Implementing any marketing strategy today (especially demand generation) requires an increasingly wide range of skills and knowledge, all working in tandem. You might have some of the necessary skills in house – great – but if you have gaps you will somehow need to fill them. At this stage it doesn’t matter who does what as long as you can identify that these key skills are on tap:
1: Content originators
Potentially external writers, PR professionals, your digital marketing agency (blimey, that could be us) or even customers. But most likely it will be those people around the company whose brains can be picked for content, most likely the source of material, not necessarily the story itself.
2: Writers
You can never have too many. Every good demand generation campaign requires copy, potentially lots of it, written specifically for your audiences in the right tone of voice.
3: Editor
This person (or maybe more than one) has authority to sign off, preferably with a little written flair and essentially in charge of the technical side where there are laws and compliance involved. We don’t want to make any faux pas.
4: Content designer(s)
A different beast to UI/UX designers (we have both). The creative types that can whip up presentations (or templates) for webinars, layout white papers, create engaging imagery (eg Twitter pics) or creative and interesting infographics.
5: Developer
A good strategy is constantly evolving and improving and there are always tweaks and improvements to be made on the website (even fixing pesky bugs), so it’s essential that there are techies on hand who can get their hands on the code.
6: Chief Listening Officer (CLO)
Sorry, one of those marketing buzzwords. Basically, it’s someone who has the ability to find, spot or maintain conversations, with the authority to contribute and route the conversations to the appropriate content resource and to best advantage to your business.
7: Search whiz
Whilst everyone is concerned with engaging people, someone needs to make sure that those robots and web crawlers are on our side.