The marketing employee dilemma

If you are running an engineering or technology business you will be familiar with assessing a potential new hire to perform a specific role within your team. But when you consider hiring a marketing person, it’s a whole different game. Unless you have a lot of marketing experience, it can be very hard to tell from a CV or even an interview whether a candidate would actually deliver what you need.

And when it comes to guiding and developing a more junior marketer, there is a nagging doubt that you don’t really have the time (or indeed the marketing knowledge) they would need from you.

There are many marketing agencies out there who would happily replicate all the kinds of marketing and social media activities that your competitors are busy with. But the reality is, you won’t know if it is delivering actual business results for many months.

And when you add up the retainer, plus advertising, software licenses and other costs, it looks like a rather expensive experiment.

Considering an agency retainer?

How about starting with the website?

Chances are you’ve been so busy serving customers that your website has been overlooked for quite some time. There’s no doubt it needs a refresh, or even a complete rebuild from the ground up. But while it’s relatively easy to commission a new website project, they often grind to a halt as you are asked to provide pages and pages of content.

And in truth, a more impressive website won’t do much for the business if it isn’t part of a wider sales and marketing strategy.

What this actually involves

This work requires someone with substantial experience in B2B tech marketing, who can quickly grasp technical complexity whilst seeing your business from the outside – often spotting differentiation you’ve stopped noticing because you’re too close to it.

They’ll help you understand not just what competitors do, but how they’re perceived in the market, so you can make informed positioning choices. They’ll draw out clear, persuasive messaging, working through the inconsistencies between what your sales team says, what your website claims, and what customers actually need to hear.

And crucially, they’ll create the essential assets – website positioning, case studies, sales tools – where quality and strategic alignment matter most. These are the materials where quality and strategic alignment are essential – they move customers forward on their journey and make sales conversations more effective.

Other materials (regular content, campaign assets, social media) can be created by agencies or junior marketers – but only once these foundations exist to build on.

Once you have these foundations in place, all those uncertain decisions become much clearer.

If you go on to hire a marketing person, they will have clear strategy and direction to work from rather than being asked to figure everything out themselves. If you work with an agency, they will have a proper briefing and can focus on execution rather than guessing at positioning. And if you commission a website, you know exactly what it needs to say and can assess whether it’s working.

Your sales team will have materials that properly support their conversations. Your partners will have tools they can use effectively. And you can make confident decisions about marketing investment because you understand what you’re trying to achieve and how to measure it.

What this changes