8 Roles You Need to Build a Successful Marketing Team

Writer:
Julia Dupuis
Editor:
Published: Mar 27, 2020
Last Updated:
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In today’s digital age, marketing technology moves fast, and the shift to online marketing is moving even faster.

With 57% of businesses pulling in new customers through a website or blog, and those that post regularly seeing up to 55% more web traffic, it’s easy to understand why. Companies are starting to realize that they have to embrace the world of digital marketing in order to thrive, and to do that, a tech-savvy digital marketing team is crucial.

But what does it take to build a modern marketing team? To meet your marketing goals, you’ll need a carefully designed strategy—as well as the right mix of people with the right skills to bring that strategy to life.

What makes a good marketing team?

Modern marketing is multi-faceted and complex. An effective marketing campaign can deliver the voice of the company, build trust with a base audience, generate leads in new corners of the online world, and translate all of this to new growth.

The digital age brings new opportunities for effective marketing, but new requirements as well. A modern marketing team needs to include experts at writing, design, SEO, marketing strategies, and social media. Through these avenues, your team can tell your company’s authentic story, promote your products or services, and turn potential readers into loyal customers.

Even with all of these points to consider, a marketing team still has one underlying goal: To build business and raise revenue. The right marketing team should be able to stimulate the company and produce growth as well as produce great marketing content.

<div class="tip">Whether you decide to hire locally or recruit team members across the globe, collaborative writing tools are a must for working with your marketing team.</div>

Before You Start Your Search

Before we dive into how to build a strong marketing team, it’s important that you have a clear plan for the hiring process, as well as several goals you’d like to aim for. To start, take a look at your current marketing team.

First, evaluate who you have on board. Consider:

  • Where do you think your team could improve?
  • Do you have enough members?
  • Are there any areas of expertise you feel are missing?
  • What roles do you think you need to make this team the best that it could be?

Use your answers to identify gaps and weaknesses in your current team.

Next, take a look at where you want the team to be in the future. This kind of goal-setting will provide you with structure throughout the hiring and training process. Not only that, but a clear destination will give your team greater clarity, focus, and determination to reach these goals.

Before you begin hiring, ask yourself:

  • How has the industry changed over the past year? What changes do we need to make in order to keep up?
  • Which areas do we excel in? Where do we need to improve?
  • What are the individual strengths and weaknesses of each team member?
  • Is there a measurable goal we should hit within the next month? Six months? One year? Five years?
  • What motivations do we have to complete these goals?

8 Roles You Need to Build the Best Marketing Team

So how do you find the perfect team that is up to the task? Let’s take a look at the key marketing team roles you need to fill to accomplish your goals.

1. The Team Leader

Everything starts with the team leader.

This role can come with many names—Chief Marketing Officer, Vice President of Marketing, Director of Online Marketing, etc.—but the primary goal is the same. When you’re working with so many different factors, you need somebody who can pull it all together into an effective strategy. The leader needs to be an experienced strategist, an entrepreneur, and a marketing expert.

On the logistical side, the team leader should be managing budgets and communicating with the company’s management. They should be creating schedules, setting deadlines, creating strategies, and monitoring team performance.

But aside from all of this, their most important role is setting the expectations for the team. They need to be a people person with an instinctual ability to lead, guide, and coach others towards success. Look for an individual who leads with vision and is ready to support the team as they push for results.

2. The Strategist

Although the team leader is the head of the operation, it’s important to have another strategist on hand to help them put their plan into action.

As your team is producing dozens of pieces of content each day, it’s important that the strategist keeps in mind the broader goals for your marketing strategy. They are tasked with considering not just what the team has to do today, but where the team should be headed in a week, a month, or six months.

The strategist should be an adept planner, organizer, and big-picture thinker. They should also be able to act as an editor for all your content, making sure that everything aligns with the broader plan for your team.

3. The Content Creators

Content creators are the bread and butter of a marketing team. No matter what kind of marketing content you need to create, you need a team of excellent writers to create it.

You’ll need compelling, engaging, and helpful copy for articles, blog posts. social media, newsletters, and emails. This kind of content is essential to online marketing. For this reason, you should seek out candidates who are powerful and persuasive writers. They should be able to adapt to your company’s voice and produce reliable, relevant, informative content.

4. The Web Designer

Even if your content is top notch, it takes great design to make it stand out from the rest.

An effective designer—of both visual art and web design—can bring your content to life through stunning visuals and imagery that draws the eye. Almost all of your potential customers will visit your website; a designer can ensure that visuals are there to hold their interest and keep them coming back for more.

Look for a candidate who is both a designer and a developer. You need someone who can take your website or blog and make a powerful first impression on your website’s visitors.

5. The SEO Specialist

For any marketing team, SEO specialist is a crucial role. After all, nobody is going to read your engaging content or view your beautifully designed website if they can’t find it easily online.

An SEO specialist can give your content the push that it needs to become more visible. Their responsibility will be to optimize the content for search engines, offering guidance for content strategies to boost your organic traffic.

You’ll need an individual who’s adept at website development, understands broader audience trends, and is an expert in keyword research and developing links.

6. Financial Analyst

One of the final steps to implementing a marketing strategy is finding out if your campaign is effective or not. A financial analyst can assess both your expenditures and your revenue, identifying areas where you can improve. They can also point out what is and isn’t working.

Especially for a business that’s just beginning to expand, hiring an organized, prepared financial planner can help make the future feel less uncertain.

7. The PR Expert

An SEO boost will help your content get seen, but a PR expert can help take your content to another level of visibility. As more and more people are beginning to block or bypass ads online, you’ll need to turn to other forms of public relations to bring in a new audience.

For example, a PR expert can help get your products, services, or website mentioned in news articles or guest posts on online blogs. They can also generate backlinks from high-ranking sites to help bring readers to your site and boost your site’s SEO.

For this position, you’ll need somebody who’s a stellar marketer. They should have a proven track record of increasing web traffic and boosting sales.

8. The Social Media Marketer

It isn’t easy to break into the world of social media. While a content creator handles online articles, creating social media content deserves its own unique role.

Just sharing updates on social media isn’t enough for you to gain traction online. You need creative, relevant content that helps you stand out from the crowd and establish yourself as a trendy, informed online presence.

A social media marketer can handle content on various social media platforms, like Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and more. Not only can they write engaging and meaningful captions, but they can craft photo and video content to catch the attention of new potential customers.

This individual will also be in charge of scheduling and maintaining your social media presence. This includes managing paid ads on channels like Instagram and Facebook, which requires an understanding of social media analytics.

Outsourcing Marketing Work

As exciting as growing your marketing department is, building out a complete team exactly as you'd like may not be feasible based on your budget. Consequently, you'll need to distinguish between high-priority positions you'd like to fill in house and roles that would be better off outsourced.

Skeptical about the merits of outsourcing?

There are some negative perceptions of outsourcing but don't be fooled–you can get just as great of results by working with external organizations and freelancers. The key is simply outsourcing to highly qualified companies. This provides a cost-effective solution that will save your business time while simultaneously enhancing your productivity.

Building Your Dream Marketing Team

In a rapidly changing world, you’ll need a stellar marketing team to keep up. Digital marketing opens up a whole new world of possibilities, but it’s going to take these eight essential marketing roles to make it happen.

Above all, you need a team of skilled individuals who are driven to produce real results for your business. You need people who can take your vision and make it a reality through all elements of your marketing strategy—content, design, SEO, finances, PR, social media, and more. Don't settle for anything less.

This article was written by Compose.ly writer Julia Dupuis.

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