I would like to give a brief overlook of the ideal structure of digital marketing team, along with its roles.

Over the last decade, the customer journey has been significantly shifted to a digital side. Therefore, it is life-vital for the majority of businesses, both B2C and B2B, to employ and rise a capable digital marketing team.

The main function of such a team is to increase the online presence of your brand, deliver new traffic to your website, gain leads, and sales for your company by engaging people on the web cost-effectively. Moreover, digital marketing itself extends the possibility for brands of reaching new clients in comparison to traditional marketing communications.

The main products of the digital marketing team are raised brand awareness, new leads delivered to your sales team, increased customer life-time-value and much more business values provided through the digital channels.

Digital Marketing Team Structure and Roles

From my perspective, digital marketing consists of three core elements:

• Data that empowers all actions
• Content that attracts prospects
• Context or marketing channels

Nowadays, marketing is data-driven; relevant data lead the way for the majority of marketing hypotheses. The collected information about the business environment and its audience support firms to understand their customer, improve the effectiveness of future marketing efforts.

The data consist of information about markets, consumers, competitors, global trends, the performance of certain marketing channels, benchmarks of attracting customers, and other insights required to build hypotheses on the effective ways of engaging consumers, furthermore, to evaluate the efficiency of your previous or ongoing efforts. Thus, your digital marketing team ought to have an analyst or data scientist who supplies other units with the necessary insights, set the direction for your strategies, and measure the success. Consequently, data is the brain of your team.

While, content is merely a voice of your firm; it informs an audience, drives a message, pitches an idea, develops personality, sells important merits of a product, or shouts at the unlucky passerby.

Content is associated with marketing collateral and a message carrier. It has to be presented by a of separate business units, which is also in charge of improving your digital properties (website, apps, POS). I assume several people should work on your content.

Finally, I understand a context as a set of all digital channels or sources of traffic for your digital properties, such as an online store. For instance, according to SimilarWeb.com, general traffic sources are search engines, social networks, media ads (display, online video), direct marketing (email, messengers, catboats, phone calls, etc.), affiliate marketing or referrals, and owned (direct) traffic, which can be attributed to the direct marketing.

Source of traffic of Amazon.com per a report on SimilarWeb.com

Based on the above, the contextual team responsible for delivering content to clients should consist of:

1. Search Engine Marketing specialist who captures organic and paid traffic from search engines. Since this unit inevitably deals with off-page SEO, it should be responsible for digital PR as an important part of organic search promotion;
2. Social Media Manager, the one who drives organic and paid content promotion on social networks, including retargeting;
3. Media Manager or display and video ads specialist. This unit generates demand and promotes your brand on third-party digital properties, such as YouTube;
4. Affiliate marketing expert is a team member that develops special programs to get leads and deals through online partners and CPA networks. It can also deal with online sponsorship;
5. Direct marketing unit nurtures your leads to convert prospects into loyal customers and increase their life-time-value. Such a professional works with CRM, middle and bottom of the funnel systems. It may operate chats, manage email campaigns, chatbots, and other means of direct communication.

Additionally, to support and maintain the effectiveness of each unit (and prevent an overload), I strongly recommend employing several trusted digital marketing vendors, such as contractors, freelancers, and agencies, which can outsource several laborious duties and activities when you really need it.

Last but not least, to become an effective team digital marketing units have to be supervised by a manager. As the core member of the digital marketing team, a manager should run the strategy and administer the marketing activity on the digital landscape. Digital marketing manager duties include campaign planning and organization, influencing plus leading the team, also controlling its productivity by making sure the marketing mission is accomplished timely and cost-effectively.

All units report to the manager. The last one serves as a connecting bridge (point of contact) between the C-Suite, as well as other divisions.

It is important to mention that the given structure of the digital marketing team does not overlap the functionality of each unit, furthermore, units are able to interact directly and supplement one another.

I hope you have found this solution to structuring the digital marketing team clear, well developed, and in line with current best practices.

As a certified marketing professional with over 20 years of experience in managing communications and promotion solutions, I am always open to any opportunities and ready to assist your business endeavors on the web. So, feel free to contact me directly on LinkedIn or check my website for more details.