When it comes to growing a B2B startup or SMB company, having a marketing team that properly fits your business model is essential to acquiring new customers, boosting your sales, and retargeting existing customers.
Marketing is more than just having a few individuals manage your promotions. A true, quality marketing team is composed of creative and strategic experts who are skilled in their craft and bring value to your company. It should be your marketing team’s mission to drive a steady number of leads that can sustain long-term growth for your business.
The key to any successful marketing team is to have marketers who are specialized in different types of marketing disciplines. Web development, visual design, strategy, digital, content — each specialized marketer is a unique cog in a well-oiled machine.
Together, a multi-faceted marketing team can build out a unified brand strategy that bridges together all creative platforms and effectively reaches your consumers and boosts your sales.
Strategic Leadership
So you want a stellar marketing team? You need to have talented, adaptable individuals in every position. This is especially true for who you designate as the leaders of your marketing team.
Marketing leaders need to be able to set the tone, spearhead initiatives with purpose and precision, and bring everyone together in developmental strategy and coordination.
How they dictate market research, develop messaging with higher-ups and disseminate it within their teams, and report and adjust department strategies has a direct impact on the efficacy of the department and the overall success of your business.
We suggest a tiered hierarchy of marketing leadership, so there is clear direction for the team at both a high level and granular level. For example, when EBQ works with clients, we provide multi-level leadership — project managers and Consultants — to guide specialists’ day-to-day execution as well as overall strategy alongside the client.
If a great marketing team is a well-oiled machine, leaders need to be equipped to maintain that machine. They need to have a clear understanding of your sales goals to make determinations about what their marketing team and its initiatives should look like.
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Digital Marketing Specialists
Once you’ve established a clear hierarchy of marketing leaders, you need a skilled team that can execute on your KPIs and deliver growth for your company. A specialized team for your digital channels can assist you in this endeavour.
Digital marketing specialists, marketing analysts, email marketing specialists, marketing automation specialists, and even pay-per-click specialists — having a team of marketers who focus on optimizing your digital channels provides real value to your company.
For any kind of digital-focused marketing specialist, it is important that they possess the skills to carry out these vital marketing tasks:
Digital Marketer Responsibilities
- Understand marketing automation software to run email campaigns, drip campaigns, social media, and ad campaigns.
- Implement and manage these automation tools in order to accelerate the growth of your company.
- Research and collect data to further develop your marketing strategy.
- Work with the content team to help optimize company web pages and content, so they’re more discoverable by users.
- Work with the visual design team to implement code and technical edits for your company’s website, emails, and more.
Digital marketing specialists have a hand in every aspect of a marketing strategy, as their main goal is to ensure all online channels align with the overall goals of the company. From developing automated workflows to adjusting your strategy based on campaign metrics, the tasks handled by these specialized marketers have a huge impact on your marketing ROI.
Content Marketing Specialists
Along with your digital platform strategy, you’ll also need to create a content marketing strategy. This aspect of marketing will largely be handled by a content marketing team, which may consist of content specialists, content writers and editors, SEO specialists, and social media specialists.
Whatever their area of focus, if they are a part of your content team, their duties typically include:
Content Marketer Responsibilities
- Utilizing company goals in an overarching strategy for effective messaging and positioning when brainstorming and developing content pieces.
- Identifying relevant topics and what types of content are popular and in demand.
- Working with your higher-ups to build on company strategy, based on data pulled across various marketing channels.
- Drawing in prospects via targeted content such as blogs, whitepapers, social media, and other easy-to-digest sales collateral.
Search engine optimization is another important aspect of content marketing, as it’s a crucial part of making your business more visible and searchable online. Your content marketing team should be able to analyze and implement the needed changes to your website and blogs, so that it can be indexed by search engines more easily.
Together, with the help of your sales team, your content specialists and digital specialists will develop persuasive copy and ensure that the content strategy is carried out within all email, social, and search campaigns.
Visual Design Specialists
You also need someone on your marketing team to execute a design strategy. You may only require a single designer to carry out this and various other tasks, but it’s important to be aware of the different disciplines these designers are focused in — graphic, web, branding — based on the needs of your business.
When looking for designers for your marketing team, it’s imperative that they have the following:
Visual Designer Responsibilities
- A deep understanding of design principles, perceptive visual flow, and user accessibility.
- Proficiency with industry-standard design tools, such as Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, and Adobe XD.
- The skill set to design visual systems and thoughtful design solutions that run across graphic illustrations, layouts, email campaigns, infographics, blog content, ads, social media, and printed collateral.
- Ability to maintain and build brand consistency throughout content, including use of logos, colors, and fonts.
That can be a lot to account for, so it’s also important that your designers collaborate and keep in close contact with other members of your marketing team.
Designers need to work with content specialists in order to have a clear vision for design materials like guides, digital ads, emails, blog posts, visual elements, and graphics. They work with sales to help create more digestible sales collateral, and they collaborate with web developers to build pages, components, and CSS stylesheets to ensure visual consistency across the board.
A good designer will provide strong first impressions and set expectations for your brand visually. The great ones can help communicate your brand story by translating well-written content into something creative and visually appealing to help your brand be better understood and resonate more with your audience.
Web Development Specialists
Incorporating a web developer into your multi-faceted marketing team provides the opportunity to create a website that brings design elements to life, enhances user experience, and optimizes technical performance.
Like with all other roles in your marketing team, web development needs to start with a fundamental understanding of you or your client’s brand. This helps the web developer formulate a strategy for the website that will achieve business goals.
Beyond creating visually striking, user-friendly websites, many web developer responsibilities deal with optimization:
Web Developer Responsibilities
- Optimize websites across devices, screen sizes, and web browsers for better user experience and ease of navigation.
- Collaborate with designers to create and optimize design systems, including branded web components.
- Assist with developing emails that are optimized across email clients.
And once your website has been established, your web developers should be adept at continued management of it. That entails optimizing pages for technical SEO on both the front and back ends, integrating third party APIs and platforms, and troubleshooting technical problems when they arise.
Internally, web developers work with designers and the department leader to determine development strategies based on the content you intend to provide and data and analytics across all marketing channels. They also collaborate heavily with visual designers and content specialists to build out a clear vision for UX flow, design materials, and SEO strategy.
Building Your Marketing Dream Team
All of the roles defined above are integral to a multi-faceted marketing team that can provide real results. Each specialization works in tandem with the others to create a comprehensive marketing strategy in line with your business goals.
But what if you don’t have a large marketing team or the resources necessary to create one? EBQ can provide a complete marketing department to drive your sales efforts, at a fraction of the cost of building it internally.
EBQ’s marketers act as an extension of your company and put your plans into action by building on your ideas and executing initiatives alongside you and your team.
Each of our team members plays a vital role:
From the top down, our team comes trained on best practices and guided by strategic leaders who regularly collaborate with your team. Drive revenue growth with a fully integrated outsourced team — reach out to EBQ to enhance your marketing efforts.
