Marketing New Hire Training Checklist

Confirm with the hiring manager which discipline the new hire belongs to — the answer drives which tooling deep-dive they get in week one. Also confirm pod, manager of record, and onboarding buddy.

Open tickets with IT to add the hire to SSO groups for HubSpot/Marketo, Salesforce, GA4, GTM, the DAM (Bynder/Brandfolder/Frontify), Figma, and the consent platform (OneTrust/Cookiebot). Permissions are role-based — don't grant CRM admin to a new IC.

At minimum: #marketing, #content, #campaigns, the pod channel, and the launch-coordination channel. Add to the DAM brand-asset groups so they can pull approved logo lockups, color palettes, and fonts on Day 1 instead of waiting on access tickets.

Cover founding story, current customer concentration, and the ideal customer profile — segment, firmographics, buying committee, primary pain. Marketers who don't internalize the ICP write campaigns for the wrong audience.

Map the marketing pods (demand gen, content, brand, lifecycle, PMM, ops) and the handoffs to Sales, RevOps, and Product. Name the lead-routing SLA and where MQL → SAL handoff lives in the CRM.

30-minute intros with each pod member; the onboarding buddy is a peer (not the manager) who fields the small dumb questions for the first two weeks. Schedule a standing 30-min daily check-in for week one.

Walk through positioning statement, value props by segment, tone-of-voice rules, logo lockups, color palette (HEX/RGB/CMYK), typography, and the do-not-use list. Show where the latest versions live in the DAM — Google Drive copies are stale.

Confirm the hire can see the production GA4 property and the GTM container. Walk through the conversion events that matter — and the ones that fire incorrectly. Show the staging container so they never test in production.

HubSpot/Marketo/Pardot — assign role-appropriate permissions, walk through the lead-scoring model, lifecycle stages, and the suppression list. Show the sandbox or test database; live broadcast sends are gated behind a separate permission for a reason.

Convention drift is the most common reason attribution reports become uncomparable. Walk through the source/medium/campaign/content/term standard, the shared link-builder tool, and the rule that no link goes external without UTMs.

Show how to brief design (Figma file conventions, request form, turnaround SLAs), where finished assets land in the DAM, and the licensing rules for stock photography and music. AI-generated imagery has its own disclosure rules — cover them.

For the Content/SEO track: Ahrefs (or Semrush) for keyword and backlink work, Clearscope/Surfer for content briefs, Screaming Frog for technical audits, and CMS author access (WordPress/HubSpot/Webflow/Contentful). Walk through the brief template and the SEO QA checklist.

For the Demand Gen/Paid track: link the new user via Google Ads MCC, Meta Business Manager, LinkedIn Campaign Manager. Walk through pacing rules, frequency caps, brand-safety blocklists (DoubleVerify/IAS), and the kill-switch procedure for a runaway campaign.

For the Lifecycle/Email track: walk through sender domains, SPF/DKIM/DMARC records, BIMI status, and the warmup history. Show GlockApps or inbox-placement reports, the Litmus rendering test, and the bounce/complaint thresholds that gate broad sends.

Cover the non-negotiables: physical address in every commercial email footer, opt-out honored within 10 business days across every sending platform, no deceptive subject lines. CASL is stricter — explicit opt-in is the default for Canadian recipients. Confirm the suppression list is enforced on manual one-off sends, not just scheduled broadcasts.

Walk through the CMP (OneTrust/Cookiebot/Didomi) and the rule that tracking pixels — Meta Pixel, LinkedIn Insight, GA4 — fire only after consent state allows. Cookie-banner 'accept all' is not marketing-email consent. EU prospects need a separate consent flow from US prospects.

#ad goes at the top of an influencer post, not buried in 30 hashtags. 'Paid partnership with [brand]' via the platform's native feature is what regulators look for. Affiliates and employees posting about the brand have material connections that require disclosure even when no money changes hands for that specific post.

Captures a timestamped record that the hire has completed CAN-SPAM, CASL, GDPR/CCPA, and FTC endorsement training. Legal keeps the signed acknowledgment in the personnel file. This is the artifact regulators ask for if a complaint is ever filed.

30 days: ramp on the stack, ship one small owned deliverable. 60 days: own a recurring cadence (weekly send, content slot, campaign launch). 90 days: lead a measurable initiative against a KPI. Capture the plan as text so both sides reference the same document at the 30-day check-in.

Standing 30-minute weekly slot with the manager for the first 90 days. Shared running agenda doc — wins, blockers, asks, feedback both directions. Don't let it become a status update; it's a coaching conversation.

A scoped deliverable that exercises the stack — a published blog post, a one-off email send, an audit of the UTM convention, a small paid test. The point is the hire produces something real with a measurable result before the 30-day mark.

Manager reviews progress against the 30/60/90 plan, gathers feedback from the buddy and pod, and flags any ramp risk early. Mark the outcome here so RevOps and HR can spot patterns across hires.