What should your marketing team look like?

We’ve written many times about the multiple skills required nowadays in marketing. From strategic marketers to designers to copywriters to search engine experts, marketing in 2013 needs a diverse range of skill-sets to deliver across a range of media.

Here we explore the key components of your marketing team:

What roles do you need in your marketing team?

• Marketing Manager: Sets the strategy and ensures it’s delivered. Manages the marketing team and acts as the conduit between the marketing team and the director/s and the wider organisation. Produces new ideas
• Marketing Executive: May be required at a lower level from the Marketing Manager to execute the strategy on a day to day basis
• Copywriter: Creates content, including white papers, guides, case studies, blogs, emails and press releases
• Designer: A creative resource (for the website and marketing collateral). Ideally you would have someone who is experienced in graphic design, website design and website development. It can sometimes be difficult, though, to find all the necessary skills in one person
• Search engine marketer: Your search engine marketer should focus on ensuring your website ranks highly on search engines and generates organic search traffic. They should also be able to manage and optimise PPC (Pay-Per-Click) campaigns.
• PR: PR is simply about generating press coverage. Whilst a copywriter could write a press release, the value PR people bring to an organisation is their relationship with the press, and access to PR databases
• Telemarketing: In many businesses this is the link between marketing and sales. A telemarketer can take a ‘marketing qualified lead’ and turn it into a ‘sales qualified lead’

How should you structure your marketing team?

There are a number of options, and ultimately it will come down to what your objectives, activity and budgets are:

• It may be that one person can take on a few of these roles. A Marketing Manager may also be a good copywriter – however it’s very hard to find one person with the requisite skill set for all the different roles
• You could take on an employee for each role on a full time basis
• You could employ people for some roles on a full time basis, using  part timers or freelancers to fill the remaining positions

Or

• You could use a marketing agency that embraces all these disciplines and is already set up as a team. For SMEs with a budget for 1 or possibly 2 marketing employees, this approach has much to recommend it

If outsourcing to a marketing agency is a route you might consider, why not take a look at our outsourced marketing packages, or get in touch?