The internet has no doubt changed the course of the way humans perform tasks. It has not only brought you closer to information or given you a more accessible platform to shop or bank; it has also given you more job opportunities. For one, most businesses either have a digital presence alongside their physical stores, while some even run entirely online. It’s given birth to a new form of marketing and advertising, and a much more challenging and creative one at that.
According to We Are Social and Hootsuite’s Global Digital 2019 reports, there is currently an estimated 4.39 billion internet users globally—that means the internet connects more than half of the world's total population. Along with that, the number of people using social media is also growing at 3.26 billion. This also means it’s easier than ever to reach a massive global market with less than the budget it would probably take if the world wide web didn’t exist.
These figures alone give companies the motivation they need to build and establish a digital marketing team for their brand. On the other hand, the demand for such services is also inspiring the birth of agencies focused on online marketing and advertising strategies.
If you want your business to succeed now and survive the hypercompetitive nature of companies in the coming years, then there’s no escaping the need to focus on digital marketing. This powerful weapon will help you attract and engage the audience and consumer base you need to take your brand to the next level.
Measure your performance through analytics – With traditional marketing, there’s no accurate way to check how many people saw your flier or looked at your billboard enough for them to perform the desired action. A lot of digital marketing tools are built just to sift through the source of where your sales are coming from. This is useful for creating future campaigns for your brand.
Establish a relationship with your consumers – The birth of the internet didn’t remove the much-needed human connection people are looking for with any brand or personality they interact with. Digital marketing gives your company a persona that your consumers would love to hear more of and reach out to.
Tell your brand’s story – There’s a lot you can do with digital marketing tools, from creating video explainers to photo slide shows that can best explain what your company is all about. There’s also that unprecedented level of customizability that no other channel can offer.
Low barrier to entry – Traditional methods of marketing took a bit more from the company budget. There are many ways to optimize your digital marketing spend to fit your business’s needs, whether you’re an enterprise or you’re a startup. It’s flexible and more cost-efficient.
Search Engine Optimization – Focuses on getting your webpages to rank higher naturally on search engines. Up to date with the algorithm changes of major search engines.
Search Advertising – Strategically bids on keywords that will help your webpage to rank first on search engines. The first search result with an ad tag is an example of a great job done by the search advertising department.
Content Marketing – This is the branch that prioritizes the creation of informative, helpful, and relevant content to your audience to establish authority and be a go-to source for potential customer’s needs.
Social Media Marketing – This area allows you to create meaningful relationships and interactions with your loyal followers, as well as entice new ones to check you out. The tone here is usually more informal and personable than other channels.
Display Advertising – Specializes in the conception of visually striking ads that are carefully placed on search engines and social media apps for increased brand exposure.
Email Marketing – This is a personalized and private channel where you can interact with your existing customers, giving them updates or offers about your brand. Also useful for abandon cart emails and exclusive promos specific to the user.
Mobile Marketing – On-the-go SMS updates about flash sales, discounts, events, and more for your customers. Excellent for short, catchy copy with urgent messaging.
Project Manager – Oversees the whole process for different types of marketing campaigns, keeps track of progress, and bridges the communication across all departments in the company.
Creative Director – This person could also be a graphic designer. He or she is in charge or giving direction and creating visual pieces that will support your content, ads, presentations, reports, and more.
Web Developers – You’d ideally have both front-end and back-end developers. The former creates code for websites and landing pages, while the latter focuses on apps and scalable solutions.
Digital Marketing Analyst – Focused on the data and the numbers to improve your brand’s performance on succeeding campaigns. Creates benchmarks and compares your status against competitors.
Digital Marketing Strategist – This person is responsible for finding new trends and strategies to lead the team into breakthroughs in the digital marketing front.
SEO Specialist – Continually tweaks and improves your website for onsite and offsite improvements that would ultimately lead to higher page rankings and a boost in website visitors.
Search Advertising Specialist – Smart in keyword research to optimize the returns on paid search campaigns. Knowledgeable in industry-wide standards on keyword bidding prices.
Display Advertising Specialist – Studies the most effective display ad placement, size, copy, and more to deliver an effective campaign across search engines and social media. Must also know how to handle the display ads budget.
