In today’s world, marketing plays a role in almost every area of business. Gone are the days where marketing’s sole focus was advertising, trade shows, or managing your website. In fact, you could make the argument that if marketing’s primary responsibility is to help create a positive brand perception, then everything your business does is marketing.
Because marketing impacts so many different areas of your business, marketers end up wearing a lot of hats. Whether you have one full-time staff person, a team of marketers, or you’re working with an outside agency, it’s important to define the different roles marketing should play when it comes to helping your business grow.
5 Marketing Roles Every Business Needs
Here are a few important roles marketing should play in your business:
- A high-level strategist. First and foremost, marketing needs to be able to take your key business objectives and translate them into strategies that will effectively help you reach customers. As a high-level strategist, marketing is willing to reach across departments and break down silos to ensure that needed insights from all stakeholders are brought into the strategy for growing your business.
- A content specialist. 96 percent of B2B buyers want content with more input from industry thought leaders. Today’s marketing teams must know how to develop content strategies that resonate. As a content specialist, marketing should play a role in all stages of content development from ideation to execution and implementation.
- An analytics authority. Marketing should constantly be paying attention to what’s working and what’s not. This includes selecting the right metrics to measure — as well as identifying the tools needed to measure them.
- A client community builder. What is your business goals to help grow your current customers into raving fans? Allowing marketing to play a role in building community by developing strategies to improve engagement, lifetime value, and customer satisfaction is is one of the most valuable things a business can do.
- A process pro. When you think about it, ideas in and of themselves aren’t that valuable. Being able to execute on them is what is most important. It’s important for your marketing team to be able to translate your “next big idea” into an actionable, scalable plan that can actually be executed. Whether it’s a specific project manager or a process management tool, having a system that makes sure projects get completed is critical for gaining traction with your marketing efforts.
As I mentioned earlier, you might not have the ability to hire five full-time marketing team members. However, ensuring each of these roles is covered will help you set your business up for growth, which is marketing’s primary objective at the end of the day.
