goal of marketing is sales, you can safely end the interview, because there are 95% of them, and you need those 5% of marketers who understand that sales should be behind all marketing activities (direct or indirect).
You can sell different things through marketing: a service, a product, a company brand to a future employee, an increase in awareness of your company among the audience of your potential customers – but there should always be a specific goal towards which your marketing should move, and not “post 3 posts in a week to post 3 posts per week”.
And so, let’s look at the key issues:
- when to create marketing department;
- marketing department structure;
- the sequence of recruiting personnel in the marketing department.
When to create a marketing department for an IT company?
If you have a comprehensive approach to the issue of creating an IT company from scratch, then it is best to involve marketers from the very beginning in order to:
- create a marketing strategy for the company;
- correctly identify the portrait of the ideal client (ICP);
- build you a lead generation process.
In case of a limited budget, you can bring in marketing consultants on a project basis.
The importance of marketing cannot be understated. Let’s take a conventional example – you need to sell a coffee maker: will you do it in the morning when everyone wants coffee, or at night when everyone is already asleep? You will do this near a coffee shop, where a person will be made ready-made coffee, or near your potential customer’s house, where he most likely has coffee, but may not have a good coffee maker, etc. An example is deliberately exaggerated and slightly banal but briefly shows exactly the kind of support you can get from the marketing department when planning your long-term sales strategy.
That is, having correctly identified the target audience for your IT services, you can: save a lot of time searching for the target group of your customers, the cost of finding one customer, and, of course, find your “ideal customer”.
Defining Your Target Customer and Ideal Client Profile
The first critical step in building your IT marketing strategy is gaining crystal clarity on who your ideal target customers are. Many technology companies fail by trying to be everything to everyone instead of focusing on their core niche.
To avoid this mistake, you need to invest significant time upfront researching and building detailed buyer personas. Buyer personas are archetypes that capture your ideal customer demographics, behaviors, pain points and motivators.
Start by examining existing customers and looking for common patterns related to company size, industry, roles and responsibilities. Combine this with broad market research on customer trends within IT services and solutions.
Once you have an initial target customer profile, interview these prospects directly via phone or surveys. Ask detailed questions to understand their challenges, buying process and criteria around vendor selection. Look for patterns in responses to uncover their precise needs.
Take all this qualitative and quantitative data to build comprehensive buyer personas. Give your personas names and faces and deeply map their buying journey from awareness to decision making.
Having finely tuned buyer personas gives your marketing strategy immense focus. They guide decisions on positioning, messaging, content creation and ideal marketing channels to reach your customers. Referencing your personas often steers your daily activities to stay laser targeted on perfect prospects.
The structure of the marketing department for an IT company.
The standard structure of the marketing department of an IT company:
- Marketing Director (or CMO – Chief Marketing Officer) is a person responsible for the entire marketing process of the company, the compliance of daily marketing activities with the strategy and goals of the company, as well as for synchronizing the processes of the department with other departments of the company. Sometimes in the company this position is occupied by the head of the business development department (or CBDO – Chief Business Development Officer).
- Marketers are people who are responsible for different marketing channels in a company (or several of them at once). For example: SEO / PPC manager, PR manager, email marketers, Social Media Manager and others.
- Lead generators – many owners of IT companies mistakenly attribute this function to a sales function, but this is wrong. The main task of lead generation is to generate interest from leads that are clearly related to the target group of the company’s customers and clearly correspond to the ideal customer portrait (ICP).
The sequence of recruiting the marketing department for an IT company.
Hiring marketing consultants to create a marketing strategy for an IT company. You can read more about what marketing consulting is in our article.
Hiring a lead generator is a key position to generate leads based on your marketing strategy and using your chosen platforms to find customers in the West.
Further, you can hire marketers responsible for different promotion channels and, at the same time, select the head of the department for better management of the department and the subsequent implementation of the strategy.
