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In order to have a successful ecommerce site, online retailers have to choose the right platform. For many retailers, open source platforms are the way to go, offering undeniable freedom, flexibility and scalability. However, they’re not the best choice for everyone, as they can be very technical, expensive and difficult to manage independently.Here, we break down the main factors that retailers should consider when determining whether or not their site requires the support of an open source platform.

Budget

Open source platforms are usually much more expensive than alternative options like template-based platforms.

Why?

On open source, retailers essentially start from scratch, which means that they need to invest more time, money and resources into the development of their site and pay for things like developers, updates, extensions, maintenance fees, etc. On top of that, this cost is largely unpredictable, with unexpected expenses like security patches, software updates and redesigns popping up all the time.

Overall, open source platforms typically cost an average of 4 times more than template-based platforms over time. The key, then, is for retailers to be aware of this difference and consider factors like the nature of their company, its potential for growth and the overall goal of their site to determine whether or not open source is worth the investment for them.

The Open Source User

The ideal open source user is a highly architectured, product-heavy site with an experienced development team and a fully developed business plan. This kind of ecommerce company has both the internal bandwidth and the need for open source, as they have a specific site vision and will likely require a level of customization and buildability that other platforms simply cannot provide.

Conversely, a small-scale retailer with a straight-forward product catalog and a team with little technical experience may be overwhelmed by the commitment and technicality that open source requires.

The main point, then, is that retailers have to consider all relevant factors when allocating their budget and determining if an open-source platform is a business-smart investment for them.

Technology

Ecommerce retailers must have access to expert, certified developers if they want to properly develop and maintain a website on an open source platform like Magento. The very nature of open source requires working in the source code of a site, meaning that retailers essentially have a clean slate when it comes to the back-end of their site. In other words, it’s like drawing on a blank sheet of paper – versus a coloring book – there are no guidelines or pre-set parameters.

On one hand, this kind of freedom allows for an unparalleled amount of customization and scalability. For a development team with the resources and a clear vision, the sky’s the limit. It also leaves a lot of room for error, though, if for example, multiple developers are used and those developers are not Magento certified, they can create conflicting codes, leading to incompatible connectors, unsupported extensions, and, in the big picture, a back-end that simply does not function seamlessly. If this happens, the website will be unresponsive and it will likely need to be redeveloped or redesigned, which means lost revenue, lost time and unnecessary expenses.

Retailers must consider the technological scope of their team before they go to open source. If they do not have the resources or technological ability to create an effective design and proper integrations, they may need the guidance of template-based platforms.

Business Strategy

Companies with a defined, developed business strategy should use an open source platform. Once again, this has to do with flexibility and freedom. With template-based platforms like BigCommerce, retailers oftentimes have to alter their business practices to fit the template-based model.

If a company’s business model requires air shipping (say they ship perishable products) they would have to restructure this aspect of their business on a template-based platform. In such cases, the flexibility of open source is a huge plus.

That said, this restrictive business model is not always a negative. Many companies don’t have a firm structure or defined practices in place, and they can benefit from the guidance that these template-based platforms provide.

In general, then, it is important that retailers consider the restrictions and requirements of their business, choosing the solution that will best support them.

ERP and CRM Integrations

If ecommerce retailers have either of these integrations, they should go with an open source platform.

Enterprise Resource Planning System (ERP)

An ERP is a business process management software that is often used by ecommerce retailers to keep track of important business metrics and capture funds.

The first function that many of the newer ERPs have is to capture funds for ecommerce retailers. Legally, customers cannot be charged for a product that they have ordered online until the shipping process has begun and a tracking label has been created. New ERPs create these tracking labels, thereby allowing for the funds to be captured and for revenue to be recognized and accrued.

Secondly, ERPs integrate the back-end accounting functions of ecommerce sites, helping retailers keep track of things like inventory, sales and product costs across multiple channels. This function is particularly necessary for ecommerce companies that operate online and in one or more brick-and-mortar locations.

Why?

