Your Team Needs a Strong Marketing Coordinator

If the marketing coordinator position is the backbone of our operations, why are we setting them up to fail?

I’m a type 1 diabetic. This requires an above-average amount of doctor office visits, labs, and medications.

I’m fortunate to have incredible doctors within a prominent hospital system supporting me. But trying to schedule an appointment or ask a quick follow-up question between visits feels like being flayed alive. This isn’t because the doctors don’t care—it’s that they work within a broken administrative system.

The administrative support these doctors get is remarkably terrible. If a medication changes due to insurance, good luck. If you can't book an appointment in person, you might wait 12 to 18 months. Responses don't take days—sometimes they never even happen.

Out of curiosity, I asked a few friends who work in healthcare across different states if they ran into similar issues. They confirmed it immediately—very similar breakdowns happen inside their own hospital systems. But what shocked me wasn't that the problem was everywhere. It was the root cause. As they explained why, I realized I’d heard this story before: it’s the identical reason I’ve watched marketing teams struggle to hire and retain great coordinators.

Across almost every industry, we are setting up the actual backbone of our operations to fail.

Overlooked, Underpaid, and Expected to Do Everything

Coordinators are arguably some of the most important people on a marketing or communications team. They help keep campaigns on time, organize chaos behind the scenes, and handle heavy lifting to keep leadership supported. Yet, they are typically underpaid and tragically underappreciated.

Marketing and communications teams rarely take these roles as seriously as they should and even more rarely set them up for success. Many organizations seem to actively work against them with the base pay and list of expectations.

A strong marketing coordinator has to master an absurd range of skills: process documentation, workflow management, vendor coordination, calendar management, invoice processing, list management, copywriting, and note-taking—basically, every critical task senior employees don't want to do. On top of that, they answer to a daily hailstorm of bizarre, urgent requests from directors and C-level executives.

Whenever a new coordinator joined a team I was on, it felt like meeting someone with a death sentence. Full disclosure: I have never been a marketing coordinator. Not once. My entire career has been spent managing strategy and working alongside them. But watching bright, eager professionals get hired into the same impossible role again and again, only to eventually be fired because leadership didn't understand the role, was incredibly heartbreaking to witness. They were hired to be fired, and everyone knew it the second the job was posted.

You Get What You Pay For

Remember the broken administrative system with my doctors I mentioned earlier? Can you guess what the root problem was?

They hire someone for an unrealistic administrative role, severely underpay them, expect them to perform at a much higher level, and act shocked when the system falls apart. Patients get mad, and the cycle repeats.

Marketing teams do the exact same thing. They skimp on compensation, throw a junior-level salary at a senior-level workload, and then act shocked when the person struggles.

If you want top-tier talent that can actually keep the whole thing running, you have to pay for it. Seriously. Pay them a real, competitive salary. In fact, if you interview someone and they’re that good? Throw another $10K on top to keep them.

But…Money Doesn’t Solve Everything

Here’s the catch: even if you start paying your coordinators better, you will still fail them if you don’t fix your expectations.

Paying someone $70K instead of $45K doesn't magically make an impossible workload reasonable. You aren't paying for a human shield to absorb administrative chaos. You have to actively change how you view and manage the role:

• Stop expecting one person to be a five-person team. Map out their actual workload. If the task list requires 60 hours a week and ten distinct skill sets, your problem isn't the employee—it's your math.

• Give them a path forward. Don't let the role be a dead end. Reset your expectations so they have room to breathe, learn, and grow into taking on impactful marketing projects. Work isn't all fun, but throw them a bone.

• Look in the mirror. When a coordinator leaves or gets fired, sure, sometimes it was a bad hire. But organizations are remarkably willing to diagnose the employee before examining the system that employee was placed into.

The Hidden Operational Tax

If the human argument isn't enough, let's talk about the business argument by looking at your P&L.

Setting up this role to fail isn't just bad management—it’s a massive drag on your bottom line. The cost of constant turnover rarely shows up as a neat line item; it’s scattered across recruiter fees, temp coverage, lost productivity, and missed opportunities:

1. You waste senior talent. Every hour a six-figure director spends managing a calendar or fixing email lists because a coordinator quit (or was never trained) is high-value strategy time thrown in the trash.

2. Campaign velocity dies. When turnover hits every 9–12 months, your marketing engine slows to a crawl while you spend 90 days recruiting, onboarding, and rebuilding lost institutional knowledge.

3. Errors multiply. Overworked, distracted coordinators drop details. Dropped details lead to botched campaign launches, missed deadlines, and pissed-off stakeholders.

Constantly replacing coordinators isn't a normal "cost of doing business"—it’s a self-inflicted operational tax.

Cool Story, Bro.

I once witnessed a director get furious with a coordinator over a delayed project. To prove a point, the director yanked the task away and did it themselves.

After finishing it, they had the audacity to turn to a group of managers and say, “See? Look at how much I got done when I just took the time to sit down and do the work.”

Cool story, bro. You handled 1% of their job for one hour without forty people interrupting you. Now do 100% of their job for a month and let me know if you still have anything condescending to say.

The Fixes Are Within Your Reach

If you’re running a marketing or communications team, stop treating your coordinators like disposable labor.

1. Pay them what the role is actually worth to attract real talent.

2. Fix your broken internal processes so they aren't set up to fail.

3. Respect the role as the operational backbone it actually is.

You don't need to keep losing talented people and wasting money on turnover. Prioritize the role, fix your expectations, and watch how much smoother your entire marketing engine runs.

This isn't about selling one of my services or pitching Schu Creative. It’s about calling out a broken cycle—because I’m sick and tired of watching great people get thrown into the wood chipper.