Cart before the horse.
That's how a lot of companies do their first marketing hire.
They hire junior professionals and expect senior level output.
And I understand why. It has to do with budget (junior professionals are cheaper), not really understanding what is needed for marketing, and the manual process that they have currently done feels like a junior professional's workload.
But that's backwards.
Bringing in a mid-level marketing professional gives you the best of everything. Someone eager to elevate their career, they know how to do the work, they want ownership of marketing strategy, and their salary is not at the level of a senior professional (yet).
When should your first marketing hire be a senior marketing pro? When your company also has the financial resources to hire more marketing staff and/or outsource the majority of the work.
For companies that are just starting out and needing to build a marketing department within their company, a lot of times firm leaders decide to hire a junior marketing person to come in. And a lot of times that decision is based off of the salary that they're able to offer.
However, it's kind of backwards because firms that are in a growth period and see that they have a need for an in-house marketing professional should be looking for a mid-level career person to come in and help build the structure of marketing, put some things into place, but also can do the work because they may be a department of one for a little bit before they can start hiring on people.
If you hire someone too senior they are not necessarily the ones that are gonna do the work. If you hire someone senior, you may still be outsourcing a lot of the marketing needs to consultants or agencies, which is great, but also that more senior person is gonna come with a higher salary.
A junior person needs a lot of management and oversight. If your company doesn't currently have a marketing leader in house, then that's going be left to you who may not have a marketing background or marketing knowledge of how to market to your audience successfully. Finding someone that really fits that mid-level range is ideal for companies that need to build a marketing presence and save costs on salary, but be able to bring someone in that has the knowledge and the energy to go out and make it happen.
So if you're building a marketing department, really think about what your company needs and make sure you can hire the right people, pay them the right salary, and then give them the resources to go and be the marketing professional that they are.