It is exactly these kinds of multi-faceted operations that will need help keeping track of all of their important figures and accounting information.

That said, any company that requires an ERP or already has a structured ERP in place will likely need an open source platform. ERPs simply don’t integrate well with the template-based software, and trying to force an integration will likely lead to poor site performance overall.

Customer Relationship Management Software (CRM)

A CRM, or Customer Relationship Management software, allows retailers to manage the different facets of their business, including marketing, automations, business information, and customer data, by centralizing all of this information in one portal.

By putting all integral functions and data in one place, CRMs can help ecommerce retailers organize their businesses and keep every member of their team on the same page.

Once again, companies that already have a CRM in place will likely benfit from an open source platform. Template-based systems usually have their own CRMs and do not integrate well with existing or external CRM software.

Product and Catalog Type

When considering an open source platform, ecommerce retailers must consider both the number of products that their website has and the number of variations on those products. A general rule of thumb is the more complex and numerous the catalog types, the more likely it is that a retailer will require an open source platform.

Why is this?

Template-based platforms tend to work best with simple, defined product types or products that don’t have options like bundles and attributes. Once things begin to get more complex, the performance of the product pages begins to suffer on template-based. This can turn into a big problem for site owners since it’ll cause issues, like slow page load speed, unresponsive product page design or low-quality product images, that will negatively impact traffic and conversion rates over time. Complex, product-focused retailers, then will require an open source site to support their needs and allow them to scale. 

Open source requires that retailers build and scale their ecommerce site on their own. While this option can seem daunting, it can provide unmatched freedom, technicality and scalability when done correctly.

In the big picture, it is essential that site owners recognize that the platform is the foundation of their online presence and choose the system that will best support their company’s needs, allowing their site to run smoothly and efficiently over time.

It is seven times more expensive to acquire a new customer than it is to retain an existing one, and it is only getting more expensive. As more and more ecommerce stores enter the market, the demand for PPC goes up. Simple economics tell us that these prices are on an upward trend.

Today’s top ecommerce sites are using retention to battle increasing digital marketing costs and stagnating growth. There are a number of retention tools at your disposal, but it can become tough to manage those tools. The solution is to use a loyalty program as a hub for your retention marketing tactics. 

Loyalty as a Retention Hub 

Here are a few examples of how a loyalty program can make your retention marketing efforts much easier by centralizing everything in one place. 

Incentivize Other Efforts with Points

Shoppers often take a “what’s in it for me?” approach when deciding whether they will complete an action on your site. It is incredibly valuable to get a customer to share your store over social media, but very few ever do. You can reward this behavior by providing points for the completion of marketing activities that are both retention and acquisition focused, whether that’s sharing your store on social media or referring a friend directly. 

As soon as a customer realizes that your points have real monetary value, they’re motivated to earn them for easy requests like sharing on social media or referring their friends, or sharing user-generated content. A loyalty program ties all of your marketing efforts back into your retention marketing strategy. More retention gets you more repeat customers, and repeat customers are valuable online!

Avoid Discounting 

One of the pitfalls of ecommerce is discounting your store to death, and reducing your average order value, customer lifetime value, and bottom line. Many online retailers will try to get more referrals, sales, or shares by offering a straight discount. These discounts set an expectation that a customer will never have to actually pay full price.

“If you are always offering discounts, your shoppers will never consider paying full price.”

You might see discounts as a necessary evil to get the ball rolling, but it can actually do some serious damage to your brand image and sales. This is especially true if you consider yourself a luxury retailer. 

Using a loyalty program allows you to reward points to incent action rather than offering straight discounts. Points do not have the same associations as $15 off or 20% off. And, they encourage users to continue to purchase full-price items from you. This allows you to kick start marketing effortsand avoid the negative effects of discounting.

Consistent Communication

The more tools you’re using, the higher likelihood that your communications have a fragmented look and feel. A tool for retention emails might send emails that look one way, and a referral program sends emails that look totally different. Using a loyalty program as a hub can help solve this fragmentation issue. After all, your customers only think they’re working with you — a single store. 

