- Danita Jo Talbot
Creating a GREAT Marketing Team
The Pocket Knife
In my family a Swiss Army knife is the handy multi-tool everyone should have in their pocket. My Dad always carried one and it’s become symbolic for being prepared for anything life throws you. It has a little bit of everything you’d need for any situation. For marketing, think of it kind of like your starter kit. When creating a strong team, each member should have a pocket knife of skills that can be used in any situation in a multitude of ways. Everyone needs these basic tools, even if there is a specialty they bring on top of that.
Creativity: Creativity comes in many forms, visually, using language, or even in problem solving techniques. Be sure to cultivate whatever inspires it and however it takes shape. Surround yourselves with other who create and foster that environment.
Content Creation: Encourage people to do what they are naturally interested in doing, whether that’s taking photos, writing a blog, shooting video, finding the story or tweeting around the water cooler.
Analytics: As simple as tracking web page activity, capturing a direct mail tracking code, using Excel or using Google Analytics. Focus on looking for trends and anomalies.
Integrated Campaigns: Managing multiple channels is one thing, integrating them into a common plan is entirely different. It’s the key that turns an isolated tactic into leveraging a customer lifecycle. Doing it effectively requires a good understanding of which channels are best used for what purposes. Connecting them together becomes an art form.
Web: Leveraging the web and social media for business takes a good understanding those channels. Urge the team to actively explore all types of digital media personally so they can dream of ways to best use them for business.
Specialty Tools
In addition to having the basic skills, every team needs a well-rounded set of specialties. Each team member must play an essential role, being especially talented at 1 or 2 focus areas. Having the right tools on your team is essential to getting the job done well and efficiently. Fill your tool belt with people that not only bring something unique but are versatile enough to cover for each other, pick up work overflow, and help each other out.
Team Lead: You need a jack of all trades that understands all roles on the team, yet has the mindset to provide strategies that guide the rest of the team. The workload should be light on content creation, allowing more time to focus on analytics and organizing the team matching projects with the best resources and prioritizing them aligned with the business.
Content Converter: Writing a whitepaper is not enough for this person, who also needs to be building a way for it to be downloaded. The main role of this person is not only to create any sort of unique item to be used by your customers, but to figure out how and where to use that content to drive traffic & capture contact information for follow up. Content converters should be making all sorts of amazing shinny objects that get people to jump through small hoops to get.
Product and Sales Marketing: The biggest function here is messaging. Packaging up the content with a message that resonates with customers. It often involves interpretive dance to determine what the right package contains. It also makes the most sense that these are your team members who really know the customers, what they want, and how to talk to them.
Content Editor & Writer: Different than copy writing, this team member would take lead sourcing content from the rest of the team and crafting it into blog posts, social media and possibly even the press. They would own these channels and be accountable not only for their content but for their overall performance measures. It is closely tied to a typical communications role of your business.
Creatives: You’re going to need those people who do the heavy lifting on art direction, graphic design, copy writing & coding. These people can be internal or external to your business, as staff or freelancers, based on your demand and the level of stability in your workload. They should be able to translate your work into the online world , as easily as traditional offline marketing channels.
