Essential roles in the marketing department to grow a SaaS B2B Company

Essential roles in the marketing department to grow a SaaS B2B Company - Magnetica Advertising Apr 14, 2019 - Marcel Odena

When trying to grow a SaaS B2B company quickly, it’s crucial to have a great marketing team at hand to focus on corporate objectives. But how can we put a good one together? The first thing is to identify the roles and responsibilities of all the people who form the team.

1. Marketing Director

The marketing director plays a crucial role as someone who knows how to guide the team’s efforts in the right direction. They’re always thinking about the plan and knows the strategic actions of the marketing plan. Their objectives are to reach targets, comply with planning requirements, and help team members perform at their best, whether it be through advice, directions, or facilitating training plans, etc.

Desired attributes: communicative, empathetic, visionary, organized, strict, and at the same time flexible.

2. Content Creators

Marketing would be nothing without content. Content is everything that communicates, everything that informs, everything that entertains. Marketing content is adorned with graphic design elements for one purpose only: to influence the user. The content creators are demi-gods: they produce new content from a blank page and turn ideas into carefully crafted words, articles, eBooks, and whitepapers, etc. The content creator’s role is critical to marketing. After all, what the user sees on your website, what they read in your eBooks, and what they watch in your videos has all been carefully crafted by the skilled hands of a content creator. But content has to be good; you can’t disappoint the user. When generating leads, the user gives us their contact information in exchange for content. Therefore, the content must be high quality, it must benefit the user, and it must be well crafted.

Desired attributes: the content creator has to be able to structure ideas, express thoughts, and utilize an extensive vocabulary. They have to combine the sophistication of everything they know and translate it in a simple way so that the consumer can easily understand it. A touch of humor is a definite plus, as making content entertaining is an art form that becomes much more effective with a joke or two. .

3. Graphic Designers

Where would we be without designers? What would the world be like without design? You can survive without design, but you’ll live much better with it. Picture a webpage: the content is excellent, and the user experience is well planned; but what if the design is mediocre? It won’t influence anyone; nobody will like it. Humans like beauty. They say beauty is the only thing that’s eternal because that’s what we’ll always desire. Graphic designers (and designers) have the artistic merit to turn the mediocre into the marvellous; the dull into the inspiring. These people are like magicians, transforming everything they touch into objects of objective beauty. A good graphic designer not only adorns; they transmit. And for this, they have to be a good listener so they can understand what they must communicate. Once they understand the message, they’re better equipped to create graphics to convey it. And all of this must be done without sacrificing the style of the corporate image. None of that is easy, of course. But a great graphic designer will make it seem effortless.

Desired attributes: creative, non-conformist, obsessive with details, curious to discover new forms of communication and unique aspects of a language, new colors, etc. They have to be good communicators. The whole company needs the designer, so they have to have the listening skills to understand and create compelling content that complies with the company’s style guide yet doesn’t sacrifice on quality. Everything that passes through their hands must be beautiful.

4. UX/UI Designers

UX/UI Designers are a must in the digital age of websites, blogs, and landing pages. I was thinking about what qualifications to state for this role when I settled on this: a UX/UI designer knows what must be communicated, in what order, and to whom it must be addressed. The UI designer must always keep the interests of the user in mind, and know how to adapt their communication to those interests. This last point is critical to capture the user’s attention.

This role is irreplaceable and has perhaps never been given the recognition it deserves. The copywriter knows how to write, what to say, and how to say it; but do they know how to structure a web page? Do they know which elements to include in a landing page to maximize conversion? How to provide the right information in the correct order to persuade the user to take action? And who will monitor the website to determine whether the page fulfills its function? None of this is usually the responsibility of the copywriter. The UX/UI designer has to know all about usability and conversion, how to structure a page for the user, and how to create a user-friendly experience.

Desired attributes: a conceptual thinker who must be able to digest all the necessary information and organize it coherently to be easily consumed by the user. The information must be logically ordered, concise, and presented in a step-by-step manner. They’re observant and analytical, always examining user navigational behavior by looking at what elements they ignore and what buttons they don’t press. Their mission is to achieve a perfect navigational flow, one in which the user always finds the information they need by opening increasingly specific pages until they’re ready to take action: request a demo, sign up to a product, etc.

