Marketing 101: Time to Hire a Digital Marketing Manager?
So, you’ve tried the marketing agency route and you’ve figured out, well, it’s a giant wallet flush. Maybe you’re into non-prime or used cars and have bought some third-party leads, and your conversion rate is less than 5% and still dropping. Either way, now you’re asking yourself: is it time to hire an in-house digital marketing manager to generate more traffic to your website, and more leads to your business? It can’t be worse, can it?
About twelve years ago, I had already reached the point where I thought it was time to hire an in-house digital marketing manager. Third party leads were not yet a thing, but there was enough going on in the digital space that I knew we needed to be more focused on it. I wasn’t really thinking about search engine or social media marketing, I just wanted to better manage my site, and generate some additional traffic for the dealership, and I knew that neither myself nor my staff had the skills to make that happen.
There was enough going on in the digital space that I knew we needed to be more focused on it.
After a brief search I found who I thought was the right person for the job. Very bright. Very eager. Right away I saw changes to our site. Higher quality images. Better content. Definitely a step in the right direction. A few months into his tenure, he approached me with a proposition. He could generate leads for the company, by leveraging his own database. If he could do that, could he be bonused on the deals that he generated? Sounds reasonable. “What database?” He would go on to tell me that he had literally hundreds of thousands of contacts in our area that he could direct market to. He would create the content, craft the emails, and launch a campaign. Sounds pretty good. Here’s the thing: you know where he got all those contacts in his database? That’s right. He stole them from his previous employer, without them knowing.
I had a problem. I had let the fox into the henhouse, so to speak. I now had a smart young man, who had stolen intellectual property from his previous employer, now in a position where he has access to all my data, my entire customer base, and wants to be bonused on what he can generate from a database he stole from another employer. Tough one. I told him we needed a contract before getting into something like that. I had one done up by my lawyer, as tight as I could get it, and I had him sign it. Some days later, I brought him into my office and let him go, basically telling him if he ever used my data, I would first sue him into kingdom come, and would tell his previous employer, a rather large online seller, what he had done. He was gone.
Times have really changed since then. Your data is not just your customers anymore. If you hire a digital manager, and that person oversees your digital marketing, all the data collected, all the learned intellectual property is held and known by that person. You can have her, or him, sign a non-compete, but those don’t work. We know that. Even if they don’t steal your shit, you're still screwed if they leave, so it’s tough.
How do you interview for a highly specialized position without understanding it?
Even the process of hiring the right person and overseeing that person is a challenge. Unless you’re a specialist yourself, you can’t really know what level the individual is at. How do you interview for a highly specialized position without understanding it? Never mind supervising the person you eventually hire. Are they working hard? Are they getting results? Are they even working at all? It can take months to get a digital marketing process up and running. The wrong person can really bury you in a few months, that’s for sure.
Here’s the thing. If you’ve gotten to the point where you feel you need to hire an in-house digital marketing manager, you better do it right. Do your due diligence to find the right person. Hire a recruiting company that specializes in this. Sign an iron clad contract. The non-compete won’t work, but it can protect your data. Pay the right money. Pay peanuts, get squirrels as they say. You can hire a sharp kid out of college or university for cheap, but they will jump the moment they sniff a real job. It’s a hundred grand a year person all day long so if you don’t have the marketing budget to justify that, then you better look at other options. Good luck and good selling.
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