Who is a marketing mentor, and how is this role different from the Head of Marketing? When should you involve one, and what results can you expect?
What’s the difference between mentoring outsourced versus in-house product teams?
Svetlana Gordiyenko, an independent IT consultant mentoring marketing teams, shares her insights.
Svetlana has over 12 years of experience in IT marketing and a strong history of building marketing teams from the ground up. She has worked with companies like XB Software, InData Labs, and CleverDev Software, among others.
She is a member of the Chartered Institute of Marketing in the UK (MCIM). Last year, she became a Chartered Marketer. Experts who demonstrate skill and significant achievements in the field receive this title.
Previously, Svetlana held the positions of Head of Marketing at InData Labs and XB Software. She is currently studying for an MBA at Istanbul University. She also works as a consultant, helping marketing teams in small IT companies. In this article, she shares these case studies.
When Should You Hire a Marketing Mentor?
Hiring a part-time consultant is an excellent option for early-stage IT companies and young marketing teams. But why exactly?
Hiring a full-time Head of Marketing can be extremely costly. This is especially true when you consider the costs of other staff. You also need to think about the expenses for marketers, copywriters, and SEO specialists. Plus, there are costs for different marketing activities.
A marketing mentor, on the other hand, can cost at least twice as little, and much less in the long term. The company gains a strong leader with good knowledge. This leader will earn less than an outside Head of Marketing.
Secondly, an external specialist tends to have higher motivation compared to a full-time head. They don’t earn a fixed salary but receive payment for specific completed tasks. For them, it’s always a project with a set end date.
This means mentors don’t overstay their welcome. If I see that the team is managing well without my assistance, I leave the project. My minimum involvement in a project typically lasts at least four months to set up all necessary processes. Yes, it often extends longer (usually at the client’s request), but there is always a defined end period.
More broadly, the benefits of hiring a mentor include:
- A clear scope of work.
You agree on specific tasks. These tasks include improving the team’s performance, the marketing department, lead generation, or marketers’ career development.
- Knowledge Transfer
Junior marketers might not fully understand the IT industry or its trends. They may also lack the skills needed to set up a department or start lead generation quickly. An experienced mentor can provide helpful advice and share good practices. This speeds up learning and improves the team’s skills.
- Skills Development
Mentors can help junior marketers build important skills. These skills include strategic thinking, market research, and data analysis. They also cover customer segmentation, campaign management, task setting, and managing execution.They also help improve communication and relationship skills. This is true for the marketing department and other company leaders. This includes the CEO, CTO, and sales managers.
- Increased Employee Loyalty
Another benefit for the company is the increase in employee loyalty. With mentoring, there is less staff turnover, and the team becomes more united, working cohesively toward a shared goal.
Challenges That May Arise
Challenges often surface when there is already a Head of Marketing in the team. They might fear that the audit of the department’s work signals that the company plans to replace them. Alternatively, if someone tests in the role, they might worry that the mentor tries to take over their job.
In some cases, replacements were indeed necessary, even because of soft skills, not just hard skills. I’ve often found myself playing the role of the “bad cop.” This happens because the person could not handle the tasks. The company finds it easier to part ways with them through a mentor.
Difficulties can also arise when there is no Head of Marketing in the team. Then, it becomes necessary to hire someone or find a suitable candidate within the company. Sometimes, there aren’t even any marketers on staff, only other specialists. In my experience, copywriters often make good leaders in such cases.
When growing a marketer or another specialist into a department head, it’s important to agree upfront on how you’ll work with the mentor and what they’ll be responsible for. This ensures that the management understands what to expect, and the consultant can focus on achieving their goals.
Mentors cannot be responsible for a set number of leads. This is because they do not do the hands-on work. Instead, they help grow the department head, transfer skills, and set KPIs.
The number of leads is a KPI for the potential head. We discuss how to achieve that together.
If we make these points clear at the start, the team will understand. The mentor will lead the department for a while, even with a Head of Marketing. This way, there won’t be any problems.
Now, let me share some case studies to illustrate how this kind of mentoring works and the results it can bring.
The Specifics of Mentoring an Outsourced Team
I usually start my work with a marketing audit. If it’s not a startup but an established company, I always review the previous work and check up the processes.
Companies usually contact me when they need to set up inbound marketing and organic lead generation on their website. I help identify the issues, fix the situation, and things start to work.
Here’s an example from one outsourced company. When I joined, they had been in the market for three years and had only a one-page website and a separate blog.
For two of those three years, they worked with two copywriters. The copywriters picked their own topics and published about four posts each month.
The creators did not optimize the posts for SEO. They did not add any CTAs. They chose the topics randomly.
The company had a part-time freelance Head of Marketing who occasionally gave instructions and reviewed the copywriters’ work. As a result, after a year and a half, only two organic leads had come from those marketing efforts. They did the work, but they achieved no tangible results.
I did a marketing audit and looked at the client portfolio. I also did research, updated the strategy, and created a marketing plan. Like many other companies I’ve worked with, they did not have a plan before. I also made a roadmap.
We also improved task tracking. Previously, they tracked tasks, but they did not set deadlines. If someone wanted to write one piece of content, they did; if they felt like switching to another, they did.
