Hiring an Interim Marketing Manager for Your Tech Company? 5 Critical Skills You Should Look Out for

In the past 15 years, I have come across many technology companies that don’t have a dedicated marketing professional. I get it — hiring a full-time marketing manager can be costly and risky.

But it doesn’t have to be. Tech companies that consider marketing a cost rather than an investment in growth have to recalibrate this kind of mindset. A skilled marketing manager can help increase your profits, speed up cash flow, and reduce the risks of the global tech market.

If you can’t hire a full-time person, this is where an Interim Marketing Manager comes in.

Why Hire an Interim Marketing Manager

Why should you hire an interim marketing manager for your tech company? What makes an interim marketing manager more favorable over a full-time marketing manager? Here are a few good reasons:

1. You will get one dedicated, highly skilled, and experienced tech marketing manager, plus access to a team of various subject matter experts who can help based on your needs, flexibly. So, instead of getting one person’s narrow skill-set, you get in-depth expertise for each area of marketing.

2. You can tailor an efficient, monthly recurring marketing process according to your needs. So, you don’t pay for time spent on learning, coffee breaks, lunch hours, and chatting with colleagues.

3. Employing a full-time marketing manager is a long-term commitment. And it’s usually only later after you hire the person that you find out what you get. Regardless, you pay a full salary from day one on top of their tools and expenses.

4. With an interim marketing manager, you only sign up for a monthly recurring service with a 30-day notice of termination. And did I mention you only pay for the activities you need?

5. Hiring an interim marketing manager is a perfect solution if you want to ramp up marketing function and produce results — leads, content, publicity — fast while saving costs.

5 Most Critical Skills of an Interim Marketing Manager in Tech

Marketing is essential to the success of any company, so does the role of a marketing manager. That’s why it’s important to go beyond looking at a marketing candidate’s degree and experience.

What should you be looking for? Here are the five most valuable skills an interim marketing manager must have when working with B2B tech companies:

1. Create a Differentiation Strategy

No matter what you sell — hardware, software, solutions, or services — the competition in international markets is fierce. You are competing against more companies and companies that are becoming increasingly innovative, and companies that are ready to lower their prices just to beat the competition.

A skilled interim marketing manager with tech experience can help differentiate your products and build a unique value proposition based on customer needs and your strengths, and steer you away from cutthroat price competition to more profitable market segments.

2. Build a Global Market Presence

Regardless of your technology or industry sector, your market area is global. Today’s savvy buyers, specialists, and decision-makers use online search to look for information about competing solutions. Often they make a vendor shortlist and contact the preferred ones when the time is right. As a vendor, you need to get your brand in front of your potential buyers before they make purchasing decisions. Building a strong online presence is an easy way to do that.

The interim marketing manager can help with search engine optimization (SEO) to rank your content at the top of Google search results for queries your potential buyers use to find products like yours. SEO is the most cost-effective method to build a global market presence. 

3. Strengthen Industry Credibility

Like it or not, tech buyers, specialists, and decision-makers follow and get influenced by industry thought leaders. The companies with strong credibility become the preferred partners, get most RFP invitations, and win sales.

The interim marketing manager can help strengthen your industry thought leadership image and credibility via global publicity on tech and business media. We write engaging, insightful thought leadership articles for you and publish them on the most important media outlets.

4. Boost Inbound Sales

About 94% of expert B2B buyers use Google to search for information about solutions and shortlist their preferred vendors. Only the shortlisted vendors will be contacted when the buying process activates. That’s why it becomes much harder now to acquire new customers with outbound sales.

An interim marketing manager builds and scales an inbound lead generation process for you to let buyers, specialists, and decision-makers find you — when it best suits them. With inbound, we can target your sales efforts optimally and get more profitable customers!

Related: How We Helped an IoT Company Generate 400 Leads in 3 Months

5. Run Day-to-Day Marketing Tasks

Marketing in an international tech company involves many recurring activities. Some might call it grunt work, but it’s one of the five critical capabilities of an interim marketing manager. The interim marketing manager keeps all the balls in the air while your organization concentrates on its core business.

The day-to-day marketing activities may include:

• Ensuring your website ranks efficiently on Google through on-page search engine optimization
• Addressing burning customer questions by publishing search-engine-optimized content regularly
• Nurturing acquired leads and develop and maintain marketing automation
• Maintaining social media channels and monthly email newsletters
• Managing and producing webinars, events, and conferences
• And many, many more marketing tasks

Monthly Marketing Process Best Practices

I recommend following our field-proven marketing process, which has been trimmed to perfection with several B2B tech companies. Typically, it starts with strategic planning, keyword analysis, on-site SEO, and/or marketing tools setup, depending on where your present marketing stands. 

However, the starting point and scope of the monthly service can be agreed together and adjusted along the way as per your needs.

Where to Find an Interim Marketing Manager for Tech?

Are you looking for an experienced and highly skilled Interim Marketing Manager for your tech company? Look no further.

I am a technology marketing specialist with 15 years of marketing experience from world-class technology brands such as Nokia, Ericsson, Spirent, and innovative startups such as FirstHop, Mobilethink, and Tweakker. And 3 years into entrepreneurship, I have worked with more than 20 international companies. My longest interim marketing manager position was at the wireless device management company Sicap that lasted for 3 years.

Want to talk more about your company’s next project?

Book a FREE 30-minute consultation with me now!