Whatever the job titles, you need people with talent in these 5 areas to take your business to the next level.

If you’ve got your finger on the pulse of business, you’ll know that you need a killer marketing team to drive sales, enlist engagement, and nurture customer loyalty – and it’s the team’s strengths that provide a strong foundation to this key operational pillar of your business. But where do you start? With job titles flying left, right and centre, it’s easy to be overwhelmed by the variety of skills  and marketing disciplines out there. Fear not: we break down the key roles within the team by the skills they should bring to the table, so you can hire with confidence and make your marketing dreams a reality.  

Find a marketing manager with leadership, experience and vision

In the first place, you’ll need a seasoned marketing expert. Usually, they’ll have job titles such as Marketing Manager, Head of Marketing or Chief Marketing Officer. Regardless of the description, this means hiring a marketing leader who understands the holistic application of each individual marketing discipline and – crucially – who can strategically assess how they align to your individual business goals within your specific industry. 

Some key things to look for in a marketing manager include: 

• Experience. Job title aside, look for someone who has put in the years and has demonstrable experience in leading a marketing team and achieving measurable results.  
• Innovation and drive. Unfortunately, this can often conflict with experience. As in many walks of life, marketing experts can make the mistake of equating time on the job with up-to-date knowledge, when the truth is that marketing is an ever-changing beast. A manager who is set in their ways is less likely to find creative marketing solutions and applications. Find someone who thrives on keeping ahead of the game and searching for alternative solutions, and you find a person who’s sure to bring you new opportunities to glean greater business results. 
• Inspiring leadership. To ensure your team works like a well-oiled machine, employ someone who cares about growing their team, and is driven to support the individuals within it. This is beneficial in any management capacity, but certainly marketers – and especially the creative ones! – will thrive and achieve more when they feel valued and supported. Find a manager who will show them you are invested in their success. 
• Tenacity. It’s easy in marketing to be led and do what is asked of you, but a great marketing leader won’t be afraid to challenge key business stakeholders – and you shouldn’t be afraid to let them. You want someone who will question why decisions are taken, which will help the CEO, MD and other key directors and leaders to make smarter marketing decisions – and not just follow the crowd. 

Ideally, you would have two levels of marketing leadership, with a Head of Marketing, Marketing Director or CMO taking the overall lead, and a Marketing Manager for day-to-day decisions, but this may be something to aspire to as your business matures.  

Hire a content marketer for content strategy and creation

Next up is a content marketer (in layman’s terms, a writer). You’ll see titles such as Content Manager, Copywriter, Content Specialist, Content Marketing Producer, Content Strategist or Content Writer. This person is critical, since content, regardless of its format, is quite simply essential to successful marketing campaigns.

A cracking copywriter or content marketer will be able to do the following:

• Increase awareness. Great content marketers will incorporate targeted keyword research to ensure SEO opportunities are maximised, thereby utilising data on buyer personas and the buyer journey.  
• Engage and persuade. Whether you’re trying to sell a car or to convince someone to switch from dairy to soy, a great content marketer can write (or create) content that not only captivates and engages, but is persuasive enough to lead your target audience to take the next step of their journey. In short, they can drive traffic, conversions and sales.  
• Humanise. Regardless of whether you’re a B2B or B2C business, the end audience is almost always a real-life person who can be appealed to, if you know how. Excellent content marketers have the power to flesh out a brand’s personality by imbuing content with a precisely selected tone of voice, helping you to connect with, and relate to, potential customers.  

Build an online presence with a digital marketer 

This is rather a catch-all term for a marketer who is skilled in both social media strategy, pay-per-click (PPC) and email marketing. Phew! No wonder there are so many and varied job titles – expect to see Social Media Manager, CRM Email Marketer, Digital Strategist, Relationship Manager, Internet Marketing Specialist, Paid Search Manager, Digital Marketing Manager, Web Marketing Specialist among others. 

