When B2B SaaS founders are looking to build out a marketing function for their business, typically the key questions they have are who do they need to hire and how much is it going to cost?
Here, we explain what you should be looking for in your initial marketing hires, what your ‘North Star’ team structure should look like and how much you can expect your salary bill to be for your marketing team.
If you’ve been on our page for a while, you’ll know we say this a lot – but it’s essential. You need to start by working out a clear marketing strategy. If you’ve got a marketing background, you may be able to do this before hiring anyone, otherwise, it probably makes sense to work on this after you’ve made a senior hire.
To build out the most effective team in the most efficient way possible, so you can set up an inbound funnel and start driving those critical demos, you need to know what kind of marketing function you’re aiming for. Do you want to rely on steady, predominantly organic growth through your website? If so, it makes sense to start building out a killer SEO and content team. Are you keen to focus on developing your product positioning and building brand recognition? You may want to start the hunt for a product marketer and brand lead.
If you look at the model enterprise businesses use, they’ll typically have a whole team of specialists within each function (e.g. a paid media team, a team of copywriters, a design team etc.) all sitting under a Head of Marketing, Marketing Director or CMO. For Series A and B businesses, not only is this model unattainable, it’s unnecessary. But building a more conservative team means you don’t have the luxury of doing everything all at once – hence why you need to really consider what you need from your team and build it out with that in mind.
Before we dive into specific job titles, it’s worth mentioning the route that we often see founders wanting to take, that really isn’t effective at all: hiring a junior ‘unicorn’ marketer.
What we mean by this is looking for a single individual who you can pay a relatively low salary and expect to single-handedly deliver growth through marketing. Marketers with 2-5 years of experience simply don’t have the strategic nous to drive your marketing forward, let alone possess the array of skills needed to execute effectively across multiple channels. As we explore each of the roles you’ll typically find in a fully-fledged marketing team, it will become apparent why it is unrealistic to expect a single, junior individual to be able to spin all of these plates.
We’ve mentioned this ‘North Star’ marketing team a few times, but what does this actually look like? From our experience, a well-rounded marketing team will look something like the structure below. For Series A or B SaaS businesses, it is unlikely that you will be able to achieve this much of a developed team until later on in your journey, however, it can be helpful to understand what you’re aiming for.
Your HoM is the steady hand that steers the ship. Their views on marketing should align with your own, as well as other key departments (think product, customer success and sales) and (ideally) they should have worked in a senior management role for a similar business before – working for a Series A or B business is different to working for a huge enterprise, the uncertainty, budget constraints and ambitious growth goals are challenging, so they should be comfortable operating in this environment.
They will take responsibility for your overarching marketing strategy, building out the marketing function and ultimately driving revenue from marketing. They should be comfortable operating with a long-term vision and have the people skills to communicate this with the wider business and secure stakeholder buy-in to their approach. At the same time, the nature of working at a Series A or B business means they need to be adaptable and able to problem solve on the fly – a common analogy is that they are often still building the plane while taking off. They should be able to spot quick wins and current opportunities, without derailing their longer-term strategy.
Crucially, you need to remember that Heads of Marketing likely don’t want to be stuck in the weeds executing. They’ve done their years in the trenches and probably won’t want to go back there. The likelihood is that they will want to hire their own team of specialists – it’s been a long time since they actually had to execute individual tasks or campaigns and will be looking for a specialist with more recent experience to support them.
This comes back to our point about not looking to hire an individual – a Head of Marketing is not a silver bullet solution to your marketing woes. They possess the necessary strategic insight, but are not the people you need to get stuff done. By exclusively hiring a Head of Marketing, you risk building a beautiful marketing strategy that would surely drive results… if only you had a whole team of specialists to execute it, so you would either need to look to hire specialists to support them or consider hiring an agency, freelancer or fractional marketing team, like Codi, where you can gain access to that strategic expertise, alongside the execution capabilities you need.
Your Head of Content is a critical part of your marketing team. They’re responsible for building a multi-media content strategy that drives revenue through your key channels. Usually they’ll have experience in content marketing, SEO and copywriting. Similarly to a Head of Marketing, however, they will have earnt their stripes and likely not be willing to be a one-person content machine writing everything themselves or building out a backlinking strategy.
If you’re looking to drive leads and demos, this is the bread and butter of the Head of Demand Gen role. They take the vision from the Head of Marketing and the content from the Head of Content and build out multi-channel campaigns that drive conversions and nurture them towards becoming customers. Depending on your overarching marketing strategy, this may look like social media campaigns, events, or paid media campaigns.
Content writers sit under the Content Marketing Manager and are the do-ers of the team. If you’re producing blogs, eBooks, sales collateral or reports, chances are your content writer has played a major role in delivering the asset.
They’re more junior than the Content Marketing Manager and left to their own devices may lack the strategic oversight to deliver a cohesive strategy that actually drives results.
Pretty self-explanatory, so we won’t labour the point, but you need a graphic designer – DIY Canva graphics and Unsplash photos, while being great interim solutions, can only get you so far.
81% of businesses are now using video for marketing and it makes sense why. Video assets allow you to create more engaging campaigns, explore more complicated concepts and showcase your product more effectively. But if you don’t have the right skills on hand, they can be an expensive pain to produce.
That’s where Video Editors come in. They work with Content Marketing, Copywriters, Demand Gen and Graphic Designers to produce assets that drive leads and engagement.
