Making a great digital team (the skills needed will surprise you)

Since the world is digitally transforming and (almost) every company in the world has some form of digital presence — a team, department or agency is needed to create and manage this presence.

The below is a suggestion based on experience of what should a great (in house or external) digital team have in it as well as what skills each role actually needs. These are needed to make sure your company is propelled in the future and keep up with the ever-changing digital ecosystem.

This is very different than the current “setup” as the digital industry is always changing — but the needs that these roles fill will stay the same throughout the digital environment. The skills that make up each role are complementary, and a lot of digital teams are missing them, have the skills in the wrong department or completely lack them — on at least one occasion in the roles listed below.

Feel free to use the “Skills Needed” section to ask questions (or provide answers) about experience in your next interview for one of these roles ;)

Creative / Designers

The first step in creating a digital anything is creating the “actual campaign” and asssets that make it happen. This is why a creative person (or team) is first on the list. This role handles thinking about the campaign, creating amazing campaigns and the digital assets that go with them to allow the rest of the team to place them in the digital environment.

Skills needed: Creative “flair” / Great campaign ideas that “work” both online and offline, Design /editing experience in Adobe Creative Suite (Photoshop, InDesign, Illustrator, Premiere Pro) or similar.

Coders / Data

Next on the list are the coders — these are the people (or teams) needed to actually make the creative’s ideas happen in the digital world. It’s worth noting that they are the digital coders specialised in the web — not the software coders that would build a product. They are also acting as support for the other members of the team to implement their requests (such as SEO technical code changes) as well as produce dashboards / reports.

Skills needed: Website and e-mail coding (for your chosen platform or software) in order to translate the designs, integration experience for all platforms / APIs / SQL or CRM back-end (databases) and some data visualisation experience as well as Tag Manager experience.

Paid Media — PPC / Paid Social / Display / Native / Programmatic

Once you have the campaign, the assets, the website, landing pages and e-mails setup it’s time to get some traffic to it. The easiest (and quickest) way is to have a paid media person (or team) that can start this for you immediately and everywhere at once to create a big impact.

Skills needed: Google AdWords, Facebook Ads, Twitter Ads etc. — any (and every) digital platform to run ads as well as great ideas to reduce the cost per click. Knowledge of the industry and market in order to know what works the best for the audience with the patience to test it and Analytics (maybe Tag Manager) to check results.

SEO / Research / Surveys

(Still) a great way to get traffic to your website is through organic search. This is done through research of keywords / SEO tactics (on and off page) and creating great content for the website, blog, social as well as great hub content (themes). The SEO person (or team) is responsible for the end-to-end creation of this based on the creative ideas as well as creating blog posts and also helps with text in general for other parts of the digital environment as well as running any survey / research to create the materials for them (like whitepapers etc).

Skills needed: Copywriting (to create lading page text, blogs, publications etc), survey / old fashioned research experience to find out what works for the industry (SurveyMonkey or similar) and SEO knowledge (and tools) to identify opportunities for using the content.

Sales People / Events

This is probably the most unusual person (or team) here mainly because sales and events are not usually digital — however the skills they require for this role fit into this category perfectly. As the role of a sales person is to drive sales — in the digital environment this translates to lead generation and follow-up, ideas and concepts for e-mail automation to drive sales and lead nurturing, CRM (data) best use and events (organising, management and in-person contact with potential clients). The best results from a digital campaign to reach potential customers come from the sales team — as they are the ones doing it anyway — this is why they are the best positioned people to create and run these campaigns.

Skills needed: E-mail marketing / automation, CRM use and best practices, ideas for lead generation based on the creative campaigns, “a way with words” to make sure that everything written that needs sell does exactly that, running events / presence at events / making the most out of every sales opportunity and follow-up.

PR / Press / Social Media

Without leaving social media out of the equation — the PR person (or team) is the best positioned to take it over. This is because all the contact they have with the “public” through every possible channel — such as press, news, social and even some customer service if looking at public reviews. They are crucial for expanding the reach in every digital channel as well as driving the back-links and outreach for the SEO efforts as this usually implies taking to the same journalists / influencers anyway.

Skills needed: Communications with journalists / press and social media “creativity” to figure out what the best angles are and use them in every earned digital channel. Having the ability to push for back-link inclusion in every article is an ideal scenario (and can be a KPI).

Customer Experience / User Experience / Conversion Rate Optimisation

Since we have the customers (or clients) — we now need to keep them there and make them come back again. As most things are revolved around the digital experience — this person (or team) must make sure it also applies to every process in the company (not just the website). The CX/UX /CRO role involves a complete overview of every touchpoint in the experience while innovating based on what works to increase conversion or improve retention.

Skills needed: Conversion Software (Google Optimise, Optimizely etc), UX software (HotJar, Adobe XD) and process mapping / planning, business process experience, net promoter score.

360 Digital Strategists as Management / Project Manager(s)

Last but not least — the person (or team) that puts it all together. This is someone with experience in all the above that acts as the project manager for every project undertaken by the teams. Their main role is to remove roadblocks, resolve issues and facilitate meetings as well as have an overview of the complete end-to-end digital world.

Skills needed: Training and knowledge of all of the above roles in order to facilitate problem solving (in this case it’s an actual skill, not just something you put on your CV — using your knowledge of the subject to solve a problem quickly to remove a roadblock), project management certification / experience, being really organised and generally available for meetings / phone calls with everyone in the company.

Conclusion

There are a lot of digital teams currently in a number of companies that have most (if not all of these skills) but some of them don’t use them how they should.

Do you know of any cases where a company or department does not make best use of their teams? Can you think of any example where the PR/press team did not know they should be asking for backlinks or where the sales person is not involved in the lead generation / e-mail automation process that brings them the leads because “marketing does that”? Let us know in the comments.

As a 360 digital expert and project manager — happy to have a chat about it any time

Hope that helps,

Narcis Radoi

Originally published on my LinkedIn profile at https://www.linkedin.com.