Build a Marketing Team
Learning Objectives
After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:
- Describe the focus areas of a marketing team.
- Identify how team members align to marketing tasks.
Create a Great Marketing Team
When you have a powerful tool like Marketing Cloud Engagement, it’s important to have an equally powerful team to use it. So what does a marketing dream team look like? Well, there isn’t a magic formula to create a great team, but there are some commonalities. In this module, we cover the focus areas and common jobs and responsibilities that create transformational marketing teams.
Marketing Task Groups
All organizations are unique in size and structure, but digital marketing tasks remain the same. In general, there are five task groups associated with digital marketing.
- Strategy and planning
- Data and analytics
- Creative and content
- Campaign operations
- Marketing technology
Key tasks and roles fall under each of these areas. Let’s cover each area and its associated team members in more detail.
These roles often overlap areas and can cross departments depending on the size and complexity of your organization.
Strategy and Planning
Marketing Cloud Engagement is a powerful tool when paired with a solid marketing strategy. Creating strategy is often the responsibility of the marketing leader or marketing manager within an organization. However, to have a successful marketing practice, you need strategic involvement from other teams within your organization. A cross-functional strategy makes a big impact on transforming a customer’s experience with your brand. What digital experience do you want to deliver to your customers from a sales or support perspective? What metrics do you want to achieve? Developing a clear vision, business value, and system of governance helps create an effective marketing team.
To identify the specific team members that work on marketing strategy, we’re going to use the RASCI model. The RASCI model is a project management tool that stands for responsible, accountable, supports, consulted, and informed (RASCI). Don’t worry if you aren’t familiar with some of the roles, we cover them in more detail later on in the module.
| Associated Roles (RASCI) | Tasks |
|---|---|
|
Responsible
Accountable
Supports
Consulted
Informed
|
|
Learn more about strategy, digital maturity, and governance in the Trailhead module Digital Marketing Roadmap Development.
Data and Analytics
Data is at the heart of a great digital marketing practice. From data modeling to system integrations, a marketing team needs at least one team member who loves—or at least likes—working with data. Ideally, you have team members familiar with data architecture, data compliance, system integrations, and data analysis tools. Having data is great, but knowing what to do with it is better. Let’s review what roles and responsibilities are aligned to data and analytics.
| Associated Roles (RASCI) | Tasks |
|---|---|
|
Responsible
Accountable
Supports
Consulted
Informed
|
|
Creative and Content
You have the strategy and the data. What’s next? The not-so-small task of creating content. What do you want your customers to see, know, and do? Your content creates the experience. Content creation team members need to understand templates, design frameworks, corporate brand standards, and accessibility guidelines. This team may also be responsible for social media posts and advertising campaigns, so they should be familiar with channel-specific content requirements. They should have a variety of content skills—from copywriting to photo editing. Here are the roles you might find on a large creative and content team.
| Associated Roles (RASCI) | Tasks |
|---|---|
|
Responsible
Accountable
Supports
Consulted
Informed
|
|
Campaign Operations
Strategy, data, and content can’t be effective if your customers don’t receive your campaigns. The deployment team is responsible for getting accurate campaigns into a customer’s inbox or mobile device. From journey creation to campaign prioritization, the campaign deployment team is responsible for quality assurance and successfully deployed campaigns. The campaign deployment team is made up of detail-oriented doers who carry out the strategy established by other teams.
Let’s review this team’s breakdown of responsibilities.
| Associated Roles (RASCI) |
Tasks |
|---|---|
|
Responsible
Accountable
Support
Consulted
Informed
|
|
Marketing Technology
The marketing technology team works across roles to transform a strategic plan with business requirements and goals into working functionality within Marketing Cloud Engagement. This team supports projects that require API development, SQL, and system integrations. They also perform day-to-day tasks like coding emails, segmenting audiences, filtering, and creating data views for reporting purposes. It’s a bonus if this team has someone who can write technical documentation about configuration projects. Let’s review technical configuration tasks and who works on them.
| Associated Roles (RASCI) | Tasks |
|---|---|
|
Responsible
Accountable
Support
Consulted
Informed
|
|
Get It Done
Looking at these focus areas and roles, you may think that’s a lot of possible teammates! In reality, roles don’t always map to one person, and many small marketing teams share tasks and responsibilities. In the next unit, we talk about specific roles and how teams work together.