How To Build a Marketing Team: Essential Marketing Hires

Once your ecommerce business reaches a certain size, handling everything alone becomes impossible. You may need extra hands for operations, customer service, or finance, but if growth is your primary goal, building a strong marketing team becomes your competitive edge. While assembling the right mix of people and skills takes time, each strategic hire brings you closer to a team that truly understands your customers and amplifies your mission.

Learn more about how to build a successful marketing team for your business, with expert insights from Katie Welch, chief marketing officer at Rare Beauty, the cosmetics brand founded by actress-singer-entrepreneur Selena Gomez.

What is a marketing team? 

A marketing team is a group of professionals who create, execute, and analyze strategies to connect your business with its target audience. Your brand’s marketing department works to build brand awareness by producing engaging content through social media, traditional advertising, and influencer marketing to showcase the value of your products or services.

Your marketing team develops and refines a strategy to make sure your messaging stays effective, consistent, and aligned with your business objectives. Since every brand’s marketing needs vary, your marketing professionals must identify those needs and deliver winning game plans that help drive growth by reaching current and potential customers.

Essential marketing team roles

A strong marketing team directly impacts the growth and shapes the long-term trajectory of your emerging ecommerce business. The right team members bring expertise in critical areas like social media, editorial content, data, and web development, ensuring each effort is purposeful and effective. Since marketing budgets are limited, understanding which roles are essential for your marketing team—and how they directly benefit your business—will help you navigate the hiring process. 

Katie Welch of Rare Beauty shares her approach to team building on an episode of Shopify Masters. Katie says business founders building their first marketing team should consider how team members fulfill business needs and complement the founder’s approach to brand storytelling. “There’s so many different types of marketing. There’s so many different types of marketers with different backgrounds,” she says. Faced with all the options, Katie recommends asking yourself: “Who is going to help you articulate your vision? And can they bring it to life the right way?”

These essential marketing team roles will help you broadcast your brand’s messaging to both current and future customers:

• Chief marketing officer or marketing manager. The marketing manager directs team members, builds the marketing strategy, and often works closely with a company’s founder. “The chief marketing officer’s job is to understand the founder’s story, the founder’s why, understand their vision, and bring it to life,” Katie says. 

• Website developer. Essential for ecommerce, a website developer builds and shapes your brand’s website to ensure it remains functional, user-friendly, and optimized for selling products or services. 

• Search engine optimization specialist. An SEO manager or specialist conducts keyword research to improve website ranking in search results and ensures customers can find products through digital marketing. 

• Content marketer. A content marketer works closely with your SEO specialist to create compelling digital marketing content that connects your brand’s products to your target audience. Content marketing encompasses everything from web and video content to blogging and infographics.

• Data analyst. A data analyst will help your team refine its marketing strategy, improve campaigns, and boost ecommerce performance by tracking customer behavior through data points such as click rate and bounce rate. 

• Public relations manager. A PR representative manages your brand’s reputation, helping the marketing team build trust and credibility through strategic communications. With their finger on the pulse of public sentiment, they help your team identify and navigate potential obstacles before they become roadblocks.

• Social media manager. A social media manager develops and executes a social media marketing strategy tailored to your brand and target audience. A social media lead also tracks and analyzes social media metrics that shape how you develop and promote your brand.

Advanced marketing team roles

Advanced roles bring specialized skills to areas like design, video, visual storytelling, advertising, and customer communication. Consider these advanced marketing roles to add depth and expertise to your team:

• Visual designer. A visual designer can create a wide range of content, from the creative design of logos and product packaging to interactive or video assets. Visual designers help build a strong brand presence across channels and customer touchpoints by ensuring everything looks and feels cohesive.

• Pay-per-click specialist. If you invest in PPC marketing (a digital advertising model where businesses only pay when someone clicks on their ad), a pay-per-click specialist ensures your marketing spend drives measurable results. 

• Growth marketer. Growth marketing uses customer feedback and data, testing, and analytics to boost profits. Growth marketers boost customer loyalty, increase customer retention rates, and encourage repeat purchases and referrals. 

• Product marketer. Product marketers are experts at conveying exactly how consumers will benefit from an item. Their product marketing skills connect your brand’s products to the right audience through targeted campaigns that drive sales.

• Customer success manager. For businesses that offer subscription-based services or complex solutions, a customer success specialist or manager provides a high level of customer support to ensure a positive user experience. 

• Life cycle marketing manager. A life cycle marketer manages campaigns across the entire customer journey, which means the complete path of interactions they have with your company. This role is helpful in businesses with subscription-based models, since life cycle marketing aims to support repeat purchases and long-term engagement. 

