Long gone are the days of wondering “if” you should have a team to manage your digital marketing efforts, it’s a reality that you MUST have one. You basically already have an ad-hoc team in place right now, more than likely as a collection of independent vendors, but how do you turn that corner to making your team work in a more efficient and beneficial way? Money and time are wasted every day as the left hand does not know what the right hand is doing when it comes to the digital marketing direction and efforts.

Rather than continuing down a disparate path, my recommendation is to rally a team together, with each person fulfilling a critical role.

6 roles required to building a digital marketing dream team:

1. Director

This is not necessary just a job title as much as a function. This is the person who has purview over all the moving parts, is the central point of contact, stays at the 10,000 foot level to make sure all the pieces are in their right place. This person has a fairly deep understanding of the technical, functional and practical elements of all the other digital marketing roles on the team. This is the team lead and the liaison between the rest of the organization. This person is critical to your success as an organization.

2. Web Developer

Someone has to own the functional side of the website. They ensure all software is up-to-date, hosting is running smoothly, pages are loading quickly, integrations are working as well as creation of new pages, landing pages, and any other new features are built out. They are involved in your planning meetings to help bridge the gap of creativity and fulfillment.

3. Creative Designer

Visual design consistency is critical to brand. This extends from your website to your e-newsletters to your social channels and beyond. Great design makes all the difference. You need someone to create buttons, headers, graphics, images.

4. Content Wrangler

It’s shocking how much content needs to be written, reviewed, re-worked. This role is either creating or corralling the content. They will be responsible for setting the tone, perspective, messaging, e-newsletter content, landing page copy, ad copy, website content and any other miscellaneous copy writing tasks.

5. SEO/PPC Specialist

It has been my experience that to really dominate in the search engine optimization / Adwords space, your organic and paid search efforts need to be approached together. Your PPC campaign will directly correlate to your SEO goals and vice versa. This skill set is usually fairly unique, meaning you can’t just hand it off to someone random in your organization to figure out. This side of online marketing is ever-changing and extremely important.

6. Social Media Manager

Most companies don’t have enough resource to hire someone just for the purpose of social media, but this role is becoming more critical to the overall digital marketing department. This person is not just someone who knows how to tweet, but rather someone who can get into the deeper concepts behind social media and translate that through to the business. And yes, they can tweet.

Am I missing anyone?

Photo credit: dvids
Author

With over a decade of experience, I have managed online marketing for a wide range of industries including biotech, high-tech, financial, higher education, non-profit, manufacturing, hardware providers, and startups. My specialty is helping business make the right turn with their online efforts focusing on lead generation and analytics.

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