When all your retention efforts are being conducted with the same tool, you get a customer experience that is on brand, engaging, and effective at driving repeat purchases.

Centralized Data

There are not enough hours in the day for an online store owner or ecommerce manager. The last thing you want to be doing is checking multiple retention tools to see how effective your efforts have been.

A loyalty program can bring all these tools into one convenient location. Instead of looking at revenue from loyalty members, number of purchases from referrals, and repeat customer rate in three separate places, you can look in one spot.

And, using a central hub for retention marketing efforts makes it easier to see if your retention efforts are making you some serious money, or if they need to be tweaked.

Centralize Retention with a Loyalty Program

Retention marketing is a long term strategy, so to truly invest you need to set yourself up for success. Invest in the right tools, treat the strategy with the respect it deserves, and start things off right.

If you are planning to take your retention marketing efforts seriously, you should consider adding in a loyalty program. They lead to some amazing results, and create a central hub for your retention efforts. 

Back in April, Mark Zuckerberg announced the launch of Facebook’s Messenger Platform — a new service that enables businesses of all sizes to build custom bots in Messenger.

In the days following the announcement, the tech and marketing space lost its mind. Thousands of articles were penned about the news, each one speculating on what an open Messenger platform could mean for businesses.

Why all the ardor? For starters, Facebook Messenger already has about 900 million monthly active users worldwide. Not registrants. Not people who got forced to download it when Facebook spun it out of the standard Facebook app. We’re talking about active users who have adopted Messenger as a primary communication channel.

Anytime a company as forward-looking as Facebook opens up a platform as heavily adopted as Messenger it should raise eyebrows. So the early excitement, well, it’s justified. But what comes next is entirely undefined. And as marketers, we have an exciting opportunity to help shape it.

As Zuckerberg put it in his keynote, “No one wants to have to install a new app for every business or service they want to interact with.” And bots are much different than disjointed apps. In other words, building into the already popular Facebook Messenger app could enable businesses to get in front of customers without that added friction.

At least, that’s the potential …

What Is a Bot?

“Bot” is a generalized term used to describe any software that automates a task. Chatbots, which anyone can now build into Facebook Messenger, automate conversation — at least the beginning stages of it.

What’s special about the bots you can build on Facebook Messenger is that they’re created using Facebook’s Wit.ai Bot Engine, which can turn natural language into structured data. You can read more on this here, but in short, this means that not only can bots parse and understand conversational language, but they can also learn from it. In other words, your bot could get “smarter” with each interaction.

You’ve undoubtedly heard of artificial intelligence (AI). And this is a type of AI. Natural language interface is common in most chatbots, but by opening up the Messenger Platform and providing developer tools like the bot engine, Facebook has made building an intelligent bot easier.

How People Find Bots in Facebook Messenger

So, now comes the classic marketer question: If you build it, will they come?

The answer? Maybe.

Users are able to search for companies and bots inside Facebook Messenger by name, so you’ll probably get some users that way. But, as with any new pathway into your company, you’re likely to find that adoption of this communication channel within your customer base won’t happen without some promotion. Facebook is trying to make that easier for businesses and organizations as well.

Here are a few tools and updates they’ve released to help simplify that connection:

Messenger Links

If you’ve created a Page for your business on Facebook, Messenger Links will use your Page’s username to create a short link (m.me/username). When someone clicks that link — regardless of where they are — it will open a conversation with your business in Messenger.

Customer Matching

If you have phone numbers for customers and pre-existing permission to reach out to them, you can find them on Facebook Messenger via customer matching. Conversations initiated through customer matching will include a final opt-in upon the first Facebook Messenger communication.

Image Credit: Facebook

Messenger Codes

Messenger codes are unique images that serve as a visual thumbprint for your business and bot on Messenger. If you are familiar with Snapchat codes, these visual cues act in the same way, redirecting anyone who scans them using Messenger to the corresponding company page or bot.

