How to Build a Well Rounded Digital Marketing Team

Meet the Team Members

Granted this is an ideal situation and keeping in mind that the actual size of your business may influence the number of people on the team, here’s a list of who you need on your Digital Marketing team:

1. Leader/Manager

Call them a team leader, a manager, or the Head of Marketing, but whatever the name, this is the person who’s in charge. They set budgets, hire people for the team, create marketing quotas, act as brand evangelist, and function as the liaison between the marketing team and management. The last function is particularly important, since the team needs to speak with just one voice, and the Manager provides that element of unity.

The Manager needs good communication and organizational skills, not only for the aforementioned contact with management, but also to adequately convey expectations and assignments to the rest of the team. In addition, the ideal candidate for this position has a couple of years’ experience in online marketing, and that includes courses and certifications. An all-around Digital Marketing Specialist is ideal for this role.

Naturally, the team leader should also possess leadership skills, someone that the rest of the team have no problem looking up to. You’d think that leadership skills would be an obvious thing, something that went without saying; yet it’s amazing how many people are in a position of leadership that have no business being there.

The Leader may also have other duties, particularly if the business isn’t very large. Experience shows that the smaller the business, the more hats each employee ends up wearing. Not that it’s a bad thing; it’s just the way it is, and having such versatility certainly looks good on a resume. For instance, the team Manager may also happen to be a social media expert due to their prolonged experience with that particular medium, and turns out that they’re the best qualified to handle social media tasks.

2. Social Media Expert

Social media offers an enormous amount of marketing opportunities. It provides the ability to quickly build relationships with potential customers as well as maintain those relationships for the purposes of repeat business. But social media is also a tricky animal, and the effective Digital Marketing team has someone who knows their way around the various social sites, familiar with their differences and what they focus on. After all, what’s appropriate for one platform may fall flat on another.

Every business ideally has a social media presence on several different platforms, and that presence helps monitor brand recognition, mentions and likes (and dislikes!), feedback, and other aspect of online communication. Some of the most effective advertising is by word of mouth, and a business with a social media presence as part of its marketing strategy can keep a real-time eye on how they’re being perceived by consumers.

This is particularly vital in terms of customer service, which can be arguably considered an aspect of digital marketing. For example, a customer complaining on Facebook about a company’s bad service ends us getting their grievance listened to and resolved by a member of the marketing team. Everyone sees the resolution, sees satisfaction given, and the company’s reputation is increased, which is always something that marketing aspires to do!

Not only should the ideal candidate for this position be someone who’s familiar and comfortable with the many forms of social media out there, they should have a good set of skills like those found in a Digital Marketing Course. Such an associate would have actually taken classes that enable them to master the discipline of social media.

3. SEO Expert

Forget the doomsayers who have declared the death of the search engine. Web searches are still in fact alive and kicking, and businesses still need an expert who knows how to optimize digital content, updating keywords, headlines and metadata.

The Search Engine Optimization expert also tracks performance as well as keeps an eye out on new developing trends (while also noting which trends are falling by the wayside; no sense wasting resources executing stratagems that are proven failures). The SEO expert is very results-driven. The whole point of SEO is to make sure that your business snags the highest possible pagerank when someone conducts a search. Your business MUST place high on the first SERP (Search Engine Results Page), since most people never even bother clicking on anything beyond that first page.

Like the Social Media Expert, the ideal SEO Expert has some courses under their belt, courses best found with a Digital Marketing Course. It wouldn’t hurt if they also had some experience in Advanced Web Analytics Certification Training.

4. Content Creator

There are still people out there who labor under the misapprehension that anyone can write. While it’s true that most people can string words together into complete understandable sentences, not everyone can write in a coherent, persuasive manner. That’s where content creators come in.

You need someone who is adept at writing so that they will be able to tackle a variety of content-related tasks such as website content, email blasts, blogs, white papers, brochures, and other bits of writing. The content writer takes those ideas, strategies, and campaigns and fashions persuasive text to attract customers. Additionally, content writers can also be used to edit copy, thereby sparing a business potentially embarrassing errors. No one wants to see their business become a laughingstock, and an excess of errors and typos makes a company’s website appear unprofessional, thereby not engendering much confidence among would-be customers.

In terms of experience, skill sets and education, it goes without saying that the ideal candidate has a good grasp of the language and good command of syntax, grammar and yes, spelling. In addition, the best candidate should have a body of work that the prospective leader can look through to see what the candidate’s style is like. Finally, the ideal candidate has taken some courses, like Advanced Email Marketing Certification Training, or Advanced Content Marketing Certification Training.

For extra credit, look for people who have studied Creative Writing or Journalism in school. Odds are, you’ll be getting someone who knows how to write effectively.

Bear in mind that in an ideal situation, some of your Digital Marketing team’s members are familiar and proficient in the same skills, but at different levels of expertise. This way, if for example the SEO expert’s workload is out of control, perhaps the content expert knows enough about keywords and search results that they could take some tasks onto their plate, alleviating the SEO expert’s crisis.

Obviously, not every business will be able to afford and sustain a full team such as the one detailed above. It may be that those roles are distributed among two or three people. In addition, there are other roles on a Digital Marketing team that could use filling out, such as a strategist and a graphic designer. But a team that incorporates at least the four roles mentioned above is a team that’s ready for success.