These days, no business can thrive without a great marketing team. Learn about the four of the most important roles your marketing department plays in your business.
When talking about marketing, many people still assume it’s all about promoting products or services. As well as building awareness for a brand and maintaining a company’s presence on social media.
While that definition may have been accurate five to 10 years ago, it no longer captures the whole essence of what marketing has evolved to look like.
Modern-day marketing has gone above and beyond its traditional purpose. Especially with the fast-paced evolution of social media and all things online.
As such, it might be time for you to review if your marketing team has all the skills needed to bring growth and success to your business today. Alternatively, if you have yet to hire marketing experts to help in your business, it might be time to think about making those crucial hires.
Either way, this article will provide you with guidance on what skills, knowledge, and talents you should look for in your marketing team so that they’ll be equipped to succeed in this day and age.
You’ll also be given a list of the most important tasks your marketing team should be able to fulfil for your business. Note that some of these tasks were not originally under the purview of marketing, so you might be surprised to see them on your marketing team’s to-do list.
But for now, let’s start by getting clear on the main responsibility of marketing teams in every business.
The Responsibilities of Marketing Teams in Every Business
In general, Marketing exists to support sales.
Imagine getting a sales call from a representative of a brand or company you’ve never heard of. Would you spend more than two minutes talking to that sales representative? Probably not. You might even suspect that you’re talking to a schemer or a con artist.
Now, picture getting a sales call from a brand you’ve heard of, read about, or fully encountered before. You might not say yes or purchase anything right away. But chances are, you’d stay on the line long enough to at least hear what they have to offer.
That’s because you’ve already got a baseline knowledge of who you’re talking to.
You may have seen a poster of the company somewhere. Or perhaps a Youtube ad for the product they’re selling. Maybe someone you know and trust mentioned a good experience they had with that brand, which is why you’re more open to staying on that sales call and hearing their sales rep out.
That’s the power of effective marketing in action.
By increasing visibility and awareness for your company, your marketing team can set your sales department up for a higher chance of success. And they do this by:
- Carefully studying your target market
- Identifying your ideal customer
- Developing marketing materials that attract your ideal customer
- Distributing those materials across various platforms, including your website and social media
- Warming up your customers to the idea of buying from you
Indeed, these are the main responsibilities of a marketing team. As you can tell, these are pretty important duties that fall squarely on your marketing staff’s shoulders.
That’s why it’s important that you onboard only the best and most skilled people to join your marketing team.
Remember that these people will be responsible for putting your name out there. So, the last thing you want is for an ill-equipped marketing team to put your brand in a bad light, making it downright difficult for your sales team to land any new clients.
As mentioned earlier, the scope of your marketing team’s role in your business has expanded by leaps and bounds. And it’s thanks to the rapid evolution (and digitalisation) of modern-day business.
So, you have to be even more discerning about the professionals you’d be taking in to man your marketing.
At the very least, they should be able to fulfil the main responsibilities we’ve enumerated so far. As well as the additional tasks modern marketing teams have taken on, which we’ll discuss next.
The 4 Tasks
As mentioned earlier, gone are the days when all marketing teams did was design, produce, and distribute collaterals that target a company’s target audience.
Nowadays, marketing teams have to step up and fulfil four vital roles for the companies they’re working for:
Task #1. Web Hosting and Management
Regardless of size, businesses need a website to publish content in and drive leads to.
This website will be your marketing team’s virtual headquarters. As such, it’s very important that they know their way around web hosting and management, especially if you don’t have an in-house IT department to rely on.
At the very least, your marketing team should know how to troubleshoot a website that’s gone offline or plugins that need updating.
They must also have a baseline knowledge of how site migration, domain pointing, and speed optimisation work. This way, they can ensure that your website is always up, running, and functioning as it should.
Additionally, your marketing team should be able to play around with the website if they need to do any of the following:
- Publish new content
- Build an opt-in landing page
- Change your sidebar widgets
- Schedule a new blog post
These are tasks that were previously reserved for IT and web development professionals. But as ‘traditional marketing’ started to lose most of its relevance, the web emerged as a much more important medium.
Nowadays, people fully rely on Google and social media to help them make all their consumption decisions. This means your website is now at the front and centre of your marketing efforts.
And as such, the main responsibility of managing your site to drive your company’s digital presence should shift from IT to marketing.
Task #2. Software integrations
Part of your marketing team’s responsibility is ensuring a seamless customer experience.
For example…
If your customers want to pay using a certain payment platform, like Stripe, they should be able to make it happen. So, if you’re using Ontraport, your marketing team should know how to integrate both platforms. This way, you could start accepting Stripe payments right away.
Likewise, if you’re using other software in your business—like Zapier or Instapage perhaps—your marketing team should have the know-how of how to connect and integrate everything to create a seamless experience.
Task #3. Graphics and Video Creation
Back in the day, many businesses had their marketing and graphics teams separate but working closely together.
Marketing experts would come up with design concepts that communicate and strengthen the company’s branding. And then, the graphics team would turn those concepts into tangible visual content using their technical know-how in graphic design.
Those two teams would usually go back and forth until the marketing team is satisfied with the output. As such, it could take a very long time before a marketing collateral actually gets done.
This long and winding process could no longer fly in this day and age of instant communication. Nowadays, if something needs to be communicated to your leads and customers, it needs to happen fast.
If a funny meme based on popular culture or recent happenings needs to be posted on your Instagram, it needs to happen within seconds. The goal is to post it before someone else beats you to the punch. And if there’s an old infographic on your website that needs updating you can no longer wait days before that update happens.
This simply means you can no longer truly separate your graphics and marketing teams.
Sure, your graphics team could still take care of big-ticket, no-rush orders like a billboard design or a book cover, if you do those things.
But for any digital communications or marketing content that requires graphics or video, like a new landing page or a client testimonial, your marketing team should be able to take the lead and make it happen.
Remember that the hidden power behind every successful marketing campaign is good design. This means your marketing team should have a good grasp of their design tools and elements to strengthen your campaign message.
Task #4. Marketing Automation
While it would definitely be impressive if your marketing team could manually take care of all the tasks and responsibilities we’ve listed in this article…
The mark of a truly good modern marketing team is their ability to automate as many parts of the process as possible. Especially those that take too much time when done manually and are often very technical in nature.
These activities include sending out drip emails for your active campaigns, publishing new website content, and managing your projects through Ontraport, among others.
Day after day, the scope of your marketing team’s responsibilities gets a little broader and more encompassing. And with so much work on their plate, automation is truly the only way they can get everything done without experiencing a dip in the quality of their work.
That’s why a great marketing team is one that could get rid of repetitive tasks, so they can be more productive in building your brand. Instead of getting constantly bogged down with work that could simply be automated.
Work with a Marketing Task Hero to Get More Things Done
Indeed, the to-do lists of marketing teams around the world grow longer and longer each day. And this is because of the ever-changing demands of modern-day business operations, sales, and marketing.
But that doesn’t mean your marketing team is doomed to spend every minute of their lives completing the tasks we’ve laid down in this article. Especially not if our Marketing Task Heroes could help it.
Automation Agency could take care of your:
- Web hosting and management
- Software integration
- Graphics and video creation
- Marketing automation
And every single task on your marketing to-do list.
This way, you and your team could focus on activities that’ll directly impact the growth of your business.
Just get in touch with our virtual team of marketing heroes for all your marketing needs and software solution requirements.