Image Credit: Facebook

Messenger Buttons

You can embed these buttons, provided by Facebook, into your website to enable anyone who clicks them to start a Messenger conversation with your company.

Image Credit: Facebook

For all of the above, if you haven’t developed a bot, the result will be a standard Messenger-based conversation. So you’ll want to be sure you’re monitoring that channel.

5 Examples of Branded Facebook Messenger Bots

Written definitions of bots are one thing, but sometimes it helps to understand how a bot works in action. Let’s take a look at a few early examples …

1) 1-800-Flowers

The example Mark Zuckerberg lauded in his keynote was the ability to send flowers from 1-800-Flowers without actually having to call the 1-800 number. A user, Danny Sullivan, subsequently tried it by sending flowers to Zuckerberg himself and documented the five-minute process here.

The bot took Sullivan through a few floral options and then confirmed shipping details.

Image Credit: Marketing Land  

2) Wall Street Journal

With the Wall Street Journal bot, users can get live stock quotes by typing “$” followed by the ticker symbol. They can also get the top headlines delivered to them inside of Messenger.

3) HP

HP created a bot for Messenger that enables users to print photos, documents, and files from Facebook or Messenger to any connected HP printer.

Image Credit: HP  

4) Facebook M

Facebook is releasing its own bot for Messenger, a personal assistant bot named “M”. M can answer a wide range of requests — from restaurant recommendations, to complex trivia, to last-minute hotel rates in the city.

Its flexibility is due to the fact that M is actually a bot-human hybrid. As Facebook’s chief technology officer Mike Schroepfer told Recode: “It’s primarily powered by people, but those people are effectively backed up by AIs.” While the bots act as a first line of defense in fielding questions, the difficult questions are quickly routed to human assistants.

Image Credit: The Next Web

5) Healthtap

Healthtap is an interactive healthcare provider that connects users to advice from medical professionals. On the heels of the platform announcement, Healthtap created a bot that enables users to type a medical question into Facebook Messenger and receive a free response from a doctor or browse articles of similar questions.

You can see here how the conversational interface works. The user in this example is inquiring in natural language about a specific health concern. From the user’s standpoint, this is similar to texting a friend.

Image Credit: mobihealthnews

This set up also helps the company filter inbound requests by solving some patient questions with existing responses first and then surfacing unique queries for live response.

(Intrigued by these examples? Engadget has a longer list of bots that are either released or under development for Facebook Messenger.)

Should You Build a Bot?

Ah, see that’s not the sort of question I can answer for you. Building a bot for Facebook Messenger, like any marketing or product endeavor, is going to take resources — mainly staff time and expertise — and may not result in the outcomes you’d like to see.

That said, here’s my best guidance for how you can answer the question for yourself:

Do you have a clear use case?

One of the biggest reasons so many companies went astray in building apps for their businesses is that they saw it as just another version of their website. They didn’t take the time to study how being on a mobile device would change the types of interactions their customers would want to have with their company.

Some tasks are just not well-suited for mobile. As a result, many apps sat unused. When you’re thinking about a use case for Facebook Messenger, make sure you’re thinking about it from the standpoint of the customer or user, not from the company’s standpoint. That’s the real driver of use.

Is your audience on Facebook?

This question is often too quickly dismissed by companies that see Facebook as a purely social platform, rather than one for businesses. Even if your audience doesn’t currently use Facebook for business needs, you need to start by determining whether or not the potential is there.

If you have an audience who uses Facebook heavily in their personal lives, they’re likely to adopt Messenger as a communications tool. And how they use Messenger may expand beyond how they use Facebook. Today, usage of messaging apps has actually outpaced that of social networks. And as new use cases arise, behavior evolves with them.

Can you support inbound inquiries from Messenger?

Don’t open a communication channel with your prospective and existing customers if you can’t support it. Even with the automation of a bot, you’ll still need to carve out time to 1) promote it 2) monitor any questions your bot can’t answer and 3) keep tabs on the overall customer experience you’re creating with it.

