3 Digital Marketing Specialists To Consider Adding To Your Team In 2017

Mark Miller — January 5, 2017 Follow @MMtwopointfive

The makeup of a competitive marketing team is constantly evolving, with critical new positions forming and traditional roles shifting to take advantage of innovative technology and tactics; 2017 will continue to shake up the formula for a “complete marketing team” for any given business. While not every organization will be recruiting digital marketers to fill every emerging marketing position, there are a few trendy digital marketing specialists that we anticipate will start joining the ranks of marketing departments and agencies in large numbers this year:

P.S. Early last year we recommended three emerging digital marketing team members for 2016: Influencer Marketing Manager, Data Security Analyst, and Customer Experience Manager. Did you bring any of these new positions into the fold? Let us know how it went!

Site Tuner

Consider your website like a high-performance sports car; it needs regular maintenance and tune-ups to deliver the best results for you and your customers.

Tuning up your site improves user experience (and by extension, SEO). When was the last time you waited more than a couple of seconds for a page to load? Most users will quickly ditch your site if it’s slow. And if you have an e-commerce platform, you certainly don’t want to be elongating time-to-purchase more than necessary.

But as much as they expect speed, they also expect a slick interface and multimedia content that can be data-heavy and weigh down load times. The explosion of mobile usage compounds the problem as limited network bandwidth and data put a bottleneck on increasingly rich web experiences. And as your site grows, it gets harder and harder to keep it running smoothly.

Balancing these often-conflicting needs is one of the greatest catch-22’s of modern marketing. Overcoming them requires a special kind of talent and expertise.

There are many potential ways for digital marketing specialists to improve site speed: streamlining code, improving server infrastructure, enabling Accelerated Mobile Pages functionality, ensuring on-page advertisements are data-light, optimizing and compressing content to hog as little bandwidth as possible, and more. It’s a multi-pronged effort that requires a diverse skillset. But it’s one that will raise SERP rankings, reduce bounce rate, and improve conversions if executed properly. Having a dedicated professional (or several) responsible for constantly tuning up your site and looking for places to improve it this year and into the future will pay dividends.

Not in a position to make such a full time hire? You can make use of SEO consultants or similar digital marketing staffing to execute a periodic audit and tune-up.

Chat Bot Developer

Thanks to innovative technology and developments in AI, chat bots have seen a huge surge in popularity and adoption over the last year for a variety of reasons.

The potential applications of chat bots for marketing are numerous: as interactive content, enhancing customer experiences, a valuable data-gathering resource, and more.

But there’s no streamlined process for brands to adopt a modern chat bot and put it to work. Agencies and software companies that provide ready-to-go chat bots are popping up left and right. But much like mobile apps, if you want full control and creative direction of the bot that will be talking to your customers then you’ll likely have to build and update it yourself.

If your business is going to adopt chat bots for any reason, the marketing department should almost certainly take the lead. After all; it’s the part of the business that tends to understand the customer best and has the right tech-savvy to take on the responsibility. So bringing in chat bot developers (or training up your current developers for the new task) should be on the radar for any CMO in 2017.

Live Streaming Specialist

Live streaming is quickly becoming a mainstream part of the everyday web experience.

Facebook is aggressively promoting its new streaming video platform Facebook Live.

Live streaming site Twitch, which was recently acquired by Amazon for nearly $ 1 billion is exploding in popularity. In addition to its massive video game streaming audience, the platform is now attracting viewers for streams including everything from philosophical discussion to cooking to painting. Video hosting giant YouTube and exploding Instagram are also onboard the live streaming train. Meanwhile, dedicated streaming apps like Periscope are going strong.

Businesses that do live streaming right can reap massive benefits. The ability to engage audiences in real-time is invaluable. And the exposure is relatively inexpensive; streaming on most platforms is free (though often with premium promotion options), and necessary equipment is quite affordable.

But that doesn’t mean live streaming is easy. Delivering video content in a live environment is completely different from, say, filming a commercial or posting an edited video to YouTube. You need the right equipment and setup to provide a streaming experience of the quality you want to represent your brand. A mistake can’t be edited out–everything said and shown on a stream, good or bad, could be recorded and kept in the digital world forever. And managing the community chat rooms that come by default with many streaming services is a unique challenge all in its own.

In order to get into live streaming (and you should strongly consider it), you need someone (or a team of someones) who is comfortable working with video streaming tech, can perform on camera, interact with users, and represent your brand without making a critical error.

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