Once you've mapped out your intent marketing strategy, the most important step is to create an effective plan for ongoing organization and implementation. This will help you to streamline the process of reaching customers at the moment of intent, and to maximize ROI, but it can be difficult to determine what responsibilities belong to each member of your internal teams.
So, what role do each of your existing marketing experts play in coordinating your intent marketing strategy?
The Key Roles
The most important thing about these role descriptions is the set of responsibilities. The position level and title will be specific to your organization, but these are the skillsets you should ensure are covered in order to build an effective intent marketing organization.
CMO: Your CMO is responsible for all top-level planning, development, implementation, and monitoring of your overall business marketing strategy. Duties include market research, pricing, product marketing, marketing communications, advertising, and public relations. This person will be your foremost intent marketing leader on the macro level, working to ensure execution as well as integration with all of your existing marketing — so that you build a fully integrated marketing strategy.
Marketing Director: The marketing director manages the development of your intent marketing strategy as a whole, holding responsibility for its implementation and overseeing the below roles.
Their duties include developing and implementing brand strategy, guiding the day-to-day activities of the marketing team, working closely with the sales and product teams as applicable to ensure a cohesive vision, and undertaking continual analysis of the competitor environment as well as consumer behavior — understanding from the top level how consumer intent functions.
Systems Administrator: This person is at the heart of your intent marketing organization. They are the owner of your brand knowledge graph, and they sit at the head of optimization and strategy.
As a marketing leader, you can tailor this role to your organization, and it can technically be internal or external. What's critical is that this person leads the project of analyzing the data about what consumers are searching for and what experiences are happening in search for your business category — using that feedback to help your organization provide the answers that customers are looking for. This person will work with all of the below roles to use website and search data to own the process of structuring your knowledge — anticipating and delivering the answers your customers need.
For example, if you're a healthcare organization, and you see that your target consumers are searching for "podiatrist in Boston that accepts Cigna," you need to ensure that your information is structured in such a way that you can answer that highly specific question on your website and across search experiences. This person spearheads that effort.
Director of Digital: This position may be titled Director of eCommerce, depending on your company, but the critical duty in either case is to oversee website optimization to ensure the flow on your website results in the desired action or transaction. Responsibilities include building strategic and tactical changes to your online properties that drive revenue — by increasing visitors, managing margin performance, and improving conversion rates.
This person should intimately understand what kind of questions customers are asking once they land on your website. What kind of answers are they seeking? What do they click on? What types of journeys are leading to transactions — and how can you improve both the layout of your site and its functionality to create the most seamless user experience?
PPC Marketing Manager: This person is an SEM strategist, focusing their efforts on boosting visibility through paid advertising. As a result, this role will oversee paid media in general, with a focus on PPC (pay-per-click) spending.
This involves developing an innate understanding of what high-intent searches your customers are making, where paid placements make sense, and what makes your target customer most likely to click at the moment of intent to make a purchase.
Digital Marketing Strategist: In contrast to the PPC marketing manager, the digital marketing strategist will focus primarily on organic SEO. This person is responsible for organic traffic, optimizing website copy and other key materials to surface at the moment of intent when customers are asking questions related to your business via search engines.
The digital marketing strategist should be adept at optimizing for business-specific high-intent keywords, and should be an expert at understanding customer intent overall.
Marketing Analyst: This role is responsible for looking at the performance data around SEO, analyzing the customer journey on your website, and surfacing the proper intent insights to other key stakeholders within your organization.
Essentially, this person looks at the performance data that comes out of the efforts made by your PPC marketing manager and your digital marketing strategist — surfacing insights to help make decisions about how your knowledge graph is leveraged.
Project Manager: The day-to-day responsibilities here depend on your organization, but a project manager is essential to ensuring that the intent marketing strategy you develop is implemented in all of your team's actions. For example, this person should manage tasks and assignments, assisting in transferring intent insights from your marketing analyst into actionable content creation requests from your content and design teams (below). This role may also be responsible for coordinating how different roles interact with different software and systems to ensure efficiency.
Content Team: The content team is responsible for creating, reviewing, and publishing content that is optimized to rank for the proper keywords and phrases that your customers are searching for at moments of high intent. This can include blog posts, sponsored articles, eBooks, and other types of content that suit your organization's needs.
The content team should work hand in hand with your digital marketing strategist and marketing analyst to produce and optimize content that coordinates with your top-down intent marketing strategy.
Design Team: The design team is essential to creating a seamless experience, on- and off-website, generating a cohesive look and feel for your brand. While a creative enterprise, this team should still be integrated with demand generation — similar to the content team — to understand your intent strategy and your brand goals, and execute accordingly.
Finally, if your business has physical locations that are franchised or managed independently, you will need a person whose dedicated role is to communicate from corporate brand marketing outward. Ensure that you have a designated team member responsible for communicating the objectives, performance, and tasks listed above to the managers at your individual locations.
Learn more about how intent marketing and how consumer search is evolving in our ebookThe Customer Journey Starts With a Question.