If you’ve thought through the above three questions and think you’ve got a good foundation for a Facebook Messenger bot then dive in. There’s a benefit to being an early adopter in this space. And as a newly open platform, Facebook Messenger needs thoughtful and strategic companies to shape it.

Have you used any branded bots on Facebook Messenger? What’s your favorite use case? Share your thoughts in the comments.

Content can be a great way for your association to engage with constituents. But where to begin? What’s the best approach to creating nonprofit content?

By setting goals, getting your team involved, and grounding your writing in a pre-established strategy, you can turn your blog, website and other content channels into a place you get engage with and inform potential customers. Whether you’re about to launch a brand new content strategy or want to tweak current efforts to increase member engagement, these 10 tips can help your organization succeed with content.

And to learn even more, check out our latest ebook, Sign Up! A Guide to Growing and Engaging Your Membership Base >>

Content Creation Tips for Associations 

1) Know Your Goal

The goal of inbound marketing is to get more people to join or engage with your organization. Your content is an extension of your organization’s overall growth and engagement strategy. Set milestones for your content that ladder up to this growth – number of views, clicks, downloads, new contacts, and members that originated from any given piece of content.   

2) Find Engaging Topics

Your organization has a wealth of experience and value. Use that knowledge to proactively answer questions that people have about organizations and members. This tactic is called “you ask, we answer.” There are so many questions folks have about who you are and what you do that people are search for answers on the web. Think about questions your members might type into goo

3) Care About Keywords

A keyword is simply a word or phrase that people search for online. With over two trillion searches being done this year, ignoring the phrases people search for around your issue can be a huge missed opportunity. You need to do basic research on the keywords people are looking for and the language your ideal constituent uses. Working those words into your content will help your inbound marketing efforts.

4) Get Everyone to Create Content 

Most organizations have a lot of people creating a lot of different content across many different departments. There are likely people in membership, policy, communications and beyond who are writing about your organization in compelling ways. You should have one person in charge of overall content, so all of the great work that your team is doing isn’t lost or duplicated. That way, everyone else can focus on planning, curating and editing content. Check out our post on why everyone should create content here.

5) Social Is Not Enough

We love social media. It’s an easy way to share content and it can increase traffic. But it’s important to think beyond a single tweet. You need good content to get customers to click, and more content on your site to keep them there. 

6) Conversions Matter More Than Traffic

You can have an impressive amount of people visiting your site, but if those browsers are not taking any action to indicate they’re interested or signing up to join your association, it is a waste of a lot of effort. Your goal as an organization is for people to take action. So, your content and website needs to be focused around that. One way to encourage conversions is to think about calls-to-action that matter to you—Donate, get involved, sign up—and then work backward to create content and workflows that drive users toward those actions.

7) Think Quantity and Quality

“How often should we post?” This is a harder question to answer than you might think. There is an ongoing argument around content marketing about quantity vs. quality. Should I have one great 2,000-word post or four 500-word posts? 

Our short answer is you need both quantity and quality. Consistency matters a ton. If you can consistently publish once or twice a week and do a big content offering once a quarter, do that. If you can do more than that great, but don’t start a blog and then stop six months later. Check out HubSpot’s experiment on blog post frequency here.

8) Consider Both Reactive and Evergreen Content

Sometimes, it makes sense for you to create a piece of content that is timely, or reacts to a specific current events. Other times, you should focus on writing something that is just as relevant today as it will be six months from now. A mix of both is important, because it drives different types of people. Some people are looking to solve problems, while others are looking to be entertained or informed on a current issue. Your content should answer all of these questions.

9) Have A Content Mix

Think beyond writing. Video, audio and infographics all have their place mix up the type of content. The goal of trying different approaches (like quizzes, games and paywalls) is to reach and engage folks.

10) Plan Out Your Content 

It’s important to have a calendar. Since inbound marketing is a cross-department effort, you need to have the content be coordinated across departments. Use a content program like Teamup or the HubSpot content calendar to keep track of posts.

