Introduction
You've hired your new Marketing Program Manager. They show a lot of promise, but they are green. Now what? It just so happens that we have helped many companies with their marketing hires and turning them into rockstars. Here's my recommendation on training a new marketing hire.
- Find a three month program. Following a 12 week plan gives the new hire eight weeks of core curriculum and four weeks to transition off the support.
- Find someone who can train the new hire on a weekly basis.
During the curriculum phase, they will have a training session each week that will include:
- Relevant reading materials
- Curriculum presentation plus Q&A, then
- Follow up assignments (goal is to align them with the marketing campaigns going on at that time), then
- Feedback on the assignment output, and
- Ongoing support as needed
During the transition phase, the goal is to observe and provide feedback to the new hire. No coaching is complete without feedback:
- Marketing concept development, filling up the experiments ledger and content calendar
- Marketing scrum master, lead the scrum planning and agile meetings
- Marketing plan of record, set the goals and track the progress
During this phase, you will want the new hire to connect with others in the marketing world to learn more from and get networked with peers.
Training Goals
By the end of the eight week period, here are the skills we expect that the new hire will develop:
- Ability to self direct on developing full funnel marketing concepts
- This means thinking through how awareness messages will become closed won deals.
- Ability to self direct on developing execution plans for delivering the marketing concepts
- Ability to propose experiments and track learnings to learn the best combinations of channels, audiences, and messages to acquire customers.
- Ability to provide campaign analysis and optimization recommendations
- Ability to evaluate the impact of marketing programs in achieving their stated objectives, including campaign performance, lead acquisition, and sales opportunity outcomes.
- Ability to propose and manage marketing research projects to generate consumer insights in support of improved marketing strategy and communications
- Ability to leverage proven marketing frameworks such as, Funnel Stage (Pirate AARRR framework) + Channel (Bullseye Framework) + Message Framework (Buyers Journey to funnel components mapping) + Goal planning + Goal Tracking + Metrics Optimization Sprint Workflow
Training Timeline
Goal is to deep dive each week in a new area. Here's what this looks like:
Google Ads
- How to create keyword lists
- Ad group strategies
- Bid strategy overview
- How to structure campaigns
- Creative best practices and examples
- How to analyze performance and identify optimization opportunities
Facebook Ads (and Instagram, since it’s the same ad platform)
- Overview on objectives and placements
- How to define audiences
- How to structure campaigns
- Creative best practices and examples
- How to analyze performance and identify optimization opportunities
Twitter and LinkedIn
- Overview on objectives and placements
- How to define audiences
- How to structure campaigns
- Creative best practices and examples
- How to analyze performance and identify optimization opportunities
How to use Google Analytics
- Capabilities overview
- How to set up events and goals for tracking conversion or key activities
- How to analyze funnel activity
- How to pull the right data for weekly reporting
- Known limitations that you should be aware of
How to create effective landing pages
- How to determine the right content outline and call to action
- How to set up tracking
- Creative best practices and examples
- Everything you need to know about responsive design, mobile, and page loading times
Set cost and performance targets for digital marketing channels using a bottom up marketing performance model
- How to leverage the AARRR framework to define/refine the steps in your customer acquisition funnel
- How to determine the right mix of your team’s time and your media/promotion budget across digital marketing channels to hit your goal
- How to build a marketing plan of record that shows how marketing costs are going to deliver the goal outcomes
- How to track progress and determine optimization priorities
Create a customer journey messaging framework that aligns to the funnel
- How to define/refine the customer buying journey
- How to map the journey steps to the corresponding marketing assets at each step in the funnel
- Identify gaps
- Use testing to decide/refine
- How to track the value of a step in the journey
Leverage the optimization priorities in agile workflow to optimize goal attainment
- How to drive idea brainstorming based on target metrics that are “off plan”
- How to breakdown ideas into projects and tasks
- How to estimate project timing and costs using a simple point system
- How to refine the process
Conclusion
We hope this is a helpful framework for thinking about your employees in marketing who run programs. If you want further information or