Everything You Need to Know About Digital Marketing Jobs & Roles

Over the past 12+ years, I’ve built dozens of digital marketing teams from scratch, both for the individual companies I’m involved with at Ramp Ventures, and through the agencies I’ve run.

While it’s true that the team at an enterprise-level organization looks very different than one at a small SaaS startup, I’ve also found that every digital marketing team must fill four basic structural roles to be successful: 

• Leads
• Strategists
• Creative executors 
• Analytics

It doesn’t matter if you’re a team of one or a team of 100. Without the right skills in each of these roles, your digital marketing team is never going to get the traction it needs to support your company’s objectives.

To help you determine whether your current team has each role covered, or whether you need to add talent, I’ve broken down each of these functions in greater detail below. 

And if you’re looking to build a career in digital marketing, pay attention. Check out the description of each role to determine where your particular talents might fit in or what kinds of skills you might want to develop to transition into digital marketing. 

Team Lead

Every digital marketing team needs a lead – a single lead. Sure, you might have a leadership team that shares different executive responsibilities, but at the end of the day, there has to be one person who takes ownership of final decisions.

Some of the other responsibilities of this role may include:

• Approving the general direction of the digital marketing program
• Allocating investment across different marketing channels
• Setting and monitoring team budgets and ongoing spend
• Setting and holding teams accountable to agreed-upon metrics
• Overseeing the work of each team member (or the team member’s manager)
• Reporting to Boards of Directors or other stakeholders

In my experience, without a strong team lead, it’s easy to get caught up in discussions and analysis paralysis. If no one is responsible for making the final call, it’s a lot harder for that final call to ever get made.

Strategists

On a very small team, your lead might also be your only strategist. But as you grow, bringing on a specialist (or multiple specialists) in each of your chosen channels takes work off the lead’s plate, while also allowing your team to deploy more sophisticated strategies.

For example, you might decide to bring on strategists in any of the following digital marketing disciplines, among others:

• SEO
• Content marketing
• Paid search, PPC or SEM
• Influencer marketing or PR
• Email marketing
• Social media
• Customer experience

The key here is that you’re looking for someone who can set the team’s strategy for each channel – not just someone who can execute. It’s one thing to know how to write a marketing email. It’s another skill set entirely to be able to determine how your lists should be segmented or how to split test messages for maximum data capture.

Again, if you’re small, your strategists may also be your team lead or your executors (at least temporarily). Just don’t bring on an executor without a knowledgeable lead or strategist to give their efforts direction. Doing digital marketing isn’t the same as doing it well.

Creatives & Executors

Strategists make plans; creatives and executors put them into action. 

Great creatives and executors are people who can take a strategist’s vision and bring it to life. Generally, this means they have some kind of creative or technical skill – and that they know how to deploy it in support of digital marketing campaigns.

Common creative and executor roles include:

Writers

Common written assets developed in support of digital marketing campaigns include:

• Blog posts
• Long-form articles
• Website landing pages
• Sales copy
• Product descriptions
• Case studies
• White papers
• Ebooks

Depending on the kind of business you run, you may have a need for several writers – or even several different kinds of writers. Someone who’s great at writing blog posts, for example, may not have the specialized knowledge needed to write great landing page copy.

Similarly, a B2B business may rely more heavily on content types like case studies and white papers than a B2C company. Whoever is in the strategist role should map out specific written content requirements before looking for this kind of creative.

Designers

Again, depending on your company, you may want to have a designer on the team, because you can’t just create content these days. You have to create beautiful content that stands out, and that’s unique and different in your space. 

So hiring someone with design talent can mean the difference between having a blog post and having a beautifully-designed ebook – even if they each contain the same amount of content. 

Video Teams

I probably don’t need to tell you how important video marketing is these days, but here are a few statistics compiled by Wyzowl to really hammer it home:

• 94% of video marketers say video has helped increase user understanding of their product or service.
• 84% of marketers say video has helped them increase traffic to their website.
• 81% of marketers say video has helped them generate leads.

It’s simple. If you’ve identified video marketing as one of your digital marketing team’s target channels, you need executors on your team who can make it happen.

Developers

Developers might seem more technical and less creative than writers, designers and videographers. But a lot of digital marketing and SEO these days comes from the product. Simply being a good product company is a viable marketing strategy, which is why most modern digital marketing teams recognize the role a dedicated software team play in facilitating campaign execution.

For instance, your dedicated team might include a front-end developer who can implement front-end changes to your website, run analytics or any other tracking software, or deploy other code changes needed for campaigns. You might need a full-stack developer who can build out micro sites, micro tools and other marketing projects.

