How to Hire a Digital Marketing Team in 2026

An SEO expert could be the difference between a blog post achieving 50 likes versus it registering only 20 likes. A paid ads expert or an influencer marketer could open new profit avenues or unlock brand recognition in ways you never thought possible. You need to hire a digital marketing team and not just a few specialists to grow the way you have always wanted to.

If you are a company hiring a digital marketing team, it helps to know what roles to hire for in 2025, especially if time and money are both constraints. In this blog, we will look at the 14 roles necessary in a digital marketing team.

Specialist or Generalist: What Route to Take When Hiring a Digital Marketing Team?

So, should you go for specialists or generalists? To begin with, when hiring a digital marketing team make sure it is not composed of only specialists or generalists. The role that you are hiring for will determine the kind of experience that the person must have. For instance, if you are hiring a Head of Marketing, you would hire a generalist, despite it being a senior position, whereas if you are hiring an email marketer, you would most often hire a specialist. Whether you hire a specialist or generalist for a position will also depend on your immediate needs as a business.

How to Structure a Digital Marketing Team?

Before your company begins hiring a digital marketing team, you must have a reliable structure in place for the digital marketing team. When you decide on structuring a marketing team or decide its composition, here are three things you must consider:

1. Your Business Model Gives You a Better Idea

What model does your business follow? Depending on the average order value, the market size you are considering and the targets you have set yourself, there will be a customer acquisition cost. This acceptable CAC, depending on how high or low it is, will determine what marketing activities you will be focusing on more and what less. This will in turn decide the composition of the middle and lower levels of your marketing team.

2. Work Backwards from Your Targets

Analyze the revenue targets that you have set for yourself and see how many marketing leads you will need to generate to achieve this. Depending on the number of leads you need to generate in a month and the productivity of members in the team, you can decide how the team must be composed and how many people must handle each discipline.

3. Go by How Mature Your Business Is

The business can be in a GTM or in a sales-led maturity (initial stages of marketing). Here it is ideal that the marketing team size is smaller and more focused on key marketing goals and activities. As the company grows, the marketing team also becomes bigger and the contribution of the marketing team to the revenue also keeps increasing.

14 Roles in a Digital Marketing Team

1. Head of Marketing

The Head of Marketing is a role that requires a senior staff member charged with handling a business’ digital marketing activities. Apart from being a reason for driving your ROI, he/she is also responsible for bringing in cohesiveness in communications. The Head of Marketing is also responsible for brainstorming new initiatives and managing freelance and in-house workers as well as guiding other team members in your team in their individual roles.

2. Marketing Operations Manager

The Marketing Operations Manager is responsible for ensuring that the marketing activities of the company are aligned with its mission and vision. They are also responsible for maintaining marketing technology such as CRM and CDM and ensure that the team is benefiting from them. They oversee marketing processes and ensure that sales and marketing teams and IT and marketing teams are working well together.

3. Social Media Manager

Social media managers leverage the power of social media to put the company’s brand in a favorable position online. They look at current trends and help with strategizing content for the brand and sometimes are involved in crafting copy for social media captions too. They are expected to be great at understanding social media metrics and targeting those most relevant to your company. They communicate with the investors and management teams and explain their social media strategies. The work with brand managers to ensure the brand’s reputation stays intact.

4. Content Manager

If a social media manager is involved in managing content for social media, the content manager is responsible for the content that goes on the web, strategizes for it and even analyzes data pertaining to it. Together with the social media manager and the digital marketing manager, a content manager is the face of content written and created in the company. This includes videos and images also. They tailor the content for the audience they are targeting and manage content campaigns.

5. Content Specialist

A content specialist is responsible for the ideation and creation of the content that goes online. This could involve website copy, content for mailers, or even content for brochures and related items offline. A digital marketing team typically has two or more content specialists working together and could be a much larger team for a larger project. The content specialists are managed by the content manager.

6. Graphic Designer

A graphic designer is the visual face of the company they are helping and another important role when hiring a digital marketing team. They work with images and sometimes short videos and reels, creating and tweaking them for the online audience. They might be involved in designing offline elements for exhibitions etc. and integrating them with the online content. They do not generally work with longer videos or animations, where a video editor may prove more useful.