5. The Growth Manager

This is a vital role in any company that is pursuing rapid growth, as is the case with most start-ups. You have to proliferate quickly to survive as a start-up, and growing fast means obtaining customers. That involves making the product known to millions of users, generating awareness, attracting leads, getting people interested, educating them about the product, and persuading them to consider using it. It is a role that requires teamwork because you need to join forces and use dozens of different tactics to succeed in your mission of rapid growth. They must ensure effective coordination between the entire team: the content creators to make user-targeted content; the graphic designers to create attractive digital assets; the web designers who properly structure each web page and its flow; and finally those responsible for attracting visitors such as Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Pay Per Click (PPC) online advertising.

Desired attributes: The growth manager is a strategist who always has a plan. They’re agile at executing and measuring tactics to see if they work and moving onto something else when they don’t. They’re highly analytical. The work of the whole team will be measured in a single dashboard. Therefore, they have to be able to measure outputs, compile reports, analyze the progress of key metrics, determine where there are issues and abort strategies when necessary, re-adapting and improving them at a later time. The growth manager is also a leader, so they must earn the respect of each team member. They need to be a team player and motivate the entire squad to perform at their best, challenging them to achieve a set of seemingly impossible goals. They’re a dreamer who uses past data to make bold predictions of the future. It’s an inventive and innovative role: analyze data, find new opportunities, design plans, herd thousands of new visitors through the magic box (campaigns and marketing actions), and get tangible results.

6. Data and Trends Analyst

What a beautiful role, to observe rows of data and metrics. To see patterns and trends where others don’t see anything, identifying yield drops and peaks that allows them to diagnose problems and identify improvement opportunities when compiled into other reports. This person knows how to find their way through a jungle of data. Never in the history of marketing has there been as much data as there is now: website visits, time on page, bounce rates, conversion rates, etc.  There is data in the Marketing CRM: leads, the origin of the leads, user actions, opened emails, unopened emails, etc. All of this is important; a tiny detail could be the key to improving conversion rates. There are also data in the Sales CRM, which is usually different from a Marketing CRM (many companies work with HubSpot as the Marketing CRM, and with Salesforce as the Sales CRM). As you can see, the volume of data here is colossal. This role is more necessary than ever before. Thanks to the analyst, subjectivity has evolved into objectivity through dashboards and reports that quantify our marketing effort, making everything better defined; black and white. An analysis expert knows how to provide qualitative data by analyzing user behavior and will come up with strategies to improve results.

Desired attributes: curious, an insatiable appetite to learn more, an enthusiasm to discover new things, the ability to see a pattern and the relationship between multiple data sources. They’re skilled at handling data, formulas, excel spreadsheets, configuring analytical tools – not even the smallest detail will go unnoticed when they’re analyzing data. Analyzing thousands of data and patterns have given them intuitive intelligence, which they later corroborate with more data to affirm or deny their intuition. A helpful team player, they know their role is to provide actionable information to the team so they can improve the webpage, content, online advertising (banners, messages, targeting, etc.). They love sharing such information.

7. Web Designer

The job of the 21st century is to build digital spaces. Web designers are code magicians (and CSS!) who construct digital empires with their art – strategically placed lines of code. Good web programmers make the difficult seem easy: the content they get from the graphic designers (who have previously spoken with the UI designer and copywriter) make it a reality. With one wave of their magic wand, they’re able to turn the impossible into the possible: a web or landing page that matches the specifications to a tee. But their role isn’t limited to what the user sees on the website; it also relates to invisible aspects that are noticed but not seen. This includes the page load time, which they can improve by using the optimal programming language and removing unnecessary components so that the website loads lightning quick.

Desired attributes: an intelligent and analytical mind that combines these attributes in a creative way when programming. Programming a function with the minimum lines of code possible: is that not creative? They’re rigorous and obsessed because code has to be well structured, orderly, and harmonious.

