X-Men of Marketing: Assembling your dream team

If you’re like most small business owners, you’re probably the only one doing the marketing for your brand. Or, you have assigned maybe one person to overlook your email campaigns and social media accounts. That has to change.

In the new era of business, marketing shouldn’t be left to just a few — it has to be everyone’s duty. Why? Because marketing should come from the soul of your business — your team. The ones who are more intimate with the inner workings of your brand are the best ones to advocate for you.

You can split up marketing duties between different members of your team. Your receptionist can overlook your email marketing strategies while your sales person handles the Facebook page. It’s all about harnessing each members’ unique abilities and letting them shine on different marketing platforms. Just like in X-Men, Professor X usually isn’t in the front lines of the battle — he’s the strategist while each of his mutants perform different tasks depending upon their mutant ability. 

Here are certain attributes to look for when assigning different channels to people in your team:

• Email Campaigns: Methodical and tech-savvy
  Whoever you place in charge of your email marketing should be relatively particular. There are a lot of moving parts in developing an email campaign, from copywriting, graphics and timing strategy. He or she should know a little bit of HTML, or be the type that would find it easy to pick up such a code language. This person should also be obsessed with data, as you’ll want to know when is the best day and time to send your email, the best types of headlines, what links are being clicked, etc. Ultimately you’ll want someone who always thinks about the steps they’ve taken and the next steps they’re going to take.

• Facebook manager: Thoughtful and caring
  Facebook is one of the best platforms for customer engagement, so it is important that the person you assign to this role understands that customer service is of utmost importance. With that, comes the need to deliver the most relevant information to your Facebook audience. He or she needs to understand that specific, thoughtful targeting to your Facebook audience encourages the best engagement. They need to pay close attention to every post they put out and respond regularly to the people who engage with your brand. At the end of the day, you’ll need someone who is always in tune with what your customers really want and what’s at the heart of your company.

• Twitter manager: Talkative and up-to-date
  Twitter moves faster than the speed of light. With millions of tweets a day, this person needs to be able to stay consistent, keep talking and stay current and relevant to the world. Twitter is very conversational, so the person you assign to this role needs to know how to get a point across in only a few characters. Breaking news appears often on Twitter, so your Twitter manager needs to know how they can stay on top of global news while still juggling other full-time duties of their job. There are many tools in the social media world that can help with this; two free ones are Hootsuite and Google Alerts.

• Website and SEO: All-knowing and pragmatic
  This person who will handle your site operations and ranking efforts knows that every small tweak done to your website can have some serious effects. While knowledge of coding is obvious, it’s the ability to detect issues and be proactive in solving them that’s key. Issues don’t only have to be broken links– issues can be what pages or parts of the site a visitor may decide to leave the site altogether. An issue can be determining what keywords your site is not ranking on the first page of Google in, but need to be. While this can be a full-time function in its own, this person should be the most logical and data-obsessed person on your team.

• Public relations manager: Suave and proactive
  This person is the voice of your brand, and will most likely be the one your social account managers will report to when issues arise. Your PR person should have a way with words and people and will always find a way to put out a fire before you even have time to be briefed on the issue. He or she knows that bad press can be turned into an opportunity for learning and brand-building, and knows all the right people to make sure your brand always elicits good will with your customers, both current and potential.

As you grow your marketing and develop more channels to be active on, be sure to truly understand the nature of that platform and the person you’re assigning it to, as to ensure perfect harmony. And remember, your team must work together for the greater good — that is, to keep your brand promise at every touch point with a customer and of course, grow your business.