Think of campaign managers as specialist marketing managers. They will focus primarily on a single product or region and be responsible for delivering campaigns within that area. It is usually businesses that have multiple products or operate across regions who require campaign managers. They are the ambassador for that product or region, calling upon the rest of the marketing team for resources.
Without them, you miss out on growth opportunities for certain products or in certain regions.
As a B2B SaaS founder, you know your website is essential to driving new business. You need to make sure your website is working for you. But keeping on top of updates and optimisations can be time-consuming and never-ending. That’s why you need a website manager.
They typically have experience in conversion rate optimisation, to help convert visitors to leads, on-page SEO, and some technical background in basic HTML or CSS.
These folk dedicate their entire working day to making sure your website is the best it can possibly be, whether that’s ongoing optimisations, or a complete new website project.
Paid Media Managers are responsible for developing paid media campaign strategies that drive revenue. When we talk about paid media campaigns, this may be Google search ads or display ads, LinkedIn campaigns, retargeting campaigns, or campaigns across other social media networks like Facebook and Instagram (although this is less common in B2B marketing).
For early stage SaaS start-ups an effective paid media strategy is a great way to grow your reach and brand awareness, while you’re building organic foundations. You do need to be careful though, without a robust strategy and stringent budget control, you can quickly end up spending a fortune and seeing no results.
For early stage SaaS businesses, email marketing is a channel that can drive real results, without pay-to-play costs. We hear some marketers declaring that email marketing is dead. We disagree. Lazy email marketing is dead, well thought-out, targeted, and helpful email marketing is alive and well.
That’s where your email/CRM manager comes in. They help to manage your CRM, ensuring you have clear segmentation, so you can be targeted in your email campaigns. They have experience creating emails that drive results for prospects throughout the marketing funnel, so can be sure you’re getting in front of the right people at the right time, with the right message, which underneath it all is what marketing is all about.
Let’s get some misconceptions out of the way first: copywriters and content writers are not the same.
So what is the difference? Content writers typically produce longer forms of content with the objective of entertaining or educating their audience. They’ll write your blogs, eBooks, reports and all that good stuff. Copywriters are wordsmiths that sell your brand. They are able to make short copy, like website copy, so compelling that it drives an individual to convert.
Copywriting is one of the most overlooked skills in a marketing team, because of a misconception that anyone can write copy. We hate to be the bearer of bad news, but they can’t. Not good copy at least. We’ve heard it directly from founders that even if they fancied themselves a bit of a word wizard before, when it comes to their own product, they’re suddenly drawing a blank.
But why are copywriters so important? Well, because they underpin everything you do. From working with Product Marketing to turn your value proposition into website copy that sings, to writing ads that make an impression and developing a tone of voice that reflects your brand – they really are involved in everything your business does.
Have you ever received feedback that prospects just don’t understand what your product is or the value it brings? Are you scratching your head about how you should be talking about your product? That’s where a good product marketer can be a life saver.
They bring clarity to your entire business by working out how to position your product and working with the Head of Marketing to ensure that everything you do and produce are aligned. Without them, the rest of your marketing team could be world class, but if no one understands what it is you actually do in a way that resonates with your target audience, it’s all a waste of time and money.
Now we’ve covered who you need access to in your marketing team, here’s the scary bit. How much they all cost. Below are the average salaries you can expect to pay each individual. Remember, this excludes pensions, onboarding costs, recruitment costs, technology costs and any additional benefits/bonuses you may wish to offer as part of your employee package.
| Title | Years | Exp Salary |
| Head of Marketing | 8+ | Circa. £100k |
| Head of Content | 6+ | Circa. £80k |
| Content Writer | 2+ | Circa. £30k |
| Designer | 2+ | Circa. £30k |
| Video Production | 2+ | Circa. £30k |
| Website Manager | 3+ | Circa. £40k |
| Copywriter | 2+ | Circa. £30k |
| Paid Media | 3+ | Circa. £40k |
| Email/CRM Manager | 3+ | Circa. £45k |
| Product Marketing Manager | 5+ | Circa. £60k |
| Campaign Manager | 5+ | Circa. £40k |
| Head of Demand Gen | 6+ | Circa. £80k |
| Approximate total cost | £605,000 |
Chances are, you aren’t going to go out and hire a 10+ person marketing team in one swoop. Check how much it costs to hire a marketing team with our handy calculator below. Don’t forget though, this doesn’t include ensions, onboarding costs, technology costs, annual leave or any additional benefits/bonuses you may offer.
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By now, you’ve probably realised it’s going to cost more than you thought to hire a marketing team. Chances are, it’s probably more than you’re willing to splash out at this moment in time, so you might be in a bit of a predicament.
You know you need marketing to grow your business, but you need to grow your business before you can afford to build an in-house marketing team. Fortunately, your back isn’t against a wall. There is another way. A fractional marketing team like Codi.
For a fraction of the price and hassle it would take you to hire an in-house team, Codi gives you access to all the expertise you need, as and when you need it, along with execution capabilities to make growth happen. As if that wasn’t compelling enough, we also slot in alongside your existing teams, just like an internal team, so you don’t have to worry about the disconnect you might experience with freelancers.
Ready to drive revenue through marketing, without the time, money and effort it takes to build a team? Speak to Codi today.
