Roshni Wijayasinha, founder, Prosh Marketing, a fractional CMO & marketing agency that helps startups/SMBs build their marketing practice.
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From startups to large corporations, marketing plays an essential role in driving companies' growth and expansion. This means that the pressure is on for marketing leaders to curate the best combination of talent to successfully support business objectives.
The current challenge is that marketing has become such a large field, comprising multitudes of specializations that are increasingly interconnected and sometimes confusing. Having worked in marketing teams across both larger and smaller companies, I've noticed some key players are essential to a company's success.
In my experience, here are four essential roles to consider when building an efficient marketing team:
1. The Product Marketer
A product marketer is a strategist who ensures that the product presented to target customers will fulfill their needs and that how to do so is communicated to the marketing team at every touchpoint. This team member is involved from the inception of the product through market analysis and research and relays important insights to the development and sales teams.
The main objective of this role is the effective positioning of the product, but the product marketer's role does not end with the creation of a successful product. Their responsibility carries on throughout the product's life cycle, from launch through growth and maturity phases, taking the customer's perspective into account at each step, ensuring messaging continuity and reviewing customer feedback for continuous improvement.
2. The Content Marketer
A content marketer is the storyteller responsible for creating and publishing thoughtful content targeted at a specific audience. In turn, they support brand awareness and attract potential customers and leads.
To achieve this goal, the content marketer creates compelling articles, blog posts, sales content and collateral, podcasts or videos to engage your target audience while remaining aligned with your company's branding strategy.
The content marketer's role also includes developing a content strategy, optimizing content for search engine optimization (SEO) and selecting appropriate distribution channels. This role is also responsible for sustained engagement and conversion.
3. The Marketing Analyst
Every marketing team needs a data-driven expert who ensures that your marketing strategies are optimized and marketing implementation is yielding the results it should.
This person gathers and analyzes data from various channels—both online and offline—and provides insights to inform your decision-making and strategy. The analytics marketer's responsibilities involve conducting experiments such as A/B tests, monitoring and reporting campaign performance and identifying trends.
This role is involved in everything from marketing strategy formulation to forecasting to overseeing ongoing campaign performance to performing post-analyses.
4. The Designer
Each marketing team also needs an artist who brings a brand and its content to life through compelling visual content. The designer's role is to captivate the audience and reinforce the brand's identity to make a lasting impression.
Whether through the crafting of logos, website layouts or social media posts, this role ensures that every visual element aligns perfectly with your company's brand identity and provides a consistent visual experience.
Conclusion
Together, these four essential roles can deliver marketing capabilities that drive growth.
The product marketer defines the market position and vision for the product, which content marketers then communicate through engaging and relevant content. Designers bring this content to life with visually appealing elements that reinforce the brand's message. Meanwhile, marketing analysts provide critical data to inform and refine the strategies of all other roles, ensuring that efforts are aligned and creating a synergy.
That said, in today's multitalented market, it is possible to find candidates with strengths in multiple areas. This can help streamline costs, especially when building out initial teams. It can also be helpful to find external experts to help supplement gaps in your team's capabilities, especially as you move from different stages in your business's growth.
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