Bonus Tips:

Hold A Blog-A-Thon

Wouldn’t it be great to create three times as many blog posts in a single sitting? Get your team around a white board and write 100 questions people would ask about your association. Then write out the answers, and you just created great content, fast.

Create A Video Booth at Events

Have trouble getting video content?  A quiet room and a green screen are a way to capture good member video easily and quickly.

Use A Whiteboard Program  

Whiteboard videos are easy to make and don’t take much time to create. Using a program like VideoScribe, you can take your best written content and turn it into video.

Want more? We delved deep into how inbound marketing can help nonprofits grow membership bases in our new ebook with HubSpot, Sign Me Up! A Guide to Growing and Engaging Your Membership Base.

Are you ready to build your dream team of inbound marketers? Do you know what roles to fill and how to find the best people for the job?

Hiring inbound marketers is fairly new and uncharted territory for many businesses straying from traditional marketing tactics.

Step one is recognizing the need to invest in inbound marketing. The next step? Assembling an all-star cast of marketers — a team of lean, mean, digitally fluent, content-creating machines to take your marketing to the next level.

So how do you acquire this killer marketing lineup? How do you spot the Jordans in a sea of Bulls? These 12 core marketing job descriptions are a great start to finding your key players.

Feel free to adapt, modify, and use them in your own search for your next all-star marketing team members. 

12 Core Job Descriptions to Build an All-Star Marketing Team

1) Inbound Marketing Manager Job Description 

If your marketing department is just starting to make the shift to an inbound approach, it’s possible you’ll still need to prove the success of your inbound marketing program.

If this is the case, you’ll likely be looking to hire an all-in-one inbound marketer — someone who can build and grow your inbound marketing strategy from the ground up. Look for someone who is very self-motivated and versatile … and gets stuff done. (And if you’re still trying to convince your boss to to make the shift to inbound in the first place, download these 100 stats, charts, and graphs to help you get inbound marketing buy-in.)

Job Description:

We are looking for an amazing, data-driven inbound marketer to own the majority of the marketing funnel for our company. You will be in charge of attracting site traffic, converting that traffic into new leads for the business, and nurturing those leads to close into customers, the latter of which sales leadership will help you accomplish.

Responsibilities:

• Build and manage a rich content/editorial calendar that attracts a qualified audience to our owned properties (including blog posts, whitepapers, ebooks, reports, webinars, infographics, etc.).
• Grow new leads, including marketing-qualified leads, by converting site traffic through calls-to-action, landing pages, and lead generation content (including offers).
• Optimize our marketing automation and lead nurturing processes through email, content, and social channels.
• Establish closed-loop analytics with sales to understand how our inbound marketing activity turns into customers, and continually refine our process to convert customers.

Requirements:

• BA/BS degree or equivalent work experience.
• Some past experience in marketing preferred.
• Excellent communicator and creative thinker, with an ability to use data to inform all decisions.
• Proficiency in marketing automation and blogging software in order to generate traffic, convert visitors into leads, and then nurture them (using dynamic workflows) into converted customers.
• Bonus skills: HTML/CSS, Adobe Creative Suite.

2) Social Media/Community Manager Job Description 

Have you heard? According to Social Media Examiner’s 2015 Social Media Marketing Industry Report, 90% of all marketers indicated that their social media efforts have generated more exposure for their business.

So if you aren’t yet using social media marketing to your advantage, it’s time to start. And to do so, you need a social media manager who not only knows social media platforms like they know the alphabet, but who also knows how to develop strategies specific to various social networks, track the right metrics, and integrate the best tools and practices on those platforms. 

Job Description: 

Do you tweet, share, and post to social media in your sleep? Do you know what it takes to grow an online community? We’re looking for a social media manager to manage our social media accounts by implementing strategies and tactics that grow our followers, engage and retain them, and help convert them into leads, customers, and active fans and promoters of our company. You should have command of best practices and trends in social media marketing, enjoy being creative, and understand how to both build and convert a digital audience.

