How I grew a digital marketing team from 1 to 11 in 12 months

Introduction

My old boss once told me that ‘at the end of the day, we all are in the people industry.’ Although a bit corny and somewhat overused, this phrase rang true throughout my 2+ years at Morphosis.

Before I tell you how I built a digital marketing team of 11 from scratch within less than a year, let me first preface that all my achievements at Morphosis could not have been possible without my supervisors Jeremie, Benjamin and Chris.

Now let’s get started. In this article, I’ll run down each step we took to transform from a single SEO Content Writer to a full-fledged team of digital marketers onboarding a handful of new clients every quarter.

Day 1 - Day 90: Setting the right expectations

I joined Morphosis, a digital consultancy in mid-2019 as their single marketer. At the time, I was transitioning from a content writer to an SEO specialist.

In the first 90 days, my goal was simple: To make a lasting impact at the company by scaling its organic traffic beyond expectations.

After achieving 2x traffic on their website, my supervisors wanted to start selling SEO as a service at the company. With that came my new goal, my newfound purpose at the consultancy.

Building a Digital Marketing Department to offer SEO, PPC, Copywriting and Social Media Marketing services for our clients.

There’s a lot to unpack in this goal. Here are a few things:

• Managing expenses and overseeing PnLs
• Recruiting
• Software subscription management
• Building a new project management workflow
• Managing freelancers
• Leading pitches and creating proposals
• Running internal marketing campaigns for the entire company
• Productising service offerings
• Oh right, and there’s the part where you actually do the digital marketing for clients

Day 90 - 120: Becoming a salesman

At this stage, winning new clients was the most important part of the job. Luckily for me, our partner and head of sales was by far the most talented salesman I’ve ever met.

No matter what languages the clients speak, what industries they were in, or what budgets they had in mind. Chris had a way of captivating people while also putting them at ease.

And with that, we started landing enough clients to hire more headcount.

Here are a few sales skills I learned working with Chris on countless pitch meetings:

• Listening is as important as pitching. It’s always important to first listen to the client’s pain points, goals and expectations so that we know what to emphasise when we come to pitch our proposal.
• Start to spot clients who simply don’t know what they want. When a client prospect starts expanding their expected scope at every meeting, it means they just don’t know what they want. This can either be a great opportunity for us to start upselling, or a big no-go as the prospect can become extremely difficult to work with further down the line.
• Let your proposal do the speaking. When pitching for a client, focus on the high-level narrative of how our services can impact the client’s business. Let the proposal do the speaking when it comes to technical details or operational how-tos.

Day 120 - 150: Going on a hiring spree

Who we hired first depended on the projects in the pipeline and the type of talent they required. In my case, we started off with a few big content writing and SEO projects. This meant the first two positions that opened up were for a content writer and an SEO specialist.

Hiring based on ambition

Starting out, I agreed with my supervisor that our main hiring criteria were drive and ambition, not experience. This was, without a doubt, the best decision to ever have been made for the department. Here are three examples of this approach paid off:

Intern with great potential

Our first hire was a digital marketing intern in her 4th year of university. She soon discovered her knack for crafting sharp, eye-catching copy. By the time I left the company, her copywriting skills had become prolific, and she was well on her way to becoming a senior content writer or even a content team lead in the future.

The journalist turned content writer

Our second hire was an automotive journalist, looking to transition to copywriting and SEO content production. 12 months later, he has become the strongest Thai content writer I have ever worked with, leading UX writing projects and nurturing junior content writers with charisma.

From junior researcher to SEO project manager

Our third hire worked for the public sector as a government researcher, looking to transition to become an SEO specialist. 12 months later, she is now our SEO Lead, spearheading a handful of SEO projects all by herself. By far one of the most diligent, detail-orientated people in the team.

With more projects churning, our team soon grew to 11 members strong, all the while maintaining the same hiring approach.

Digital Marketing Team Structure

While most of the positions we hired for were to fill the growing demands of our clientele, we also needed to add headcounts to solidify the structural integrity of the team. With that said, this was the full structure of our team by the time I departed from the company.

