It usually starts with a message rather than a meeting. A founder or MD has decided this is the year marketing gets sorted, the job ad is half written, and they want a quick second opinion on the wording before it goes live. That conversation almost never stays on the wording.
The reason is simple. By the time a marketing job ad is being drafted, a decision has already been made in the background, and nobody has written down what problem the new person is being hired to solve. So we start there instead.
Why Is This Role Being Created Now?
The honest answer is rarely strategic. It is usually pressure.
Leads have gone quiet, or a competitor has become noticeably more visible, or the last freelancer stopped replying, or marketing has been sitting on the leadership team's to-do list for three quarters and nobody has the hours. Every one of those is a real problem. None of them is a job specification. A role created to relieve pressure tends to inherit everything nobody else has time for, which is how a business ends up asking one person to run paid media, write content, rebuild the website, manage events and produce a board report.
The first useful question is not who to hire. It is what specifically is underperforming, and what evidence exists for it.
What Do You Already Know, and What Are You Assuming?
Most businesses at this stage know their marketing is not working, and are guessing about why.
In the conversation, we usually ask where the drop-off actually happens. Is traffic low, or is traffic fine and the website failing to convert it? Is the messaging clear to a buyer who has never heard of you, or clear only to people who already work there? Are competitors genuinely ahead, or simply louder in one channel? Nine times out of ten these questions produce an honest pause, because the answers are assumptions rather than evidence, and the assumptions are what the job ad is quietly built on.
That matters, because you cannot brief a hire against a guess. You can only give them a broad remit and hope they find the problem before their probation ends.
What Would This Person Do in Their First 90 Days?
Ask this out loud and the shape of the real decision appears.
If the answer is a clear list, run these three campaigns, own this channel, hit this pipeline number, then the brief exists and hiring is straightforward. If the answer is something closer to work out what we should be doing, then the first month of that salary is being spent on diagnosis, not delivery. That is fine. It is simply worth knowing that is what you are buying, and that diagnosis can be bought on its own, faster and for a fraction of the cost.
This is the point in the conversation where the comparison question comes up directly, and it deserves a proper answer. Compare a marketing audit with hiring a marketing manager
Who Will This Person Report To?
A marketing hire needs someone senior enough in marketing to judge their work, and in most growing businesses that person does not exist yet.
This is the quietest reason marketing hires struggle. A capable marketer joins a business where nobody can tell whether the plan is right, only whether activity is happening. Six months later there is plenty of output, no agreed measure of success, and a difficult conversation on both sides. The fix is not a more senior hire at twice the cost. It is deciding, before anyone joins, what good looks like and who is qualified to say so.
What Usually Changes After the Conversation
Three outcomes come up repeatedly.
- The business hires, but with a sharper role, a narrower remit and a written brief the new marketer can be measured against from day one.
- The business delays the hire by a quarter, fixes the two or three things holding conversion back, and hires later against clearer numbers.
- The business decides it does not need daily hands-on marketing yet, and takes monthly senior direction instead, starting at £995 + VAT a month with Marketing Lite.
All three are good outcomes, because all three start from evidence. The bad outcome is the one where the ad goes live first, someone joins into an undefined role, and the business spends a year finding out what it should have asked before the interview.
“Digital leads surged by an impressive 80% in just three months. Social engagement jumped 160% and organic traffic tripled.”
How to Have This Conversation Yourself
You do not need an outside party to run it. You need the questions written down and answered honestly.
- What specifically is underperforming, and what data shows it?
- Which single number should be different in 90 days?
- Is the gap strategy, execution, or both?
- Who in the business is qualified to judge whether the plan is right?
- What would we hand a new marketer on their first morning?
If the last question is difficult to answer, that is the work to do first. A Marketing Audit produces exactly that document: a scored view of your marketing across 12 areas and a prioritised 90-day plan, delivered in 7 working days for £495 + VAT. Whether you hire afterwards or not, the brief exists either way.
Frequently asked questions
How do we know if we are ready to hire a marketer?
You are ready when you can describe the first 90 days as a list of specific outcomes rather than a general remit, and when someone in the business can judge whether the work is right. If either is missing, the brief needs work before the ad goes live.
What should be in a marketing job brief?
The commercial problem the role exists to solve, the single number that should move, the channels in scope and out of scope, who the role reports to, and how performance will be judged at 90 days. Everything else is detail.
Can we run this conversation internally?
Yes. The value is in answering the questions with evidence rather than opinion. Where businesses get stuck is having no independent view of what is actually underperforming, which is what a structured audit provides.
What if we have already posted the job ad?
Nothing is wasted. A clear diagnosis becomes the onboarding document for whoever joins, so their first month is spent executing against agreed priorities instead of working out what the priorities are.
