Staffing a Modern Digital Marketing Team
“How do I staff my marketing team to take full advantage of digital tools and tactics?”
This is a question we frequently hear from our clients as they struggle to find the right blend of roles, skills, responsibilities, structure, and execution models to do everything expected of a modern marketing team. The advent of digital has changed the paradigm of what it means to be a marketing team. Gone are the days of general brand awareness and simply measuring effectiveness with the rise or fall of the company’s bottom line.
The biggest change? Beth Comstock, then-CMO of GE, nailed it at Marketing Nation 2017 when she stated, “we don’t need marketers to be data scientists, but we do need them to understand data.” Digital has given marketers unprecedented opportunities to read and react to their audience’s actions and reactions to content. This digital body language is, at the same time, empowering and daunting since marketers are now held accountable for more metrics and measurements than ever. Tracking, measuring, and ultimately, interpreting, this vast amount of data has seen the advent of a new breed of professional; the marketing technologist.
Marketing technologists are a vital part of understanding and integrating the vast array of marketing technology platforms in existence today; marketing automation platforms, social engagement platforms, advertising technology platforms, content platforms, account-based marketing platforms, and the list goes on. These platforms are powerful on their own, but are much moreso when integrated together and with a back-end CRM and/or ERP platform. While certain operational roles are required to be the stewards of such technology, the need to understand the “how” and “why” of marketing technology and data has bled into just about every role on a marketing team.
This rapid shift in marketing expectations and accountability has lead a lot of organizations to outsource many digital marketing tasks. The onset of the digital agency model has posed a new set of challenges to marketing leaders as they struggle with which responsibilities to outsource versus handle in-house. The right equation in terms of selecting the right execution model isn’t magic, but it does vary depending on factors such as organizational size and desired engagement activities. Agencies can be cost effective, creative, and highly capable, however there is no substitute for institutional knowledge and the control that can be exerted over an internal team.
It is these questions of who to hire, how to structure the team, and what to outsource that we seek to answer in the new Staffing a Modern Digital Marketing Team ebook. In it, we cover:
- What roles are required to produce results and to scale?
- What skills and responsibilities should each role have?
- What is the right-size structure for my team?
- Should we be focused on building internally or executing with external partners?
- What roles do Centers of Excellence (CoE) play and when/how should they be introduced?
Visit this link to download your copy of Staffing a Modern Digital Marketing Team: www.mfdn.co/goto/fRh
We hope that it provides you with some valuable insights and options and would love to hear what you think in the comments below or drop us a line at engage@mcfadyen.com.