• Email marketing manager. An email marketing specialist designs and sends targeted emails to existing and prospective customers, building relationships and creating consistent touchpoints. This role is essential to keeping your brand at the forefront of your target audience’s mind.

• Influencer marketing manager. An influencer marketing strategist or manager negotiates and oversees influencer marketing partnerships. If you have the budget to work with influencers, your brand can reach new audiences when they share visual and video content with their followers.

Marketing team structures

A marketing team’s structure provides the framework for how team members divide responsibilities and work toward shared goals. The right marketing team structure for your business helps streamline management, create clarity across roles, and establish a standard of high performance. Here are a few common team structures that you can use as a template to get your marketing team up and running:

• Functional structure. This is the most common structural approach for a smaller brand. A functional marketing team is divided by job type. For example, content marketers, graphic designers, and social media specialists each focus on their area of expertise, working on behalf of the entire brand. 

• Product- or category-based structure. This type of structure organizes teams around product lines or customer segments. It highlights products that are performing well and draws attention to those that need additional support. 

• Channel-based structure. For larger businesses, a channel-based marketing team structure has separate teams that focus on individual marketing channels like email, paid ads, SEO, and influencer programs. It’s similar to the functional structure, but involves even more channel-specific specialization. 

• Matrix structure. A matrix structure is more common in larger organizations, blending aspects of the other team structures. Marketers within a matrix team structure may report to a direct manager as well as a campaign or product leader when needed. A matrix structure encourages collaboration between teams, but it also requires strong communication and management to prevent overlap.

Regardless of the marketing team structure, leadership plays a critical role in achieving goals within your organization. A marketing manager or director (or sometimes a vice president of marketing) oversees the team structure and creates a strategy to make sure the entire team is working toward long-term business goals. The marketing team leader determines hiring decisions while also setting clear job responsibilities for team members.

How to build a marketing team

1. Identify your marketing goals
2. Consider current resources and identify gaps
3. Prioritize hires by impact
4. Write clear job descriptions and optimize onboarding
5. Establish KPIs and performance reviews
6. Analyze results and adapt

Building a strong ecommerce marketing team involves hiring the right people at the right time, defining individual responsibilities and team structures, and analyzing results. The following steps will help you build your team logically and sustainably: 

1. Identify your marketing goals 

Before hiring a new employee, define your expected marketing goals. What areas of marketing are you hoping to focus on and grow? Knowing that intel gives you a better chance of bringing people on board who have the right skills for exactly what you need. 

2. Consider current resources and identify gaps

If you currently have a marketing team, review the structure and employees and list their roles and responsibilities to check for duplication. You might find that a current employee has the skills needed for a new focus area, or you may identify gaps in existing skill sets that require hiring a different type of specialist.

3. Prioritize hires by impact

In the early stages, focus on hiring essential roles, like a marketing manager. Then, as you grow, you can add more specialty roles. If you have interim needs, consider hiring freelancers or working with an agency to fill the temp position. That’s a cost-effective way to determine if you need to hire a full-time marketing person at all.

4. Write clear job descriptions and optimize onboarding

Provide detailed job descriptions that clearly state duties and expectations. When you’re interviewing, consider including a short skills test or brief assignment as part of the interview process to help you find the best fit for the role. Katie says that a new marketing team member “has to understand your vision and be able to bring your vision to life for your community.” Your interview questions should lead to answers that reflect how well the potential new hire meshes with your objectives and company culture.

5. Establish KPIs and performance reviews

Once you have a team in place, you want to make sure they’re working effectively. For this, consider establishing key performance indicators that sync with your goals. Measuring employee performance against the KPIs helps identify areas for training and development, as well as highlighting when to celebrate wins as a team. 

6. Analyze results and adapt

The marketing landscape is always evolving with new trends and technology, so remaining agile by adjusting your team strategies when needed will help you stay relevant to your target audience. Utilize marketing campaign reporting to assess the effectiveness of your marketing and make informed decisions. This will help you identify successes as well as missed opportunities, which will influence how to reallocate budgets or reconfigure your team.

For new and aspiring entrepreneurs who are building a brand on a limited budget, Katie says creativity is the ultimate tool in the current marketing landscape, especially within platforms that have a low barrier to entry, like social media. “Whatever the medium of the moment is, how can you start a conversation?” she says. Katie also advises using your unique brand voice to gain exposure: “If you can be creative, come up with a way to insert yourself into either an existing conversation or grab people’s attention that’s unique to your brand that still tells your brand story,” she says.