Social Media Manager – In charge of scheduling posts, ensuring all social media accounts are active, and also responsible for community management. They are also tasked with creating new spins for previously published content for social media formats.
UX/UI Designer – Understands the nuances and art needed to build enjoyable user experiences for mobile and desktop visitors of your brand’s website.
Content Writer – Produces content that is tailored to the voice and persona of the brand, whether for social media copy or blog posts.
Email Marketer – Maintains and grows the email list, properly segments subscribers, and delivers engaging email marketing campaigns to increase ROI.
Content Marketing Strategist – They are in charge of creating an editorial plan for content marketing, lead generation efforts, and others.
Centralized/Center of Excellence:
The center of excellence structure illustrates a digital expert or team that creates rules, systems, and documents within the digital marketing team. This is best for organizations that can’t support an analytics team per division. However, it does come with the risk of losing your network with local markets.
Divisional/Distributed Team:
The next model places analysts within different teams or locations throughout the company. This exposes the analysts to the various departments’ processes and agenda, creating more flexibility. In this structure, they can run tests and make changes whenever needed. It also prevents upper management from micromanaging and allows them to focus on the firm’s overall goals.
Hub and Spoke:
Last but not least, the hub and spoke model combines the previous two types of structures. There’s a functioning center of excellence which establishes the guidelines and provides the tools, while there is a divisional model of having analysts spread around the organization. The center and the analysts are highly encouraged to collaborate to empower the groups to update, discover, and take risks.
The process of structuring your team is admittedly painstaking. However, the returns are going to be massive. There will be some trial and error involved, but nothing that clearly defined purpose and intentions won’t be able to fix.
Read next: Surprising Ways in Which the First Ten Minutes of Your Day Affect Productivity (infographic)
According to We Are Social and Hootsuite’s Global Digital 2019 reports, there is currently an estimated 4.39 billion internet users globally—that means the internet connects more than half of the world's total population. Along with that, the number of people using social media is also growing at 3.26 billion. This also means it’s easier than ever to reach a massive global market with less than the budget it would probably take if the world wide web didn’t exist.
These figures alone give companies the motivation they need to build and establish a digital marketing team for their brand. On the other hand, the demand for such services is also inspiring the birth of agencies focused on online marketing and advertising strategies.
If you want your business to succeed now and survive the hypercompetitive nature of companies in the coming years, then there’s no escaping the need to focus on digital marketing. This powerful weapon will help you attract and engage the audience and consumer base you need to take your brand to the next level.
Why is Digital Marketing Important?
Besides the abovementioned benefit of creating online brand awareness and presence, there’s more than meets the eye with digital marketing.Measure your performance through analytics – With traditional marketing, there’s no accurate way to check how many people saw your flier or looked at your billboard enough for them to perform the desired action. A lot of digital marketing tools are built just to sift through the source of where your sales are coming from. This is useful for creating future campaigns for your brand.
Establish a relationship with your consumers – The birth of the internet didn’t remove the much-needed human connection people are looking for with any brand or personality they interact with. Digital marketing gives your company a persona that your consumers would love to hear more of and reach out to.
Tell your brand’s story – There’s a lot you can do with digital marketing tools, from creating video explainers to photo slide shows that can best explain what your company is all about. There’s also that unprecedented level of customizability that no other channel can offer.
Low barrier to entry – Traditional methods of marketing took a bit more from the company budget. There are many ways to optimize your digital marketing spend to fit your business’s needs, whether you’re an enterprise or you’re a startup. It’s flexible and more cost-efficient.
Building Your Digital Marketing Team
So, digital marketing is critical. If you’re ready to dive in structuring your digital marketing team, the infographic below gives you a guide on how to accomplish just that. (P.S. There’s a lot more discussion going on in the original post, so you could also check it out for more insight.)Which Areas of Digital Marketing Should I Focus On?
Here are some of the most important disciplines that you should be focusing on for your in-house team:Search Engine Optimization – Focuses on getting your webpages to rank higher naturally on search engines. Up to date with the algorithm changes of major search engines.
Search Advertising – Strategically bids on keywords that will help your webpage to rank first on search engines. The first search result with an ad tag is an example of a great job done by the search advertising department.
