Evolution of Marketing Roles in the New Era

The world of marketing changed quite a bit with the introduction of social media, marketing automation and other digital capabilities. Not only did the way we “do” marketing become different, but the organizational structure and roles also evolved.

As recent as the early 2000’s, mid-sized and larger companies organized their marketing department along the lines of advertising, PR, partner marketing, and product marketing. Later, we saw the addition of digital marketing, inbound marketing, social media marketing, content marketing and marketing automation functions. PR didn’t die, but it changed quite a bit as well. (for more on that, read my related article titled “PR is Dead – Or Is It?”).

March 2018 Update 

I wrote a fairly comprehensive article titled “A.I. Will Revolutionize the Marketing Function” that takes the above topics and projects them forward into a really exciting world for marketing professionals.

June 2023 Update  

Artificial intelligence (AI) kicked into a whole new gear in the past six months or so. The field of generative AI is entering the business world, and is definitely affecting the marketing department. The role of Prompt Engineer is being advertised, seeking employees that know how to interact with generative AI solutions via the currently-required prompting.

The Early, Early Days of a Startup

For early stage startups there’s still probably just one person responsible for overall marketing, which means they wear all of the hats. At least I hope you have a marketing employee starting pretty early in your evolution. I wrote an article on that subject titled “Why Isn’t a Marketing Professional One of Your First 10 Employees? ”  In any case, as you grow you’ll want to think about how to evolve the marketing function.

Rather than reinvent the wheel, I really liked this article from HubSpot, which did a nice job of explaining the new roles in marketing for the current era. It will be interesting to see how long it is before even this list is obsolete.  See the HubSpot article here.

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