flexiblefullpage - default
interstitial1 - interstitial
Currently Reading

How To Hire A Marketing Director

Advertisement
billboard -
Management

How To Hire A Marketing Director

A full-time marketer skilled in lead generation methods can drive big growth. Finding that person might not be easy.


By By Jim Cory, Senior Contributing Editor March 22, 2018

Seeking a “cohesive marketing and branding strategy,” a growing ten-year old company in the South, which specializes in fiber-cement siding and wants to grow its roofing and window segments, has just hired its first marketing manager. Her first order of business? Build a referral program at a company where most leads come from a manufacturer’s website or online lead generators like Angie’s List and Home Advisor. In other words, augment with referrals a lead model that is already almost entirely inbound.

Marketing for a home improvement business might seem like a straightforward proposition. Your job is to generate customer inquiries (leads) and convert them to appointments that the salespeople then run and, let’s hope, close. Tell a marketer who’s never been in the industry that and he or she will nod appreciatively, though likely they’ll know little about generating leads for short cycle construction projects. 

Full Time or Part Time 

Leads drive everything at a remodeling company, and especially at a home improvement business. When it comes to finding a contractor for needed or desired exterior improvements, homeowners are slow to act, for several reasons—how much they’ll spend and fear of the contracting process top the list. And owners of home improvement companies often hire a full-time marketing director late in the game. In the early life of a company marketing tends to be someone’s part-time job, often the owner’s. 

A recent report from indeed.com says marketing managers at home improvement companies make $40,000 a year. The same website claims sales professionals in this business average $96,150. Can it actually be the case that a marketing director makes less than half of what a salesperson makes? Unlikely, when you consider that the average starting salaries of marketing majors graduating with a bachelor’s degree was $53,400 in 2012. The website PayScale.com lists the median salary for a marketing director at $82,647, as of this year. 

That doesn’t necessarily mean home improvement companies are stingy. What it reflects is that “marketing director” is often a part-time position at many companies, split between the office manager and the owner, or the sales manager and another admin employee. Many owners are former salespeople who want a direct hand in marketing and sales management. A survey late last year of members of Certified Contractors Network, a networking organization whose roughly 350 members are mostly exterior contractors, found that 40 percent of respondents had a dedicated marketing person. At 48 percent of the companies responding, it was “part of someone’s job responsibilities” (i.e., part-time), and at another 12 percent, marketing was outsourced. 

Not Easy To Come By

A company has to be of some size or ambition to take on the additional overhead of, let’s say, a $60,000 salary. On the other hand, if your home improvement business is running seven salespeople and those salespeople need at least two qualified appointments a day, you’re going to need 70 qualified appointments a week, and many more leads than that, since not all leads convert into appointments. That’s a full-time job by any definition. 

So where do you find someone to fill that job? Just because marketers appear to be plentiful doesn’t mean a really good, effective marketing person is easy to come by. “Although competition for marketing jobs is high, 51 percent of human resource managers report that they have current openings for which they can’t find qualified candidates, and 46 percent say these positions go unfilled for three months or longer,” notes WeddingWire marketing strategist Sonny Ganguly.  “Finding the right marketing hire to fill a particular role can be a difficult and time-consuming undertaking.”

It’s especially difficult in home improvement. The learning curve can be daunting, so past experience working for another home improvement company is a huge plus. In “Why Marketing Has Become The Hardest Position to Hire For," marketer and writer Benji Hyam notes that marketing majors at universities get little or no hands-on experience. They’re taught theory. And experienced marketers applying for the job are prone to exaggerate prior achievements, so that in interviewing them you’d be wise to drill down into their answers to your questions. Hyam also advises getting a marketer to hire your marketer. “If you don’t have a marketer in your company to help you with hiring, call in a favor to a friend or reach out to someone to help. You’ll be a lot more successful at finding a quality marketer if you can have another marketer help you hire.” 

