Digital marketing teams are responsible for digital upkeep and promoting a company’s brand presence across the internet. It’s a complicated job, as consumers are now constantly connected (and expect their companies to be, as well), and media types and channels are proliferating at an exponential rate. A lot of companies not only have or hire a digital marketing team, but within that team they have a dedicated social media team.
In 2012, 67% of companies had a social media team: by 2015 that number was 78%. And despite having teams for online marketing, only 8% of businesses have a dedicated email marketing team, which is a lot of missed opportunity seeing that the email marketing platform delivers the highest ROI of all digital marketing strategies. If you’ve got a team, or need to hire or expand a team, here are some important roles you want to make sure are filled by capable and qualified people:
- Marketing VP This person is your cheerleader and organizer. This position doesn’t necessarily have to be filled by a digital or even marketing whiz, but the person needs to be ready to evangelize for your brand, manage the budget, empower the whole digital marketing team, and even do some blogging and speaking. The buck stops here a lot of the time, so it will take just the right person to fill this role.
- Paid-Per-Click Specialist This is a specialist who needs to have a strong grasp of finances and the cash flow of businesses. Pay-Per-Click SEO strategy has a very short ROI turnaround time, so it’s worth making sure this role is filled by someone who can keep up with keyword optimizations, knows how to constantly search for new keyword opportunities, can keep up with which ads should be paused, and knows how to analyze traffic results.
- SEO Specialist This is the person who needs to be able to analyze trends, quickly figure out what search engines are up to when they update and how to keep your site at the top of search results, research audiences and their search trends, build a profile of some of your ideal clients, and build solid links for your site.
- Developer This is a key position not to be scrimped on. You’re well advised to hire for yourself or look for a digital marketing team that has a really solid website developer. With the right developer, you can stand back (which you should), and let them create content, fix site issues, keep an eye on usability across all the devices that might be accessing your site, and constantly review overall functionality. If you’ve got the right developer, and empower them, they’ll be able to make changes quickly and efficiently; which means your marketing strategy can be implemented in a matter of weeks rather than months.
- Specific Strategic Outreach This could be just an individual, or it might become a whole team if your business is large enough. You need people doing strategic email marketing, for one, and keeping your brand and presence up on social media, for another. These need to be people with a strong knowledge of your brand, a good understanding of the target audience, and the ability to both stop and solve problems quickly.
These are really just a minimum of roles that need to be filled for you to roll out a truly effective online marketing campaign. Fill them in house or hire a company to provide help; but don’t ignore the issues of online marketing until it’s too late.
