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Successful Marketing Team Roles: The 4 Essential Job Functions You Need to Deliver High Performing Results

by Marije Schreur, on Oct 26, 2020 6:06:29 PM

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Marketing has changed. Marketing team roles haven’t. The way that businesses attract, engage, and convert their audiences today is like nothing we’ve ever seen before, particularly with the widespread shift from outbound to inbound marketing techniques. Yet despite this, McKinsey believes that ‘if you had put a few typical marketers from the 1980s into a time machine and sent them into the marketing departments of today, they would probably feel right at home’. Departments are failing to adapt. And that’s not good. 

Building a Successful Marketing Team

Right now, your team may be on the small side. Perhaps yourself, and two or three junior employees. Up until this point, you’ve probably been getting by OK, although as you’re beginning to implement new strategies, you may be beginning to notice just how busy your team is getting, and you naturally want to protect them from an even higher workload. But the truth is that, if you’re keen to develop a fully comprehensive marketing strategy that includes a variety of tactics, then your team will need to change; your team will need to grow to incorporate all essential job roles and functions.

Between you, your team members probably all wear many hats, sharing responsibility for tasks such as social media marketing, content creation, email marketing strategy, and so on. However, as marketing is evolving, and as departments pay closer attention to the benefits of inbound, new functions are arising that can be full time jobs in themselves.

Here are four essential marketing job roles and functions for inbound marketing teams:

1. Team Leader

As a marketing director, you’re naturally the leader of the department. However, you have a need to straddle two distinct functions - leading teams to deliver high performing results, and liaising with the board. You have a finger in each pie, and you can’t afford to let leadership slip while attending board meetings and presenting ideas. That’s why it’s essential that your team has a full time authority figure to keep them on track. Unfortunately, less than half of all marketing departments in 2020 have a dedicated operations leader, according to recent research by insights firm Gartner. 

2. Brand Manager

Personalisation is the key to inbound marketing. In fact, it’s the key to any type of marketing today as customer demand for tailored communications continues to grow. Every campaign that marketers produce today is unique, and it’s the differences between campaigns that are appealing to audiences in the moment. However, while ‘different’ works in terms of communications, consistency is what works when it comes to branding. When your attention is focused on individual campaigns, it’s easy to forget about maintaining your overall brand, which is why a brand manager is so vital. 

3. Customer Experience Expert

McKinsey suggests that taking a customer-centric approach to marketing can result in revenue growth of between 5 - 10% while simultaneously reducing outgoings by as much as 20%. And yet, the insights specialist reports that only a few excel at achieving this. The primary reason is that businesses don’t have a customer experience expert in place whose function is to keep audiences at the very forefront of every strategy. With a need to operate across departments to gain a comprehensive understanding of the entire cross channel customer journey, customer service really is a full time position. 

4. Data Analyst

With audiences leaving digital footprints across every channel that they engage with, organisations hold more data about their customers than ever before. And the good news is that many marketing teams are beginning to leverage this data to not only engage with customers today, but also predict changing behaviours to allow them to strategize for tomorrow. However, to derive the most value from this data, it’s important that teams have a dedicated data analyst to understand attribution models and turn facts and figures into actionable insight; insight that facilitates the creation of personalised messages and offers. 

Other Critical Functions

We’ve outlined four essential job roles for any modern marketing team. But four seems a little too low, right? Especially as 21st century marketing can be a minefield. The answer is yes, there’s an almost never ending list of vital marketing roles needed to deliver high performing results… but you don’t always need to keep these functions in-house. For many critical yet smaller functions, an external partner can be just what you need. 

There is a growing trend for marketing leaders to grow their team through a core competency approach, hiring and developing for strategic planning while leaving execution and administration to an external partner. This could include tool licensing, niche expertise, gap bridging, and focus, amongst other tasks. You don’t have to grow beyond your capacity in order to have a comprehensive marketing team in place, you just need to know how to choose the right agency partner to help you execute your strategy.

Developing Your Ecosystem

What’s clear is that there are a lot of effective ways to build and develop a team that delivers high performing results. And the approach that works for one business might be different to what works for another. There’s no right or wrong; what is most important of all is that you work to build your own ecosystem, where all components are linked together to achieve a common goal, driving your business forward to success. 

Topics:Inbound MarketingMarketing Strategy

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