Although there are standard organizational structures for digital marketing teams that many departments follow, the marketing mix, requirements, and internal capabilities of each company vary. You can rely on agencies and independent contractors for extra help, but some key positions, in my opinion, should be filled internally rather than outsourced in order to assure consistency across initiatives, take use of internal knowledge, and provide the groundwork for organizational growth.
Content Marketing Manager
A content marketing manager develops media and thought leadership content, such as blog entries, social media updates, podcasts, or downloadable resources, either directly or in collaboration with content creation resources. You can employ freelancers to improve your content creation because it serves as the cornerstone for all of your channel activations, but you can benefit from in-house knowledge of your company to reveal the true wisdom in this.
Your SEO expert makes sure that your site receives organic traffic. These initiatives power your demand engine and provide fuel for the top of your funnel. Your SEO expert not only assists in generating traffic for your website, but they also make sure that it is user-friendly in terms of navigation, content placement, and other factors. Your website is probably your most valuable digital asset, so I think it’s crucial to have this position on staff.
One of the most important positions on the team is the marketing operations lead, who oversees marketing automation, contact databases, tools and procedures to ensure you’re capturing all the data coming from your programs, attribution, and powerful reporting to show the company the return on investment of marketing efforts. If you don’t prove the worth of your job, you can encounter resistance when requesting important future resources, personnel, and initiatives. It is advantageous for this role to be an internal function given the complexity of how data is stored and used.
Although it’s unlikely that your web developer works directly with the marketing division, I’ve found that having this position in-house is still important. It can be challenging to worry about relying on an agency’s bandwidth or punctuality while you’re busy making website modifications, launching new content, correcting broken webpages, and other things. Speed is the currency of digital marketing; every minute you take to address a crucial update could cost you money. I’ll always insist that web developers work as internal teammates to maintain agility.
Campaign Manager
Not to mention, your campaign manager is in charge of starting your email marketing efforts to attract new clients and nurturing leads to increase conversions. It can be advantageous to retain this position internal because it interacts so closely with marketing operations and serves as a vital conduit between you and the paid marketing team.
