The right marketing framework can facilitate expansion through fresh, inventive avenues, and can ensure everyone is in their field of expertise. 

It can reduce role redundancy across regions and departments and enable collaboration for a blend of creative and strategic marketing approaches. There is no secret sauce for the exact roles for each area of your marketing department. It is important to understand which roles are most valuable for your organization and which ones can be combined in terms of skill sets.

After collaborating with many marketing leaders across various industries, a few areas of expertise stand out as the keys to marketing success within organizations:

Marketing Strategy

The brains behind the marketing operations, focusing on alignment with the organization and how marketing plays a role in its success. Determining what success looks like, key metrics, the direction and objective of the department, positioning, planning and guiding the vision and growth of the organization through the marketing lens. 

Creative Strategy & Design

The heart, bringing brands, campaigns and content to life with impactful creative visions and designs. Creativity helps differentiate your brand and marketing activities from your competitors. 

Digital Marketing

The hands, executing and optimizing the online tactics from websites to SEO to social media and beyond. The digital marketing team is very hands-on while driving results that matter to the organization. 

Branding

The face, ensuring cohesion across touchpoints and consistency of the brand voice and persona. The brand needs to connect emotionally with your customers to drive action and response. Your customers choose you over your competitors when they see value in your brand. 

Growth & Demand Gen

The legs, specializing in acquisition and conversion through data-driven efforts. The growth or demand generation departments focus on revenue. Driving more purchases from both new and existing customers needs to propel the organization further. 

With expertise in each area and collaboration across them, the flywheel moves with purpose. The momentum builds as strategies connect with audiences through creative delivery and digital channels, interactions strengthen brand affinity and data-backed insights fuel growth.

We tapped some other industry experts for their # tip to build a winning marketing team. 

Here is what 6 marketing leaders had to say.

• Align Members With Company Values and Mission
• Assign Clear Roles to Prevent Conflict
• Find Passionate Specialists for Team Success
• Hire Smarter Individuals for a Strong Team
• Prioritize Skill Diversity and Inclusive Hiring
• Focus on Continuous Learning and Empowerment

Align Members With Company Values and Mission

When building a marketing team, I emphasize the importance of aligning each member with our core company values and mission. Marketing and organizational alignment ensures that everyone is moving in the same direction and is passionate about what we do at our company. Hiring for cultural fit and value alignment helps in retaining employees longer and builds a team that’s committed to the company’s success, enhancing teamwork and reducing friction.

We structure our marketing department with a focus on customer journey stages: Awareness, Consideration, Decision, and Loyalty. Team members specialize in strategies tailored to these stages but work collaboratively to ensure a seamless customer experience across the entire funnel. This approach allows us to tailor our tactics and strategies to be stage-appropriate, maximizing the impact of our marketing efforts at each point in the customer journey.

Jason Hennessey, CEO, Hennessey Digital

Assign Clear Roles to Prevent Conflict

Always give team members clear roles. This might seem obvious, but it’s perhaps the most crucial aspect of building any team. When multiple professionals are working together, it’s vital to have clearly defined roles for each person. This keeps everyone accountable and helps prevent conflicts that could hurt productivity.

For example, in my marketing department, the strategy needs a strategic marketer, the creative tasks require creatives, the auditing demands auditor marketers, and the communications team must consist of strong communicators.

When I’m building my marketing team, I start by looking for a well-rounded marketing team leader with experience in leading teams. This leader needs to be able to balance long-term branding goals with short-term customer acquisition strategies. Once I have the right leader in place, the next step is to find team members who can thrive under their leadership. From the recruitment stage, these team members are assigned clear tasks and job roles. This clarity from the outset helps prevent any dissatisfaction or resentment from seeping into our organizational culture.

Lydia Valentine, Co-Founder and Chief Marketing Officer, Cohort XIII LLC

Find Passionate Specialists for Team Success

The number one tip for building a successful marketing team is to find specialized individuals who are passionate about their work and eager to grow in their positions. By assembling a team of experts who are dedicated and enthusiastic, you create a foundation for innovative and effective marketing strategies. 

Structuring your department to facilitate close collaboration among team members ensures that they can support each other and work cohesively towards a common goal. The team is rewarded, and everyone can be called out for how they helped achieve the goal.

Erik Cocks, Marketing Director, trustworks law

Hire Smarter Individuals for a Strong Team

I have spent my entire career in marketing—both as a practitioner and as an executive recruiter. Frankly, I can’t think of any other industry that I would want to work in. Regardless of which side of the desk I’m sitting on, I always take immense pride in assembling the strongest team possible.

Legendary marketing executive David Ogilvy once said that to build the strongest team requires putting your ego aside. Hire others who are smarter than you. I couldn’t agree more. The analogy I use is that assembling the best marketing team is not unlike that of a baseball team.

It requires having a wide range of talented people who complement each other. Having all home-run hitters may at first appear beneficial, but when you look deeper, you realize it’s essential to have some scrappy players who hit singles and doubles, too. The same is true in your pitching rotation. You need both: some righties and some lefties, some who continually throw over 100 mph, and others who rely on finesse and effectively tossing off-speed breaking pitches.

The same thought process is true with your marketing team. You need to have a wide array of talent. From strategists to tacticians, from data analytics to producers, from creative to media.

Jamie McCann, Executive Recruiter, 3AM Marketing Services

Prioritize Skill Diversity and Inclusive Hiring

My number one tip for building a marketing team is to prioritize diversity in skills and backgrounds while ensuring a non-biased hiring strategy. This includes making accommodations for complex needs and respecting individual preferences, which fosters a happy and productive team. 

For example, when structuring the marketing department in my previous role, I focused on bringing in individuals with strengths in different areas like content creation, SEO, graphic design, and data analysis. We also embraced neuro-inclusivity practices, ensuring that team members felt supported and understood. 

This approach not only boosted creativity and problem-solving but also created a cohesive and motivated team. Tailoring your hiring strategy in this inclusive way is essential for building a successful marketing team.

Cameron King, Marketing & Comms Business Partner, Meallmore Ltd

Focus on Continuous Learning and Empowerment

The key to building a successful marketing team is to focus on continuous learning and development. Stay up to date on the latest trends by encouraging your team to research the latest industry tools and technologies. We allocate time and resources for regular training sessions, workshops, and certifications. This not only enhances our team’s skills but also keeps them motivated and innovative.

In terms of department structure, we follow a decentralized model where each team member has ownership of specific projects or campaigns. This approach empowers individuals to take initiative and make decisions, fostering a sense of accountability and leadership. For example, when launching a new product, our social media manager led the campaign, coordinating with designers and content team to ensure a cohesive strategy. This empowerment resulted in a highly successful launch with record engagement.

Sahil Kakkar, CEO & Founder, RankWatch