This division of labor can produce a higher level of quality for your campaign deliverables, but there are two big drawbacks:
Bottlenecks are common: If you have just one copywriter mobile number data base responsible for producing all campaign and evergreen marketing materials, their capacity puts a limit on when those deliverables can be launched.
Marketing becomes disconnected: Specialists working within silos may lose track of the bigger picture and the team will likely miss opportunities where collaboration is vital. For example, content writers and SEO experts produce the results when they work together – but many specialist teams struggle to align in this way.
Given these drawbacks, it’s critical to ensure a team of marketing specialists is managed by a marketing leader equipped with the expertise to align all team members around shared goals and objectives.
2. Generalists
Every team member is expected to bring multiple skills to the table.
Hiring a team of generalists solves the collaboration problem and enables greater agility within the team. There are fewer bottlenecks because multiple people can step in to take over a particular task, which means you can launch campaigns more quickly and with less capacity planning.
However, the reality is generalists are likely:
Less skilled in certain areas: The work produced will be of a lower quality because they lack the deep knowledge or experience a specialist offers.
Less discerning: Specialists are not just producers – they also tend to have a stronger sense of quality control. A generalist may not see that your research is lacking or the SEO strategy is weak in the way an expert would.
3. Hybrid (The Ideal Structure!)
A hybrid team combines specialists and generalists to maximize the benefits.
This ensures the team has access to higher quality output while maintaining the agility of generalists. For most B2B businesses, this is the optimal approach. But most in-house marketing teams will struggle to find the right balance, and most likely won’t be able to afford to hire full-time experts across all the areas they need.
As a result, many companies will look to:
Contingent labor: The generalist full-time team is supplemented by freelancers who can produce specialist output on an ad-hoc basis – keeping costs low while plugging specific skill gaps.
Marketing agencies: The in-house team leverages an external agency that can provide both generalists and specialists, as well as help ensure the strategic and daily management aspects of marketing are taken care of efficiently.