If your development needs are time-limited, you may not need full-time talent. But take a look at what your competitors are doing. If they’re investing heavily in development, chances are you’ll need to as well in order to keep up. 

Analytics & Data Scientists

Finally, you need people on your team who can help you figure out whether the campaigns you’ve planned and executed are actually working. Yes, there are tools that help with performance analytics, but the real skill a data scientist brings to the table is an ability to read between the lines of all the numbers captured by the average campaign.

Specific responsibilities of this role may include:

• Configuring analytics tools to report on target metrics
• Running periodic reports
• Analyzing the data presented
• Confirming or suggesting changes to the direction of the digital marketing program

Evaluating Your Existing Team

If you’re a totally new company, building a digital marketing team involves making sure you have all four of the roles described above covered. 

That doesn’t mean you need four people. Your team might start out using any of the following models until you’re able to scale up:

• One full-time digital marketer who serves as the team lead and strategist, and who outsources both creative execution and data analysis.
• A marketing team lead, a strategist who can also handle creative execution and an outsourced data analyst.
• A marketing team lead, a combination strategist-and-creative, and data analysis capacities borrowed from other internal departments (such as R&D or IT).

If, on the other hand, you’re starting with an existing team, deciding how to scale up requires an evaluation of the current skill sets you have access to. Ask yourself the following questions to get started:

Does my team currently have a strong leader?

Who makes the decisions for your digital marketing program right now? Can you point to a single, strong leader who has the knowledge and experience required to make informed decisions? Or are decisions being made by consensus across the group?

If you don’t have a strong leader in place, your next move as a team might be to:

• Designate the existing team member whose skills are strongest to serve as a single lead (in addition to making whatever workflow and process adjustments are needed to consolidate decision-making authority within that role).
• Bring on a new hire who can provide more decisive leadership, in support of your preferred marketing channels. This might be a VP of Marketing or Director of Marketing role.

Is my team currently executing a selection of strategically-chosen marketing channels?

Unless you’re dealing with Fortune 500 resources, you probably can’t afford to do every possible marketing channel well. Most companies are much better off choosing a handful of strategies that best match their company type and audience, rather than trying to be good at everything.

So take a look at your current marketing program. Are you focusing on the marketing channels that best move the needle for your company? Or are you constantly chasing shiny new strategies, without regard for your team’s capacity to execute on them successfully?

Once you’ve pared your efforts down to a handful of channels, staffing decisions become clearer. You don’t need a PPC strategist, for example, if you’re only going to focus on content and SEO. You don’t need three different types of writers if you’re going to focus on blog posts alone.

To a certain degree, the marketing channels you choose to focus on will depend on the skills of your existing team. But don’t let yourself get locked into inappropriate strategies just because you happen to have the talent available. Every strategy – and, by extension, every allocation of your resources – must support your company’s needs. It can’t be the other way around.

What resources are you able to commit to your digital marketing program?

Even if you’ve gone through the questions above and determined that you need additional talent to fill the four key roles of a digital marketing team, you can’t do anything if you can’t afford it.

There are ways you can get creative when plugging the gaps on your digital marketing team:

• Rather than hiring a strategist, you could arrange for short-term consulting through a service like Clarity.fm. As long as you choose the right expert, you should be able to get enough insight to drive the direction of your program until you can afford to fill the role with an employee.
• Most creatives and executors can be brought on as contractors – especially if you don’t have an immediate need for long-term or full-time help. Just keep an eye on demand. Once you have enough work to justify part-time or full-time employment, it’ll likely be cheaper (and more reliable) to hire them on a regular basis.
• Hiring part-time versus full-time makes it easy to test candidates and see if they’re a good fit for your digital marketing program. 

Just be sure that, when you’re evaluating both your needs and available resources, you consider the bigger picture:

• If you bring on additional talent, you’ll need additional resources to manage them. That time has to come from somewhere.
• Depending on the types of creative executors you bring on, you may need to make additional investments in tools or technology to support their work. Strategists, for example, may need specialized software. A video team may need to either purchase or rent equipment to carry out shoots for you.
• If you plan to bring on part-time or full-time employees, make sure you have enough money in the bank to cover their costs until their efforts become profitable. By some estimates, it can take up to eight months before new employees are fully productive.

Asking these and other questions may seem tedious, but initial inquiry and ongoing evaluation is critical to maximizing the success of your digital marketing program.

Are these four roles filled on your digital marketing team? Are there any I’m missing? Share your thoughts by leaving a comment below:

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