Evolution of Marketing Roles in the New Era

Wow has the world of marketing changed with the introduction of social media, marketing automation and other digital capabilities.  Not only is the way we “do” marketing different but the organizational structure and roles are different.  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.  Is PR dead, by the way? (see 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.

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? ”  But 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  It will be interesting to see how long it is before even this list is obsolete.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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