Each of the interconnected roles involved in digital marketing will have different weight depending on the type of business you have. For example, an eCommerce business will almost always need a dedicated CRM (Customer Relationship Management) email marketer in addition to someone who is competent in both social media and advertising (though again, there could be a remit for hiring these roles individually).  

Here’s what digitally savvy marketers can help your business do:  

• Breathe life into the brand. Digital marketers can help businesses to have a little fun, stay on top of trends and engage with customers and clients on a personal level. This is true for both B2C and B2B businesses – and can be a great source of dynamic market research to fuel business growth. 
• Drive traffic (or footfall). Sentiment aside, the commercial opportunity via digital marketing is vast. Whether it be organic searches, social media or emails to existing databases, there is minimal cost when weighed against the opportunities to attract and convert via digital marketing.  
• Amplify your reach. Working with a digital marketer who is confident in Search and Social Media advertising in addition to allocating a spend for advertising makes your business much more likely to be found by your ideal customers. Digital marketing is an art in itself, and a good practitioner will be able to manage your cost per click/impressions whilst ensuring the adverts don’t diminish your conversion rates – in other words, your audience will still be relevant. 

Enchant and encourage sales with dynamic visual or graphic designers  

Bring your content strategy to life and create engaging marketing collateral – both online and offline – with a visual designer who can level up your business from dated to dazzling. You may find your employee under various designations, the most common being Graphic Designer, Visual Designer or Web Designer, with Art Director or Creative Director coming in at the higher end.

Skills your visual designer needs to have include:

• Creativity. Yes, it goes without saying – but the best visual designers don’t just know how to create;  they thrive on flexing their artistic muscles and are experts in helping businesses to ‘stop the scroll’. 
• Expertise. Visual design isn’t as simple as saying something looks good. It’s underpinned by a great deal of knowledge across several disciplines, both theoretical and practical. Choose someone with a thorough grounding in composition and graphic design techniques and software – a visual designer with the proper training will be able to create unique and engaging designs quickly every time, as they have a foundation of expertise to draw from. 
• Patience. This isn’t one you’ll find extolled on CVs, but the best visual designers are patient and open to constructive criticism (or simply to your CEO’s taste). In fact, they thrive on it – it gives them the opportunity to find creative solutions.  

Drive traffic, nurture and retain customers with data and performance marketing

This may be the less glamorous face of marketing, but my word, is it powerful. Having someone on the team who can manage the reports, and the data that drives strategies forward, is integral to both consistently achieving goals and evolving beyond them. 

The best data and performance marketers can:

• Identify opportunities. Data doesn’t lie, and great data and performance marketers can wade through the numbers and unearth the blueprints for business success.  
• Optimise via segmentation. The best data and performance marketers are experts at optimising campaigns (across disciplines) by understanding how to manipulate and segment the data. Especially true of email marketing and marketing automation – if you tailor your campaigns with this level of optimisation it’s the ultimate recipe for success.  

• Highlight relevancy. There’s a LOT of data to access, and when it comes to stakeholder reports – or just monitoring performance it can be TOO much data, which then leads to inaction. Data and performance marketers not only make sense of the data but they ‘tell the story’ that needs to be told.  

This is just a snapshot of the key marketing roles – there are of course, countless other skills and roles that may benefit your business. However, it’s vital that you thoroughly and correctly assess the marketing strategies and needs that align with your business and its goals – and it’s easy to see that, while important, hiring the personnel to fulfil all your company’s marketing needs is a huge investment. Not all businesses have the resources just yet. But there are other solutions. 

Working with an agency like White Square Studio allows you access to a wide variety of skills and experience at a fraction of the cost of hiring a full marketing team. In addition, any marketing agency worth their salt will adopt the partnership approach so you feel as though you have an in-house marketing team – just out-of-house! That’s how White Square Studio operates – and it works. We take the time to fully embed and onboard ourselves within your company to ensure we are as clued up about, and integrated within, your businesses as any in-house marketer could be.  

Why not find out more about working with White Square Studio or, arrange a no-obligation consultation meeting with me here.