Marketing onboarding for new staff: first week, in order

Aug 22
3 min read

Updated: 4 days ago

Introduction

A new person joins to run marketing, spends three weeks working out what exists, and starts making decisions on incomplete information.

That is not a failure of the hire. It is the predictable result of onboarding that consists of handing over passwords and hoping.

1. Marketing onboarding for new staff starts with context, not tools

The first thing to hand over is not access. It is why things are the way they are.

Who the customers are, what they buy, what was tried before and abandoned, which channels work and which were funded out of habit, what the pricing logic is, what the current priority is and why.

Without that, a competent person will spend their first month rediscovering it, and will often restart something that was correctly stopped last year.

2. Hand over the numbers on day one

Give them the actual figures rather than a description of the business.

Monthly spend by channel, enquiries by source, conversion rate, average transaction value, what a customer is worth, and repeat rate. A single page.

Someone who can see these on their first day asks materially better questions in their first week. It also tells you immediately whether those numbers exist, which is a useful thing to discover before the person needs them.

3. Sort out access properly, not incrementally

Access granted piecemeal over a fortnight blocks work and looks disorganised.

Before they start, list every account, tool and platform, and grant access from a business-owned administrator account rather than sharing personal logins. Include the boring ones: the domain registrar, the review platforms, the listing sites, the email sending tool.

Use individual named accounts wherever the platform allows. Shared credentials cannot be revoked selectively, which becomes a problem the moment anyone leaves.

4. Walk them through the recurring routines

Marketing is largely a set of things that happen on a schedule. Those are what a new person needs to inherit.

Show the daily check, the weekly slot, the monthly review, the reporting deadlines. For each: what it is, who does it, what it produces, and where the output goes.

Explicit handover of routines is what stops them lapsing. Most marketing that quietly stopped happening stopped when someone left and nobody knew the routine existed.

5. Have them walk the customer journey in week one

Before they change anything, they should experience the business as a customer.

Search for it, browse the site on a phone, submit an enquiry, wait for the reply, read the follow-up. For in-person businesses, visit.

New people notice what everyone else has stopped seeing, and that observation is most valuable in the first fortnight, before they acclimatise. Ask for the list, and take it seriously.

6. Give them something small to own immediately

Sitting in on things for a month teaches less than owning one small thing in week one.

A single channel, a report, the review responses, the weekly check. Small enough that mistakes are cheap, real enough that they have to understand the process.

It also surfaces gaps in the handover quickly, because they will hit the undocumented parts within days.

7. Point them at the documentation, and expect it to be wrong

Whatever written procedures exist, hand them over and ask the new person to correct them as they go.

A new starter following documentation is the best test of it available — they cannot fill gaps from memory. Every place they get stuck is a genuine defect.

Give them explicit permission to rewrite it. Most procedure documents are written once and never touched again, and a new hire is the only person who will ever read them cold.

8. Set the first review point, and what it covers

Agree a date, usually four to six weeks out, and what will be discussed.

Not a performance review. A check on whether the handover was complete: what they still do not have access to, which routines are unclear, what they discovered that nobody mentioned, and what they propose to change.

Write the outcome into the onboarding document for the next person. Onboarding improves only if each new starter's confusion gets recorded rather than resolved privately and forgotten.

Conclusion

Lead with context and the actual numbers, not passwords. Arrange all access before day one through business-owned accounts with individual logins.

Hand over the recurring routines explicitly, have them walk the customer journey in week one and report what they noticed, give them one small thing to own immediately, ask them to correct the documentation as they use it, and hold a handover review at four to six weeks that improves the process for the next hire.