Building a Marketing Team: A Guide to When and How to Hire

Scaling a startup requires making smart hiring decisions that maximise growth while conserving precious resources. One of the most critical—and often confusing—decisions founders face is building their marketing team. Should you hire a marketing generalist first? When is the right time to bring on a CMO? How do you structure your team for different growth phases?

As a founder, you're already wearing dozens of hats. But there comes a pivotal moment when delegating marketing becomes essential for sustainable growth. Making the right hire at the right time can unlock explosive growth, while getting it wrong can waste months of progress and burn through your budget.

When to Hire Your First Marketer

The Critical Signals It's Time to Hire

Most successful startups hire their first dedicated marketing professional between the late seed and early Series A stages, but timing depends more on specific business indicators than funding rounds. Research shows that 60% of marketing leaders who drove results at top-performing startups had valuable prior early-stage experience.

Here are the key signals that indicate you're ready for your first marketing hire:

• You've landed paying customers outside your personal network. If you've secured customers through cold outreach, content or other marketing channels rather than just founder relationships, you've proven there's demand worth scaling.
• You can't handle the marketing workload anymore. When marketing tasks consistently distract you from product development, strategic planning or other core founder responsibilities, it's time to delegate.
• You know which channels work. The most successful first marketing hires happen when founders have already tested marketing activities and identified promising channels. This gives you clear direction for what you need your hire to focus on.
• You need more than basic execution. When your marketing needs expand beyond posting on social media or sending occasional emails to require strategic thinking, campaign management and systematic growth, you need professional expertise.

The Founder-First Approach

Before hiring anyone, most successful founders handle the first 10-20 sales themselves. This hands-on experience is invaluable because it helps you understand: what messaging resonates; which channels drive quality leads; and what your ideal customer actually looks like.

The CEO should make the first few sales themselves to get direct feedback from the field. If the founder can't sell the product at all, it's unlikely someone else can.

Understanding Your Business Model Dictates Your First Hire

Product-Led Growth vs Sales-Led Motion

Your go-to-market strategy fundamentally determines whether you should hire marketing or sales first:

If you're product-led growth (PLG) or e-commerce focused, hire marketing first. You need someone who can:

• Drive awareness and demand through content and digital campaigns
• Optimise your website for conversions
• Set up and run basic marketing automation
• Write compelling copy that explains your value proposition clearly

If you're sales-driven with complex enterprise deals, hire sales first. Enterprise deals come from relationships, outbound efforts and trust-building that requires dedicated sales expertise.

What to Look for in Your First Marketer

The Ideal Profile: Mid-Level Marketing Generalist

The ideal first marketing hire should be a mid-level talent with demand generation experience. Here's why this profile works best:

• Experience Level: 5 years of experience is ideal. They're experienced enough to develop strategy but hands-on enough to execute without micromanagement.
• Generalist vs Specialist: At the early stage, you need someone who can wear multiple hats rather than a specialist in one area. They should understand the full marketing funnel and be comfortable with various tactics.
• Startup Experience: Your first marketing hire needs to understand business and startups. This helps them become better product marketers and navigate the unique challenges of early-stage companies.

Key Skills for Your First Marketing Hire

Your first marketer should be able to handle two crucial buckets of responsibilities:

Foundation Building:

• Market research and competitive intelligence
• User research and customer interviews
• Brand messaging and positioning
• Basic website optimisation and conversion tracking

Demand Generation:

• Content creation and content marketing
• Basic SEO and organic growth tactics
• Email marketing and automation setup
• Social media marketing and community building
• Lead generation and nurturing systems

When to Hire a Marketing Agency

Sometimes, hiring a full-time marketer isn’t the best next step. For many startups, partnering with a marketing agency offers flexibility, expertise, and cost-efficiency—especially when you need specialised skills or want to test the waters before committing to a full-time hire.

Why Consider a Marketing Agency?

• Specialised Skills on Demand: Agencies bring expertise in areas like paid advertising, SEO, content creation, and automation—skills that may be too expensive or unnecessary to hire full-time early on.
• Flexible Budgets: Agencies work on a project or retainer basis, so you can scale up or down as your needs change.
• Faster Results: With an agency, you get an experienced team that can hit the ground running, often delivering results more quickly than a new hire.
• Broad Industry Experience: Agencies have worked with multiple clients across industries, bringing best practices and fresh ideas to your business.
• No Overhead: You avoid the costs and commitments of hiring, onboarding and managing full-time employees.
• Set and Forget: Once your strategy is in place, agencies can manage ongoing marketing tasks, allowing you to focus on other aspects of your business while campaigns run smoothly.

When Is the Right Time to Bring in an Agency?

• You’re Not Ready for a Full-Time Hire: If your marketing needs are project-based or you’re still experimenting with channels, an agency can provide the support you need without long-term commitment.
• You Need Specialised Expertise: If you require advanced digital marketing, technical SEO, or creative campaigns, agencies can fill these gaps.
• You Want to Test Multiple Channels: Agencies can help you explore different marketing strategies and identify what works best for your business.
• You’re Scaling Quickly: If your business is growing fast and you need to ramp up marketing quickly, an agency can provide the resources and bandwidth to keep up.

Common Mistakes to Avoid

• Hiring Too Senior Too Early: The biggest risk is hiring someone too senior, too specialised, or too far removed from customer reality.
• Expecting One Person to Do Everything: The misconception that you can hire someone who “does both sales and marketing” rarely works.
• Hiring Without Clear Expectations: Define specific goals and metrics before you start interviewing.
• Rushing the Hiring Process: Take time to find the right cultural and skill fit.

Building for the Future

Planning Your Marketing Team Evolution

As your startup grows, your marketing needs will evolve dramatically. Plan for this progression:

• Quarter 1-2: Foundation building and channel identification
• Quarter 3-4: Scaling proven channels and optimising conversion
• Year 2: Expanding to new channels and building brand awareness
• Year 3+: Advanced personalisation, account-based marketing and thought leadership

Creating a Marketing-Sales Feedback Loop

The marketing person will generate demand for sales to close, and they'll have a great mutual feedback loop. Ensure your marketing hire works closely with sales to:

• Understand lead quality and conversion rates
• Refine ideal customer profiles based on closed deals
• Create content that supports the sales process
• Develop case studies and success stories

Making the Right Choice for Your Startup

Building your marketing team is one of the most important investments you'll make as a founder. The right marketing hire can accelerate your growth trajectory, improve your market positioning, and build the foundation for long-term success.

Remember that there's no one-size-fits-all approach. Your industry, business model, funding stage, and growth goals all influence the best path forward. Whether you start with a fractional CMO, jump straight to a full-time marketing manager, or blend internal hires with agency support, the key is aligning your marketing team structure with your business needs and growth stage.

The founders who succeed are those who recognise when they've outgrown their DIY marketing phase and make strategic, well-timed investments in marketing talent. By understanding when to hire, what to look for, and how to structure your team as you grow, you'll be well-positioned to build a marketing engine that drives sustainable, scalable growth for your startup.

Partner with 24GO

Building the right marketing team is complex, but you don't have to navigate it alone. At 24GO, we specialise in helping B2B businesses engineer the systems that make marketing more measurable, scalable and effective.

Whether you're evaluating your first marketing hire, considering fractional leadership or ready to scale your existing team, we understand the unique challenges faced by growing startups. From CRM implementation to marketing automation, list-building to targeted advertising, we help you connect the dots between prospects and conversions.

Ready to accelerate your marketing momentum? Let's discuss how 24GO can support your team-building strategy and help you make the right marketing investments at the right time. This is where momentum starts—let's build it together.