Day 150 - 180: Systematising chaos

Before we knew it, we were managing 15+ clients simultaneously, building out new sales proposals weekly for the sales team, as well as continuing to support internal marketing efforts for the company.

This was when I realised we had hit a ceiling. All my time was spent on deliverable QAs and client meetings, without any bandwidth left to make any strategic decisions on how we should move forward.

In short, my work life had become chaos.

I knew that I had to find a way to scale my time or there would be no further growth for the digital marketing department. This was when I immersed myself in the world of productivity tools and project management.

This freed 80% of my time, allowing me to actually manage my team, think strategically about our future, and relieve a lot of the day-to-day stress I was experiencing.

Here are just a three of the most impactful initiatives I implemented to scale my time:

• Creating a single source of truth for the deliverables
• Championing passive communication through the meta-verse
• Building a second brain for all things work-related

Each of these initiatives warrants its own in-depth article. Today, I’ll focus on the first point.

Creating a single source of truth

Every day, I had to spend hours doing deliverable reviews, adjusting task deadlines to fit resource capacity, and setting up micro-calls to clarify tasks and expectations with the team.

This was when I decided to create a single source of truth for project management with Asana. This allowed me to:

1. Have a high-level overview of our resource capacity at all times in sync with task assigning
2. Monitor all project timelines under a single view
3. Make clarifications on any task briefs with my team

However, the project management tool is only helpful if it has a complete adoption rate from all team members, closely following our rules of engagement on the platform. Here are the core principles that made Asana a game-changer:

• The central source of truth: Asana is to be treated as a single source of truth. All tasks should be documented on Asana, any tasks not documented on Asana will be treated as non-existent or non-necessary.
• Flexibility: All stakeholders should engage Asana with a flexible mindset. Requesting to adjust processes to better fit their workflows and accommodate new situations.
• Autonomy: All stakeholders are entrusted to take ownership of their own tasks, keeping their task statuses up to date at all times and reporting to their supervisor once a task is complete or ready for review.

By this time two years had passed and after systematising everything within our project management tool, our department become a well-oiled machine. Leads were coming in consistently within our pipeline, our team was consistently growing, and processes were well defined.

This then marked the end of my time at Morphosis as their first digital marketer. I was ready to move on to newer challenges in my career.

What I would’ve done differently

Although I’ve focused on the wins and key achievements in this article, my two years at Morphosis were in fact, filled with endless roadblocks, sleepless nights, and far from frictionless. If there was one big shortcoming to my management style at the time, it was that I didn’t know how to delegate properly.

Don’t delegate tasks, delegate responsibilities

I learned the hard way that when you don’t delegate enough, it can take a heavy toll on the team’s productivity, my team member’s motivation as well as my own mental health.

My manager told me I had to delegate more to my team members for my own sake. So I did just that. I built out an air-tight process for all aspects of the job and proceeded to delegate individual tasks to each team member.

But before I knew it, my inbox was constantly being bombarded by an endless queue of ‘clarification questions’ and ‘roadblocks’ identified by my team members, waiting patiently for me to help them resolve the issue. Soon, this meant I couldn’t take any holiday breaks without becoming anxious that things would fall apart, eventually leading me to the verge of burning out.

I had built an implicit process of dependency between myself and my team members, taxing my own mental health on a daily basis as well as hindering the growth of my team.

It wasn’t until the end of my two years at the company that I finally understood what my manager meant. I had to delegate ownership to my team members instead of individual tasks. This helps them:

1. Feel empowered and trusted to achieve a meaningful goal at a company
2. Become more motivated to achieve their goal and own up to their new responsibilities
3. Grow as individuals to become to provide more value to our customers

Conclusion

Through this experience, I came to learn that indeed, we are all in the people industry at the end of the day. I came to Morphosis to improve my SEO skills, but I stayed for the people here, for the team that we’ve built.

Each of these sections warrants its own in-depth article, from project management, sales, and system-building to management. I’ll be posting links to future articles relating down below.