How to (not) hire a marketing co-ordinator

For many venue operators, probably the last thing on your mind is hiring a dedicated marketing resource. However if you’re ready to get more exposure for your venue, what kind of resource do you hire?

You need someone to get the basics done, right? Logo, artwork, signage, menus, comment cards… there’s a lot to get done. Once all that is done, there’s the web site – need one of those and some print ads for local media.

All in all that’s a long list of “basics”.

So let’s get your ad written for your marketing hire.

“Wanted marketing co-ordinator for new inner city restaurant. Must have a good eye for design, great ability to come up with original concepts, ability with web design desirable.”

Hang on though. The venue is nearly open so we need to get some ideas for opening night.

“Experience with event management keenly sought”.

Let’s also remember that we’re going to spend a fortune on our web site so we need to get some tracking systems in place to see if visitors are actually using the site, and why those visitors are not using our online forms to book or make an enquiry.

“Applicants must have a background in online marketing, analytics, user interfaces and conversion tracking”.

Social media? What is that? Oh twitter, facebook all of that huh? Hmmm well surely that can’t be hard, we’ll add that to the job description.

“Must be well versed in social media, to interact and represent our venue in online spaces like twitter and facebook”

Wow these comment cards we had printed are doing well, we’ve not got a stack 78cm high in the back office, better get the marketing guy to enter those into a database. Then, we’ll need a email template that looks just like our web site, so we can start sending our newsletters to our past customers. Make sure we can track who is opening and interacting with the emails so we know how successful the campaigns are.

“Experience with HTML, sufficient to create newsletter email templates, as well as 80 words per minute data entry. Good understanding of online email database and send systems, with the ability to record and analyse user behaviours”

Google.

Hmm Bing and Yahoo as well. How on earth do we get our web site listed on those?

I know. “Candidates should have at least 2 years experience in Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and Pay Per Click (PPC) campaign management”. That will do it!

Ok so this is all a bit tongue in cheek but…

There is a point to all of this and it’s this: sometimes these things are better to be outsourced. With the variety of marketing options that you need to cover consider hiring an agency that has specialist in many areas rather then trying to find one person who is (impossibly) experienced in all of disciplines that a modern business needs to be involved in.