7. Video Editor

Video is the future of online content. It is estimated that by 2025, video will account for more than 60% of the time spent on social media. But at the rate at which video content is growing, it should be more. Any company hiring a digital marketing team cannot ignore the role of a video editor. A video editor’s work generally involves assembling raw footage, adding sounds and images or graphics designed by the graphics designer, and editing the final video to include brand and other design elements and sometimes even explaining to the Head of Marketing why something should be included.

8. Web Designer

Web designers plan and ideate webpages and the content that must go on it. They conduct preliminary research for the website along with UX writers and designers. A web designer also creates mockups and prototypes for the different pages on the website. Web designers also present these mockups to the other members of the marketing team and to decision makers before the work on the website starts. A website designer also collaborates with the developer to help create the website.

9. Digital Marketing Manager

When you hire a digital marketing team, a digital marketing person is perhaps the most important role. A digital marketing manager is involved in managing the creation of content, managing campaigns, increasing website traffic, and understanding user behavior in their journey on the website and devising suitable strategies to increase the conversion rate. In this process, they manage the work of inbound marketing specialists and SEO and SEM experts. They also coordinate efforts with sales teams to ensure that the leads they get are being converted into end customers and devise ways to retain them in the long term.

10. SEO Specialist

An SEO specialist is responsible for ensuring that the website traffic improves over time. They achieve this through a process referred to as SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and SEM (Search Engine Marketing). Their responsibilities include doing keyword research, keyword optimization for blogs to be written and already written and sometimes even doing competitor analysis too. Together with the digital marketing manager, they are responsible for ensuring there is a boost in traffic to the website through the right kind of optimization and marketing.

11. Email Marketer

An email marketer is responsible for strategizing the email campaign, doing audience and other research for the campaign, and deciding on a template and flow for the emails that is to be sent. An email marketer will also be responsible for maintaining a database of the emails already sent and some ideas for the campaign sourced from elsewhere, among other things. They will work with the email marketing manager to manage the email campaign and mailing lists. The copy for the emails may be written by the email marketer or by a copy/content writer.

12. Brand Manager

A brand manager is responsible for the overall look and feel of the brand, including the brand voice and the tone it is communicating in. A brand manager must ensure such consistency exists across all online media. The brand manager must also assist the marketing teams in their activities to promote the brand and work with the research teams to ensure that they are doing meaningful research. Staying up to date with trends is also important from a brand manager’s perspective.

13. Data Analyst

A data analyst is involved in market research and does competitor analysis. A data analyst also creates reports and presentations to visually represent useful data to decision-makers. Apart from these very important things they do, they are also involved in implementing data-driven strategies to optimize marketing campaigns. They can also identify industry trends and buying trends to perform customer segmentation. A lot of the marketing automation platforms are making the lives and jobs of data analysts a lot easier, by helping them perform these tasks in very little time.

14. Affiliate Marketer

Affiliates are people associated with a brand and who voice their opinion and help promote it. They differ from influencers in the sense that they are more directly associated with a particular brand rather than just advocates. An affiliate helper/manager makes deals with affiliates, manages training for affiliates, contributes to content marketing on affiliate websites and helps affiliate websites grow. This is a much sought-after position and will be very valuable in the future as affiliate networks grow and expand.

Are You Looking to Hire a Digital Marketing Team?

Hiring a digital marketing team can be a complicated process, given all the constraints we have mentioned here and the roles and responsibilities of every member of the digital marketing team. It is important to note that hiring great talent by itself is not simple and requires the knowledge and expertise that only a highly experienced recruitment and staffing partner like Alp Consulting can provide. Talk to us today if you are thinking of rebuilding your digital marketing team and rejuvenating your sales team with some marketing energy.

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Amit Saproo

Head Operations: RPO

Amit Saproo is the Head of Operations at ALP Consulting with nearly 17 years of experience in Executive Search, RPO, Leadership, and IT & Engineering recruitment. He leads nationwide recruitment programs across Technology, BFSI, and R&D domains, driving strategic hiring solutions for diverse client needs. Amit excels in building and managing high-performance teams that deliver scalable, end-to-end recruitment and consulting services.