The management was quite lenient, often saying, “The team is doing something, they’re trying.” In other words, there were no real expectations from marketing, and they didn’t even believe it could generate leads.
Next, we hired a part-time SEO specialist and a full-time content marketer. We focused on restructuring and redesigning the website.
After launching the updated website with new materials, we improved its performance in just three months. We also generated our first high-quality leads.
This was a major achievement for the company, as the website started generating leads. The CEO didn’t expect anything to come of it—they decided to give it a try, but had low expectations.
This case is one of many. Across all the cases where I worked with outsourced companies, I’ve observed the following patterns:
- To achieve results, the mentor must dive deeply into the work, almost as if they were a full-time employee, and give their all.
- No growth hacks exist – the results come from systematic and consistent efforts.
- Having a Head of Marketing, whether part-time or full-time, does not guarantee success. In one case, a Head of Marketing faked productivity for two years, yet there were no real results.
- Having a strategy and content plans greatly simplifies the journey toward the goal.
- For business owners, marketing work is often unclear. As a result, they may not properly evaluate its effectiveness. If there are no leads, they might simply conclude that marketing is useless without digging deeper into the reasons.
In my opinion, a Head of Marketing should have plans, track tasks, manage budget reports, and generate leads. If they do not have these for a long time, it shows that they need to make changes.
The Specifics of Mentoring a Product Team
Let me share a successful case of my work with a company developing a web product.
How do companies usually start thinking about launching their own product? The owner decides to make it, relying on intuition rather than conducting any marketing research. After a year, they develop an app or website that lacks optimization and attracts little or no traffic. There are also no registrations.
I had such a case. I started the process as I explained before. I did an audit, conducted market research, and hired an SEO expert to improve the website. We also hired a dedicated product marketer.
In the first case, I mentored the whole team. Later, I worked closely with one marketer. This marketer became the project lead. In this case, I worked exclusively with the marketer from the start.
My role was not only to transfer knowledge but also to maintain morale and motivation. In these moments, it’s important to have a mentor. This is a senior colleague you can ask questions. They can help you learn and understand how to handle different situations. This includes how to communicate with internal stakeholders.
After 3-3.5 months of implementing changes, the product website began seeing its first registrations.
Overall, during our collaboration, we significantly increased the number of inquiries from the U.S. (it was the key task for us), all with minimal spending on link building and copywriting.
Eventually, we launched the product on Product Hunt and became the Product of the Day without using paid promotion methods. This led to over 100 registrations on the website and several offers from potential investors.
Before the launch, we carried out meticulous preparations following the general recommendations for the contest, and, of course, the entire team worked hard on the day of the launch.
One common challenge when mentoring product teams is that product owners often love their creation so much in its original form that it can be difficult to convince them to make even minor changes to the product description on the website.
It’s also tough to get product owners to invest in marketing experiments because they believe they know exactly where their target audience is. As a mentor, you often have to find compromises.
How to Oversee Task Execution by the Team
Now, I’ll dive into how to establish communication and organize task tracking. These are universal methods I’ve used in different companies.
Once the work plan is ready and the team members are on board, we integrate a task-tracking system.
Often, company leaders want to see what the marketing department is doing and the progress we’re making, so we connect them to the task-tracking system and set up notifications.
In one case, the team used Trello, which they synchronized with Telegram. Any comment on a task was sent to the chat, so everyone could see everyone’s tasks. Management appreciated this transparency, and it didn’t bother the team at all.
I showed the marketer how to work with tasks by example, always following the monthly plan.
We set deadlines for everything, making it clear where tasks were getting stuck and who was responsible. Even after I left, they continued to work this way, and they are now successfully managing things on their own.
When it comes to organizing calls with the team and management, it depends on the company. Some companies dislike calls, while others prefer weekly discussions of the plan progress with management.
In addition to C-level calls, there are regular meetings with the marketing team, the lead marketer, or individual specialists. These calls occur regularly throughout the project.
For those who dislike calls, I use on-line chats. I let them know when I’m available and respond to their messages during my working hours.
How to Know When a Mentor’s Work Is Done
Marketing is a long-term game. Everyone wants leads immediately, but it’s essential in the early stages to think through everything, organize the work, improve the website, and only then move on with active promotion.
In fact, nothing sells better than the website— and good reviews, of course.
I finish my work on a project when I’m confident that nothing will fall apart after I leave.
In other words, I wrap up when we’ve achieved the goals, the marketers have the necessary knowledge, they feel confident in their abilities, and the website consistently generates leads.
Even though I work with small companies, a key indicator for me is when new projects emerge and the whole business scales up, not just the marketing department. For example, I’m currently working with a small company that had 20 employees when we started, and now they have 40-50 developers alone.
Of course, this success isn’t solely due to marketing, but we significantly improved the company’s market presence and even worked on their internal brand. Marketing isn’t just about generating leads.
To summarize, successful mentoring in marketing and management requires not only a deep understanding of processes and mechanisms but also flexibility in training and monitoring approaches.
It involves setting the right KPIs, establishing a task-tracking system, maintaining effective communication with team members, and ensuring the project can continue to grow and thrive without your direct involvement.
All of this together leads the company to new successes and, at the very least, helps the website consistently generate leads.
This material was originally published on Kraftblick.Media journal.
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