Hiring a Junior Marketer Won’t Fix Your Marketing
(Here’s Why)
Many business owners reach a point where they look around and realise something important.
“We need to do more marketing.”
Maybe visibility has dropped. Growth has slowed. Competitors seem louder online. The website hasn’t been updated in months. Or there was a LinkedIn page set up, but no posts yet.
So the conversation begins. “We should hire someone to handle the marketing.” And very often the next sentence is, “maybe we bring in a junior.”
Someone young. Someone digital savvy. Someone who can manage social media, update the website and keep the content flowing.
On the surface, it feels like a sensible step.
But in reality, this is where many businesses take a wrong turn.
Why businesses jump straight to hiring a junior
Marketing often gets mistaken for activity. Posting on social media. Running ads. Updating the website. Creating content.
These are visible tasks. And because many digital tools look intuitive, businesses assume that a junior marketer can quickly step in and “run the marketing”.
But marketing done well starts somewhere else entirely. It starts with strategy.
Marketing without strategy is just activity
Before deciding who should deliver the work, businesses need clarity on what they are trying to achieve.
What are the goals of the business?
Who are your core clients?
Where do those clients spend their time?
What makes your product or service different?
What are you trying to achieve over the next year?
Is the team aligned on those goals?
Have you defined the bigger ambition for the business - the kind of goal Jim Collins famously described as a BHAG, a big hairy audacious goal?
These questions form the foundation of strategy.
Without that foundation, marketing quickly becomes a collection of disconnected activities.
Busy work that looks like progress but rarely delivers consistent results.
Why the junior marketer often gets set up to fail
Once a junior marketer joins the business, the first question they usually ask is simple.
“What should I focus on?”
And the answer they often receive is equally vague.
“Let’s just get more visibility.”
So they begin posting content. Trying different platforms. Updating the website. Running a few campaigns.
But without a clear strategy guiding the work, they’re essentially guessing. And that’s an incredibly difficult position for a junior person to be in.
They don’t yet have the experience to define the strategy themselves, and no one in the business is providing that leadership.
So marketing becomes reactive rather than intentional.
Eventually the business concludes that “marketing didn’t work”, when in reality the structure around the role was never clear in the first place.
Learning through life
I saw this dynamic play out recently when partnering with Ross McConnell from Faulkner Construction. Ross initially felt that the next logical step was to hire someone junior to help pick up the marketing workload.
But when we stepped back and looked at the situation together, it became clear that what the business really needed wasn’t a junior marketer.
It needed marketing leadership. We started by clarifying the strategy.
Who Faulkner Construction wanted to work with.
What made their work different.
How the business should position itself in the architectural building space.
From there we created rhythm.
Consistent content.
Clear messaging.
Visibility in the right places.
Stepping in and partnering as Fractional CMO provided Faulkner with the leadership needed to move marketing forward. It helped create clarity with the strategy, the work had direction, and Ross had a peer at the table to challenge ideas and help shape the thinking.
Yes, bringing in senior marketing leadership can feel more expensive than hiring a junior. But believe me, it’s very expensive when you are hand-holding, approving and micro-managing a junior individual. It’s their cost, plus yours. And surely there are $1,000 per hour tasks you can be working on instead.
Marketing leadership before marketing execution
Junior marketers can be incredibly valuable members of a team. But they shouldn’t be expected to build the strategy that guides the work. That’s a leadership function.
Before hiring someone to “do marketing”, businesses need clarity around:
positioning
goals
target audience
and the role marketing plays in achieving growth
When that strategic layer is clear, and there is leadership in the marketing space, junior talent can thrive. They know what race they’re running. They know what success looks like. And their work contributes to a bigger plan.
Without that leadership, they’re simply being asked to run a race no one has properly defined.
Final thought
Marketing is a powerful lever for business growth. But like any lever, it only works when it’s applied in the right direction.
Before hiring someone junior to “run the marketing”, step back and ask a different question first.
Do we have the strategy and leadership in place to guide the work?
Because when that foundation exists, the rest of the marketing puzzle becomes much easier to solve.
Jacqui Gage-Brown
📷 Every team performs better when there's clear leadership and a strategy. Marketing is no different. My team from 2025 CrossFit Nationals.