Content Marketing – This is the branch that prioritizes the creation of informative, helpful, and relevant content to your audience to establish authority and be a go-to source for potential customer’s needs.
Social Media Marketing – This area allows you to create meaningful relationships and interactions with your loyal followers, as well as entice new ones to check you out. The tone here is usually more informal and personable than other channels.
Display Advertising – Specializes in the conception of visually striking ads that are carefully placed on search engines and social media apps for increased brand exposure.
Email Marketing – This is a personalized and private channel where you can interact with your existing customers, giving them updates or offers about your brand. Also useful for abandon cart emails and exclusive promos specific to the user.
Mobile Marketing – On-the-go SMS updates about flash sales, discounts, events, and more for your customers. Excellent for short, catchy copy with urgent messaging.
What Roles Should You Hire?
To have a truly effective team, you need the right people to fill in these key positions. It may take time to build a group this large, as you may end up finding more than one person to work on similar roles depending on the size and demands of your company.Project Manager – Oversees the whole process for different types of marketing campaigns, keeps track of progress, and bridges the communication across all departments in the company.
Creative Director – This person could also be a graphic designer. He or she is in charge or giving direction and creating visual pieces that will support your content, ads, presentations, reports, and more.
Web Developers – You’d ideally have both front-end and back-end developers. The former creates code for websites and landing pages, while the latter focuses on apps and scalable solutions.
Digital Marketing Analyst – Focused on the data and the numbers to improve your brand’s performance on succeeding campaigns. Creates benchmarks and compares your status against competitors.
Digital Marketing Strategist – This person is responsible for finding new trends and strategies to lead the team into breakthroughs in the digital marketing front.
SEO Specialist – Continually tweaks and improves your website for onsite and offsite improvements that would ultimately lead to higher page rankings and a boost in website visitors.
Search Advertising Specialist – Smart in keyword research to optimize the returns on paid search campaigns. Knowledgeable in industry-wide standards on keyword bidding prices.
Display Advertising Specialist – Studies the most effective display ad placement, size, copy, and more to deliver an effective campaign across search engines and social media. Must also know how to handle the display ads budget.
Social Media Manager – In charge of scheduling posts, ensuring all social media accounts are active, and also responsible for community management. They are also tasked with creating new spins for previously published content for social media formats.
UX/UI Designer – Understands the nuances and art needed to build enjoyable user experiences for mobile and desktop visitors of your brand’s website.
Content Writer – Produces content that is tailored to the voice and persona of the brand, whether for social media copy or blog posts.
Email Marketer – Maintains and grows the email list, properly segments subscribers, and delivers engaging email marketing campaigns to increase ROI.
Content Marketing Strategist – They are in charge of creating an editorial plan for content marketing, lead generation efforts, and others.
Structuring the Digital Marketing Team
The structure of your digital marketing team will be the fabric and base upon which your department will operate. There are quite a few models to choose from, and there’s no one-size-fits-all type. Here are some of them:
Centralized/Center of Excellence:
The center of excellence structure illustrates a digital expert or team that creates rules, systems, and documents within the digital marketing team. This is best for organizations that can’t support an analytics team per division. However, it does come with the risk of losing your network with local markets.
Divisional/Distributed Team:
The next model places analysts within different teams or locations throughout the company. This exposes the analysts to the various departments’ processes and agenda, creating more flexibility. In this structure, they can run tests and make changes whenever needed. It also prevents upper management from micromanaging and allows them to focus on the firm’s overall goals.
Hub and Spoke:
Last but not least, the hub and spoke model combines the previous two types of structures. There’s a functioning center of excellence which establishes the guidelines and provides the tools, while there is a divisional model of having analysts spread around the organization. The center and the analysts are highly encouraged to collaborate to empower the groups to update, discover, and take risks.
Conclusion
There’s nowhere to go but digital. In this day and age, you need to focus on prioritizing your online efforts just as much as your offline efforts—perhaps even more. Soon, you might also migrate all of your business processes with the help of automation tools, some of which you may already be using now.The process of structuring your team is admittedly painstaking. However, the returns are going to be massive. There will be some trial and error involved, but nothing that clearly defined purpose and intentions won’t be able to fix.
Read next: Surprising Ways in Which the First Ten Minutes of Your Day Affect Productivity (infographic)