One of the most fulfilling things in my marketing career has been guiding, supporting and watching marketing teams grow. In my last Marketing Director role, I really enjoyed building a marketing team development plan to up-level the marketing department.
My favourite thing to do in interviews for new roles is to boast about direct reports who have grown in their careers at companies I worked at, left agencies to start their own or are climbing the ranks at very popular eCommerce companies. I literally feel like a proud mama talking about their accomplishments.
How To Write A Marketing Team Development Plan
Step one: take the time to sit down with each member of the current team individually. This will allow you to understand what motivates them, what do they enjoy doing in marketing, what do they dislike doing, where they would like to go in their career and their experience to date at the company and previous companies.
Step two: create development plans for each individual that includes career aspirations and the next step in their career growth (which includes within the company or potentially at what point they would leave the company if there was no career growth potential at the current company).
Step three: map out these three key components
3 Key Components of a Marketing Team Development Plan
- Business Goals
- Personal Growth Goals
- Certifications/Education Needed
A marketing team development plan needs to align with the business goals of the organization. The overall plan must include the company’s business goals broken down into smaller marketing goals. From there we map out personal growth goals they would like to achieve to enable them to hit business goals. I then outline, with the team member, what certifications or education might be needed to achieve the business or personal growth that have been mapped out.
Budget Implications
When going through annual budget planning, ensure you plan for the costs of paid courses, conferences or certifications that could up-level the team.
Marketing Team Development Plan Structure
I like to make a comprehensive marketing team development plan in a spreadsheet (using a good ol’ Google Sheet). Here are the steps I use to build it (and a visual example of a template):
- Under Role, list out current role titles
- Link each current role to a comprehensive job description document
- List out any future roles you’d like to hire on the team
- Under Marketing Team Member list the current employee in the role
- Under Certifications list out all certifications that the role should have. These could include courses or certifications (ex. HubSpot Inbound Marketing)
- Under Goals list out current business goals the role is working on
- Under Tasks list out what tasks need to be accomplish to achieve the business goal
Another column you could include is a list of MarTech tools that each role uses and who is the “owner” of the software. This will allow you to easily review who manages specific vendor relationships.
Marketing Team Development Plan Specifics
When mapping out the goals and tasks, we always need to ensure we are setting SMART (specific, measurable, attainable, realistic and timely) goals so that our teams know exactly when they’ve hit the mark or have missed it.
At my last organization, we reviewed development plans quarterly to ensure they were progressing. This also allowed for enough time to pass to allow for goals to be achieved. It was also timely enough that we could identify if something needed to be done to shift goals or assist them in attaining them.
A skill gap analysis could also be conducted for your team. Ensure that the team know’s that the focus isn’t to necessarily point out weaknesses, but to identify what specific training can then be put in place to up-level your team. This could include leadership courses, soft skill courses, specialized training or cross-functional training.
So what about the structure of the team? It’s important for a marketing leader to have a mix of strategists, generalists and experts.
Typical Marketing Team Roles
- Marketing Leader (CMO, VP, Director)
- Marketing Manager
- Content Marketing
- Digital Marketing
- Product Marketing
- Channel Marketing
- Social Media Marketing
- SEO
- Marketing Operations
- Growth, Acquisition, Performance Marketing
- Creative (Designers, Writers, Video/Audio Editors, etc.)
- Analysts
- PR
- Project Managers
When building a marketing team development plan and after discovering what your team members like to do you can decide to focus them on specific skills or allow them to continue to learn within several areas of marketing. Mapping out what you have and what roles might be needed based on executing the overall marketing strategy will be key during annual strategy and budgetary planning.
How Can I Help?
If you need someone to review your current marketing team’s development plans or create one for your organization. I’d be happy to help. Let’s book a time to chat about your organization’s needs.
