When Should You Hire a Marketing Professional?

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As a general rule, specialist roles should only be added to your company's organizational chart once an existing group of generalist marketers has identified a need and mapped out how the specialist role will meet that need.

If you've been working with your marketing team to map out a new marketing strategy (e.g. creating original content, finding leads through data analysis), hiring a specialist can ensure that the strategy gets the attention it needs to succeed.

CEB, now Gartner, surveyed 104 B2B marketers about the roles they hire for to support their digital marketing efforts. (The research is available to Gartner clients.)

When asked to report on hires in the past six months and projected hires in the next 12 months, the four most commonly named positions were lead digital marketer, lead analytics specialist, content manager/editor-in-chief, and social media specialist.

A bar chart showing the top performers for B2B digital marketing, based on a Gartner survey
This data provides a great roadmap for small businesses types of usa phone number database available from us looking to expand their organizational structure to include specialist roles. From this survey, we see that industry best practice is to first hire a lead digital marketing specialist, followed by key specialist roles for analytics, content, and social media.

Each of these roles performs different functions within a small business. Let's first look at hiring a digital marketing leader to act as a liaison between the CEO and the marketing team.

sample marketing organization chart
Leading Digital Marketing Specialist
The Head of Digital Marketing reports directly to the company's Founder/CEO, developing and managing the strategy and execution of digital marketing, fundraising and engagement.

This role oversees general marketers as well as any specialists, and their responsibilities may include:

Oversee marketing strategy and direction, including content marketing, digital advertising, organic search, paid search, social media and website.
Liaise between the CEO and general marketers and specialists to drive the achievement of the company's goals and vision.
Lead digital support efforts across departments and encourage close collaboration and teamwork to deliver cross-departmental initiatives.
If: You are looking for a marketing team captain to unify the marketing direction/strategy.
Next: hire (or promote) a leading digital marketer.

Head of Marketing Analytics Department
The Head of Marketing Analytics, under the supervision of the Head of Digital Marketing, will collect and analyze data to identify key insights with supporting data for existing initiatives.

The responsibilities of the Head of Marketing Analytics may include:

Use marketing analytics software to provide direct marketing analytics and statistical modeling, campaign analysis and CRM.
Provide analytical insight into business development, customer relationship management and marketing programs.
Use data-driven recommendations to support growth in customer information management, digital data, and loyalty program performance.