8. Marketing Automation Specialist

This person is responsible for creating programs in the Marketing CRM to automate specific processes. For example, when a user wants to download content, they usually send an email with the link to download it. This email has to be configured in the appropriate tool so that it will post automatically. We may want to send a sequence of emails to the user, such as an email every week for two months with content that’s relevant to what they’ve downloaded. Again, this all has to be programmed and configured in the marketing automation tool. This person is also responsible for the lead scoring and the lead nurturing system. This role is very important, it is in their hands to accelerate the pace of user engagement to make it evolve in the different phases of the sales funnel, providing useful and relevant information for the user in each phase of the funnel.

Desired attributes: organized, you have to create many automatisms and you have to be organized, everything has to fit and have a coherence. This person has to master the tool as the best to put it at the service of the objectives. They have to be creative to imagine all the sequences, flows, automatisms that can help.

9. Communicator

The figure of the communicator, typically in the hands of the communication department, is very important. What do you want to say, how do you want to say it, when and to whom, everything well orchestrated is very important. On the other hand, there is great work in this area in relation to the media, specialized press portals, influencers’ blogs, etc. The communicator is in charge of contacting these organizations and their role is to converse that the information provided is relevant to their audiences so that it is made known. Organizing events is another of its primary functions.

Desired attributes: communicator, empathic, optimistic, exquisite treatment, open, public relations, gift of the word, persuasive, intelligent.

10. SEO Specialist, natural web positioning

Behind the digital world there is an empire of positioning. The natural (organic) position in the web world is grounded on some parameters of credibility: from 1 to 100, which authority has the domain of your company, which authority has each of your pages, and this is related to many factors, which the SEO specialist knows. Its role is to improve the technical aspects of the pages so that the search engines understand them well. Most are not visible to the user, but they make a page of an article be positioned in better or worse position. We all know that content will always be king to rank, but we also know that without a good SEO expert it is difficult to rank only based on content.

Desired attributes: methodical person, disciplined, analyst, handles well all the list of tools that exist in the SEO world, knows how to communicate the aspects of improvement that must be addressed according to good SEO practices.

11. Online Advertising Specialist, Pay Per Click (PPC)

Online advertising is at the service of the company’s objectives, in the short, medium and long term. One million impacts of several ads can serve to capture hundreds of clicks and dozens of leads, but it can also help to position the company in the users shortlist. The role of the online publicist is to find the necessary campaigns to make to meet the objectives previously set. If you have to generate thousands of leads, it is convenient to make a certain type of campaign, if you have to help convert leads into business opportunities you have to do other types of campaigns. Their mind have to imagine the future, it has to unite what the company wants to achieve, with the available digital assets that are available, to create the most appropriate campaign strategy. This person’s role is also to advise which “gaps” exist so that the strategy works to the maximum, many times it takes contents to cover a phase of the funnel, it is necessary to improve landings, etc. It is an individual sport but that would not be possible without the contribution of all the previous teams.

Desired attributes: strategist, knows that power without control is useless, knows that the tools he has in his hands (Google Ads, LinkedIn Ads, Twitter Ads, AdRoll, etc.) have a lot of power, can place ads, messages, images before thousands of people in a matter of days. That is why he must be responsible, he must have an auditor profile and be demanding with the ads and campaigns he prepares. If the banner has some defect, he must say it, if the copy does not fit, he has to say it, if the content does not fit for the target of the segmentation he has to raise the flag. An error in the ad is a sacrilege, and this is why it is a meticulous person, a perfectionist, lover of things well done, even if they take more time and work to do them. This person has to have a very elevated component of analyst, as he handles many metrics: impressions, clicks, CTRs, leads,% conversion to lead, MQLs, SALs, etc. Many metrics and also on many PPC platforms (Linkedin Ads, Google Ads, AdRoll, etc.). They have to read the data quickly and know what adjustments to make to improve performance. Tireless when optimizing. A considerable part of the weight in achieving objectives resides in him and for this he has to be trained to absorb the pressure.

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Marcel Odena

Marcel Odena

CEO at Magnetica Advertising | LinkedIn Ads Expert

Since 2013 I've been working in the Pay Per Click Advertising Industry. I manage Google and LinkedIn Ads accounts for several B2B companies. I work to deliver results to my clients as well to contribute to do better B2B marketing. I like to learn and share my knowledge at the same time.