Don't skip the foundations

Brands can, and do build revenues up to $3M per year without the proper foundations and infrastructure. However, it almost always comes crumbling down if neglected. With scale, comes the exposure of bottlenecks and inefficiencies in a company that can get by for a while, but won't perform smoothly forever.

Foundations in business are core pieces of infrastructure you build (digitally or physically) and are used to support the growth of your company, or daily operations. This article is focused on the foundations of a good marketing team, but can be equally applied to all of the departments in your company.

What are the foundations of a good marketing setup?

After working in digital marketing roles for nearly 12 years, at startups to large corporate brands I've noticed the same patterns.

The brands who fail at scale, lack many key foundations and business operations.

Companies that scale up well have built the proper infrastructure, marketing systems, and resources to support them in doing so. Brands serving different industries may require custom solutions, but overall these are the key foundations to a marketing department, as listed below.

Website

Marketing teams rely on the main company website as their home base for traffic generation, and acquiring new users. Invest into your website, and make sure you're building on up-to-date platforms such as Webflow to get the most performance out of your website.

CRM (Customer Relationship Management)

Choose one, set it up correctly (you may need to hire a contractor on Upwork ), and stick with it! Your customer database is such an extremely important part of your entire marketing system, and the searchable data within is a powerful tool that will help your marketing and creative teams.

You'll likely have to spend some money and sweat on completing the integrations of your other 3rd party apps with your CRM, either through API or native integration. When you finally get it working properly, your CRM can become the main hub from which most all sales, support, and marketing activities begin.

Marketing team internal resources

Build internal resources, SOPs, asset folders, video walkthroughs, and more. Any company over a few years old should have these to make life easier on new hires as they onboard, and become acquainted with your company. Your team will also need these on an ongoing basis to work efficiently and stay organized.

Project Management system

Speaking of staying organized, stop emailing your team members with tasks. Any growing organization is likely to receive hundreds, if not thousands of emails per week (for each team member's inbox). Be more professional, by assigning tasks in a project management system, with dates assigned, and all relevant information included. This will also allow you a much, much simpler way to manage your open projects and check on their statuses. It will actually speed up work within your organization.

Analytics and Reporting

Marketing, especially in paid media and SEO — relies heavily upon data. If you need regular reports created, please make things easier on your team by investing a little time into creating automated reports, and data dashboards. All good leaders know the score(s) in their business. If you don't have an analytics dashboard fully built out, it's doubtful that you know the true numbers! This limits your ability to make informed decisions, so make sure to include analytics.

Budgeting for campaigns - approved ahead of timeframes

Unclear or inconsistent reporting on what marketing budgets are available, will absolutely kill the growth in your brand. Without a budget, your marketing team can not prepare, plan ahead, and build out in time the digital campaign assets to deliver on a budget that was never planned for, then sprung upon your team at some random date.

Design system

All marketing teams need a design system — a unified set of files, usually in a design app like Figma where you can make wireframes, design templates, and specify brand guidelines for certain use cases.

Web and Email Hosting

Popular web hosting tools like GoDaddy are great for domain and DNS management. It's also important to properly setup your email hosting, with company inboxes on your main domain, and another setup for CRM and marketing emails. Landing your messages in spam, on your main domain can be a really bad thing for the future of your company. So before sending out email blasts and linking your main domain to your CRM, consult with an email marketing expert.

Social Media

Find a good social media scheduling tool, so that your social media manager(s) have one central place in which to create and plan weekly posts.

Content Management System

In modern web development platforms like Webflow , your content management system comes built in with the ability to create many different CMS collections (databases). If you use an old and outdated website builder like WordPress, you'll be limited to just one CMS (blog) and have to implement 3rd party services which only slow down the site.

Make sure you consider this when it comes to the web infrastructure! Also, website development varies a lot from software and app development. In the case of an App, you'll likely use another CMS like any API-first CMS that can integrate seamlessly with your chosen mobile development framework, like React Native or Flutter.

Content Calendar

Create a spreadsheet, Airtable , or anything else similar to setup a content calendar where you can plan an omnichannel approach to content delivery.

