First we’re going to talk about your marketing team. To be strong in our team function, we need two things:
- We need the right people in the right roles
- And two, we need all core accountabilities covered
The people on your team, the people actually creating and executing your message are just as important as the people that you’re trying to reach.
As we review team structure, think of these as core accountabilities, not necessarily individual roles. What I mean by that is one person may own multiple functions. How many of you wear more than one hat on your marketing team? Quite a few, ok, so you can relate to this.
Or, multiple people might focus on just one function. As an example, if you have a bigger team, you might have multiple people that have a content creation accountability, and that’s primarily what they do.
Your scale, your resources and your needs are really going to dictate the actual number of people required for each accountability.
Let’s look at the accountabilities:
[RELATED: How to Structure a Marketing Team with the Right Roles and Technology]
The project manager
Marketing teams fulfill a lot of different needs for a lot of different departments, right? Everybody comes to marketing for everything. Your project manager will help your marketing team, and really, the rest of the organization prioritize and plan out what really needs to get done.
The strategist
A really important accountability. Impactful content marketing starts with a good plan and a strong understanding of who your audience is. Your strategist should have a pulse on all your content output as well as your business objectives and the needs of your audience.
The content creator
Our of curiosity, how many people in the room are creating content for your company today? Quite a few. It’s an important role. Your content creator will help develop content assets for multiple audiences, channels and buyer-journey stages. Beyond being able to create great content, he or she should really have at least a working knowledge of SEO best practices.
Now, although many organizations like to keep this function in-house, content creation is prime for outsourcing, whether that’s with freelance help or with a content marketing agency.
The SEO/PPC manager
Here’s a scary stat: 75 percent of users don’t go past the first search engine results page. That means if your content isn’t on page one, you’re invisible to 75 percent of the internet. Scary. So, ideally, everybody on your team should at least understand some basic SEO principles, but having a dedicated specialist, at least the accountability of that, can ensure that all your digital assets are optimized for search. It’s pretty important.
The marketing automation manager
How many of you use marketing automation software in your roles? Quite a few. So, full-scale marketing automation and email marketing programs — you guys can probably agree with me — it’s enough to keep at least one person busy in your organization. There’s a lot going on. Now, email writing can be a shared function as we talked about, but these programs benefit greatly from having a dedicated owner and subject matter expert within your organization.
So now that we have our team in place, let’s look at the tools that can help them be successful.
The Content Marketing Operating System is a six-part actionable guide to help you build a foundational and systematic content marketing practice.