Job Description

So say you’re hiring your first dedicated marketing director. You need a job description that clearly communicates the scope of this person’s responsibilities. “The first item under the job title should be a summary overview of what the position entails,” writes Christine Lagorio-Chafkin at Inc.com (“How to Hire a Marketing Director”). “Depending on what your company needs in a marketing director, that list could include identifying opportunities to launch new products or to enter new markets; managing marketing budgets; projecting revenue and growth potential; identifying technology and marketing partners; conducting necessary market-research studies; and building and overseeing the company's marketing staff. Bullet points work best for organizing these responsibilities.”

Your marketing director will be a key player in planning for ongoing growth, since you’ll need to know how many leads will be generated and at what cost, month-to-month, quarterly, and for the year. The ability to test new lead sources will also be important, as many traditional sources lose their effectiveness over time or become obsolete.

Beyond outlining these key responsibilities, what attributes should you look for in a marketer? Initiative and creativity top the list according to Lisa Schneider, Chief Digital Product Officer at Merriam-Webster, who lists seven criteria she uses when hiring a marketing manager. 
You’re going to want to hire someone who learns quickly and is always willing to try a new way. Don’t expect even seasoned marketing pros to know anything about canvassing, direct mail campaigns, setting up and working a booth at a show or event, or the outbound marketing you may be using to balance what comes in via online. Those are, however, skills the right person can quickly learn. But since so much of home improvement marketing today involves inbound leads - that is, customer inquiries steered to your website by online activity - skills such as website design, content creation, and social media marketing are critical to the job and need to be in place when you make the hire. 

Briefing Ongoing

The less your new marketing director knows about your business, and this industry, the less likely you are to have a successful long-term hire. Frustration will quickly mount, and with it, stress. Your onboarding process is key here. If you leave it at making introductions around the office and showing him or her where to sit, you’re cooking from a recipe for disaster. If all she knows about what you do is what she reads on your website, she won’t have any clear idea as to the nature of the task at hand. Make it clear from the outset that this is all about sales leads and in-home selling, which will mean, according to an article at Hubspot, “finding unique ways to attract people” to your business.  

That company in the South hiring its first marketing director had her ride with its best salespeople on appointments. “She came back,” the president says, “and she could see how sales and marketing tie together.” He says he wanted her to understand “how we’re speaking to the customer in the home and how our brand is represented there.” 
 


written by

Jim Cory

Senior Contributing Editor

Philadelphia-based writer Jim Cory is a senior contributing editor to Professional Remodeler who specializes in covering the remodeling and home improvement industry. Reach him at coryjim@earthlink.net.


Add new comment

Plain text

  • No HTML tags allowed.
  • Web page addresses and email addresses turn into links automatically.
  • Lines and paragraphs break automatically.
leaderboard2 - default

Related Stories

How to Create a World-Class Remodeling Team

Great remodeling companies position themselves for the future with the right players

Everyone Should Have a Number: KPIs for Your Design Build Team

Measuring key performance indicators guides your team to success while creating accountability and ownership

How to Revamp Your Pre-Construction Process 

Experiencing too much slippage and delays? See how Bridget Bacon of Red House Design Build solved these issues by improving the remodeler's pre-construction process

How This Remodeler Revamped Their Pre-Construction Process

Bridget Bacon of Red House Design Build outlines how she helped transform the pre-construction process for improved finances and morale

Building A Small Projects Division from the Ground Up

Through hard work and careful strategy, Harth Home Services has seen big growth

A Mindset of Serving Others

A research study shows surprising results about what makes us take ownership of our work.

3 Keys to Successful Team Management

On this episode of Women at WIRC, hear Laura Burnes delve into her approach to leadership and project management, in addition to sharing insights into Adams + Beasley Associates' winning culture. 

Preparing for an Uncertain 2024

Here's how remodelers can prepare for unpredictable market

4 Steps to Prep Your Business for Contraction

How a remodeling company plans ahead for the worst of times (and the best of times)
 

Helping Remodelers 'Get Their House In Order'

From remodeler to NARI executive to industry consultant, Diane Welhouse uses her expertise to help business owners 

Advertisement
boombox2 -
Advertisement
halfpage2 -
Advertisement
native1 -

More in Category




Advertisement
native2 -
Advertisement
halfpage1 -
Advertisement
leaderboard1 -