Recently one of our customers asked to help them define the ideal composition of their marketing team for the upcoming year. If you’re looking to fill new roles or reorganize your team read on! We’re digital marketing experts, so you should expect no less from us than a team structured by the inbound methodology meaning that we’ll include roles related to content creation, distribution, promotion and last but not least strategic marketing. And while content might be king, design is queen. That’s why we’ll also be looking at Design & UX roles to compliment the technical part of our team.
The marketing manager
Also commonly defined as the VP of marketing, Marketing director, etc.
We believe that the marketing manager should be the go-to person, not only for strategy but for the coaching of the team members. We see that a lot of the ‘younger’ profiles described below possess a skillset which is more technically oriented. More often than not theses profiles need to be properly managed and integrated to get the team to operate as a fully functional whole.
Marketing manager tasks:
- Designs marketing vision.
- Defines team & individual KPI’s.
- Evaluates goals and KPI’s.
Marketing operations manager
Also known as that marketing automation guy, the strategy guy, etc.
Marketing automation tools like Hubspot, Pardot, Eloqua, etc. have found their way into the bigger B2B organizations. Depending on the company’s maturity in using this new toolset the usage ranges from: “We send email!” to “We build entire multichannel campaigns and integrate them holistically”. The marketing operations manager is the guy who’ll take you from A to Z. He’ll translate the vision he receives from the marketing manager and turns them into actionable plans. He designs your campaigns and coordinates the overall project management between the marketing team & external stakeholders.
Marketing ops tasks:
- Translates vision into strategy.
- Coordinates campaigns & projects.
- Leads the marketing revolution on a technical level.
PPC specialist
Also known as, our conversion hero, etc.
Campaigns need contacts to hit their targets, content marketing will help you gather contacts but takes time to take effect. Closing that time gap? Enter the PPC specialist. There was a time that a PPC specialist meant an SEA (search engine advertising) but to cover all the new bases (read: Paid Social) a term like PPC specialist covers their activities much better.
PPC specialist tasks:
- Keyword research.
- Campaign set-up & optimization.
- Looking for new channels & opportunities to add to the distribution mix.
Content marketing & SEO specialist
Also known as the customer champion, the blog guy, etc.
Today, we can’t just write half-assed content and expect it to rank, I’m afraid those days are long gone. Hiring a Content marketing specialist is difficult, because it combines the tasks of a good writer (or editor) with a set of technical skills (like linkbuilding, adding metadata & schema.org markup). Now top of that profile with a strategic sauce and you’ll have a profile that take the time to analyze your target audiences and comes up with the right (segmented) strategy to get you those customers and build brand capital for the long term.
Content marketing & SEO specialist tasks:
- Writes, edits or creates content (or manages content creators).
- Adds Technical markup & builds links.
- Crafts the content strategy per target audience.
UX / Webdeveloper
Commonly addressed as: the guy who does the website, the guy that gets all the complaints, etc..
A good UX/Webdeveloper combines the best of both worlds, where a good webdeveloper ideally has knowledge of the basics (HTML5, CSS3, Javascript (and/or jQuery), etc), a great webdeveloper also has skills related to User experience design. Which means that they’re capable of conducting customer interviews, building mockups and so on… Using this skillset they’re able to pre-validate design changes and to build a customer-centric platform.
UX/Webdeveloper tasks:
- Designs & validates (web)designs.
- Conducts customer interviews/data analysis.
- Guards the customer centricity across all channels.
BI & Analytics Specialist
In the B2B market, the quality of your (CRM & analytics) data is one of the biggest factors in executing successful campaigns. However, it’s not just about managing data quality, it’s about segmenting & aggregating that data with actionable analytic insights to improve the quality of your campaigns to drive and improve ROI.
BI & Analytics specialist tasks:
- Maintains & optimizes internal & external datasets.
- Creates actionable intelligence by running analytics.
We hope you enjoyed our little round-up, if you have any questions don’t hesitate to drop us a line via our contact form.