Define Roles and Responsibilities
Learning Objectives
After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:
- Identify essential roles of a marketing team.
- Review specific tasks and responsibilities.
- Identify ways a team can work together for efficiency.
Essential Marketing Team Roles
While many roles are involved in key marketing tasks, most teams consist of a lean group where one or more roles are performed by a single person with multiple skills. Since every company is unique, titles and roles are often diverse—even when tasks are the same. Here is one way you could break out the essential roles needed to create a lean marketing team.
| Role | Task Group | Responsibilities | Other Titles | Related Certifications |
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Marketing manager |
Strategy and planning |
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Data architect |
Data and analytics |
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Content manager |
Creative and content |
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Campaign manager |
Campaign operations |
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Solution architect |
Marketing technology |
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Let’s take a look at another way you can structure your team to meet these needs.
Meet the Northern Trail Outfitters Team
You may have heard of Northern Trail Outfitters (NTO), our favorite—and fictional—outdoor gear and apparel retailer. We use this team as a way to illustrate concepts here on Trailhead, and their roles are closely aligned to real-life marketing teams. NTO has a pretty lean team, which means each member has multiple tasks. Let’s meet the team to review their job responsibilities and how they work together.
Ralph Vasquez, VP of Marketing
Ralph is the leader of the digital marketing team and defines the team’s strategy and vision based on NTO’s business goals. Working with Isabelle, he defines team metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs). Using data, he analyzes and adjusts campaign strategy based on performance. Ralph provides strategic guidance to his team to help improve the NTO customer experience.
Isabelle Givens, Manager of Digital Marketing
Isabelle is NTO’s Marketing Cloud Engagement expert and admin with a strong understanding of email and digital best practices. Isabelle manages the work of Paulo and Michele, overseeing all marketing projects and campaigns. She works with Ralph to determine a marketing strategy and team KPIs. She reviews data and analyzes metrics to provide recommendations for testing and improvements. Based on her team strategy and goals, she provides Pia with project requirements to help with solution design. Isabelle does a lot for NTO!
Michele Hansley, Technical Marketer
Michele is NTO’s email content manager. She creates and builds all of NTO’s marketing campaigns across communication channels. She built NTO’s design framework and templates and is NTO’s expert in email coding and AMPscript. She tests her emails using a variety of email clients before handing them off to Paulo. Michele also works closely with Pia and Warren to implement technical solutions in Marketing Cloud Engagement.
Paulo Santino Mendes da Silva, Marketing Specialist
Paulo’s main tasks are related to campaign deployment. Paulo manages subscriber data, import, queries, and audience segmentation data for sends. He prepares all campaigns for sending, whether they are using automation or are adding the campaign into a journey in Journey Builder. Before deploying or activating any campaign he follows a deployment checklist to ensure error-free execution. Paulo also assists Isabelle with running reports and helps Michele in technical configuration when needed.
Supporting Roles
While not on the marketing team, other NTO colleagues offer critical support. Let’s meet them.
Pia Larson, Enterprise Architect
Pia is NTO’s Salesforce expert and data architect. She works closely with Ralph and other leaders to understand and define business goals and strategy. She creates cross-cloud solutions that drive business growth, so she has a high-level understanding of all areas of NTO’s business. Pia leads the design and delivery of technical solutions and maintains a documentation repository of all NTO’s technical configuration documents.
Warren Mehta, IT Specialist
Warren is in the IT department, but he supports the marketing team with API development, security updates, and data integrations. Warren helps make sure any marketing projects that require IT support are prioritized and follow change management and security protocols. He also helps Pia with technical solution documents that require IT oversight, specifically for any project that involves NTO’s data warehouse and SFTP automations.
Working Together
How do these team members work together? Since they are a small team, they divide tasks and responsibilities and use Slack to collaborate on their progress. To illustrate one typical scenario, let’s imagine NTO is creating a new transactional email that uses commerce data. Here’s the sequence of events and the team members involved.
- Ralph and Isabelle confirm the campaign goals.
- Pia gathers requirements, designs a solution, and documents the solution in a blueprint.
- Using the blueprint, Michele creates the transactional email and builds the transactional send journey in Journey Builder.
- Warren works with Michele to ensure API functionality is set up properly.
- Paulo reviews the email setup and performs QA tasks to ensure accuracy.
- Once tested and approved, Paulo activates the transactional send journey.
- After activation, Isabelle reviews the journey performance to ensure the campaign is performing as expected.
Bravo, team! Now that you understand who works on what, let’s shift to identifying skill gaps and hiring needs.