Paid Ads

The marketing specialist on your team responsible for managing paid advertising campaigns will also need resources to do their work better. Many of the other foundations covered such as the budget tracker, analytics dashboard, design system, brand graphics, and the content calendar will all be needed!

SEO (Search Engine Optimization)

SEO is a research based role, and if you haven't invested into tools like Semrush , Ahrefs , or another one you are likely hindering their ability to perform and make quick, iterative changes each quarter to your SEO strategy.

Partnerships and Sponsorships

Who's going to reach out to influencers, brands, and orgs about sponsored content and partnerships? Do you have a dedicated team member for this, or were you going to ignore it? Many social media managers will also be tasked with this, to conduct the influencer outreach and make some joint venture partnerships with other content creators.

Our media team at Spaulding Decon was able to secure brand deals with companies like Hoover, SurfShark, and were featured on VICETV — all because of proactive outreach that resulted in sponsorships and new videos.

PR (Public Relations)

As a customer / external facing role, you'll need systems and goals for Public Relations and your press releases.

Customer Support

How organized and accessible are things for your support team? Make sure they have access to the CRM, and anything else you rely on for up to date customer data. Support will also need their own infrastructure such as a VOIP phone system (I suggest Dialpad instead of Ring Central), support ticketing system, email management, and access to your social media inboxes.

Vendor Management

Marketing teams often interact and engage with vendors that provide services like PPC management, web design, SEO, graphic design, videography, and content creation. Do you have a vendor management system, database, contracts, and resources, or steps to follow for working with them?

HR (Human Resources) or a dedicated Team Lead for hiring

As your team grows, you want to keep it efficient by having each team member focusing on their role, rather than sparse and random interruptions (which are caused by a lack of infrastructure). This means, your head of marketing such as the CMO (chief marketing officer) should be the main one interviewing candidates and managing the hiring process.

Local Marketing, Reputation Management & Directories

For large organizations, especially multi-location business models like franchising will require an even larger (huge) amount of work on local marketing. This will likely be a small corporate team of it's own within a franchise system.

That's my basic list of marketing foundations. There's even more to include when you get into the technical setups and tools used in marketing roles. With today's advancements in AI, team will soon also need to build infrastructure around their artificial intelligence systems too.

By following the steps to integrate all of those core foundational elements, you'll be a lot more secure in your journey of scaling your business into the future.

Companies are only as good as their infrastructure and operations

It's been said that "Companies are only as good as their people"

I'd like to take this a step farther and propose that as the CEO of a company, your people will only perform as well as the foundations which they've been given to operate within. Here's a metaphor — try asking last year's winner of the Kentucky Derby to ride a mule in the next championship horse race. He's great, but will be confined to the limitations of the mule. A lack of marketing infrastructure will do the same to the capabilities of your entire team.

How talent evaluates joining your company, and why they often leave for larger organizations

Why do companies struggle to retain great talent for longer than 2-3 years? It's likely because of a lack of infrastructure, making things more difficult on your staff. Great talent will often leave companies that neglect their foundations, in search of a well-built organization where they're offered more support and resources to work with.

Why does marketing infrastructure matter to a small business?

This is something you need to keep in mind, and build towards from the start. Every client, customer, or employee put into a business system with a lack of foundations starts a negative flywheel that only makes it harder to recover from later on. You don't want to put these items off until later 'when the team grows' because without them, your team won't be able to grow.

A lack of structure wastes time and team efficiency

We're not just talking about building random things here — items without interconnectedness. These foundational pieces are what hold each other together, and make your work-time spent 2x-10x more efficiently.

The problems with scaling a company that skipped over key foundations

Putting of these foundations in your company for too long, will have it's consequences. It's like ignoring a small leak in a canoe, which weighs down the boat and causes you to sink! The longer you resist doing this necessary work, the more expensive and challenging the projects become.

Build these foundations early — it will be more challenging later

Don't wait, start today on each of these foundational pieces. Even putting together a document like a marketing infrastructure plan will go a long ways to getting you started on what needs to be built, focusing on making those foundations strong, and then getting them made in their first version to allow your team to experiment with new and more efficient ways to work.