Responsibilities:

Responsibilities:

Job Description:

As a marketing operations manager, you will work to create scalable processes that ensure best practices in lead generation and database management. You will also conduct complex data analyses that will be used to inform strategic decisions by stakeholders from across the company. You will be working in a fast-paced environment managing multiple projects at once.

Responsibilities:

• Manage technical aspects of key marketing systems (marketing automation, CRM) used to generate, distribute, and report on leads.
• Establish and maintain scalable processes that ensure best practices in campaign and lead management.
• Create and maintain metrics reports on marketing and sales activities, effectiveness, and business impact.
• Analyze marketing and sales data to develop insights and make recommendations on areas for optimization.
• Monitor and maintain data quality within the marketing database.
• Evaluate new technologies and add-on applications to improve and optimize marketing team performance.

Requirements:

• BA/BS or equivalent working experience.
• Strong analytical skills (including mastery of Microsoft Excel) and experience with reporting and data analysis.
• Proficiency in marketing automation systems (like HubSpot) and integrating those systems with other technologies.
• Ability to manage multiple projects at the same time in a fast-paced environment.
• Technically capable, excellent communicator, and a desire to improve processes.

11) Graphic Designer Job Description

If your content isn’t designed well, you risk detracting people from reading and enjoying it — even if it’s beautifully written. Someone on your team may have a natural eye for design, but hacking designs together in PowerPoint isn’t scalable. Professional graphic design is an investment that goes a long way. 

Plus, there’s a lot more to great design then making things look good. A great graphic designer is also really good at solving problems. They use their creativity and skills not just to make marketing materials more attractive, but to improve user experience, create brand consistency, and get specific results.

Job Description:

We are seeking an experienced graphic designer to own the creation and maintenance of both our marketing assets and content created to support the product and other marketing goals. From concept through execution, this candidate will improve our user experience by bringing our brand to life and keeping it consistent across all our various touchpoints: 

Responsibilities:

• Collaborate with marketing and product marketing teammates to support our website design and content marketing (blog, social media assets, and more).
• Help bring new ideas for design and content creation to the team using your expertise and eye for great design.
• Scope and create templates for our marketing team to be more efficient in their posting on social media, the blog, email, and other channels.
• Manage other design needs such as presentations, signage, and trade show collateral as needed.

Requirements:

• BA/BS or equivalent working experience.
• Past experience as either an in-house designer or at a marketing agency. (We require work samples to apply for this position.)
• Experience designing for a content optimization system (like the HubSpot COS). This person must create assets for our web team that are mobile-, tablet-, and desktop-friendly and provide a user experience that fits on all three screens.
• Expert in Adobe Creative Suite or similar technologies.
• Knowledge of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript a major plus.

12) Web Developer Job Description

Maintaining and innovating on an effective, lead-generating website requires a dedicated developer.

Look for someone who has expertise in building sites on the platform or CMS you use, maintains an attractive portfolio, is deadline- and detail-oriented, and can work well with your graphic designers and product marketers.

Job Description:

We are seeking a web developer to work on our company website and other projects as needed. This role is expected to bring an eye for design, along with practical web development abilities. You will work closely with our graphic designers, product marketers, and other internal stakeholders to bring to life our brand, product information and collateral, and other website content, via the code you write.

Responsibilities:

• Develop and implement front-end web code and design standards for writing clean, semantic code.
• Wireframe and mockup revamped or brand new site pages and present to senior management.
• Collaborate with marketing teammates, senior management, designers, and other project stakeholders.
• Create and optimize our web project management, hitting all deadlines and improving efficiency while maintaining the highest standards of quality web development.
• Proactively scope and present new ideas to improve our website experience for prospects, leads, and customers.

Requirements:

• BA/BS degree or equivalent working experience.
• Strong background with HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript, and jQuery. 
• Domain expertise in UI/UX best practices. You are a problem solver with everything you develop to improve our site’s experience and drive action.
• Certified on our Content Optimization System, used to create automatically responsive webpages for mobile, tablet, and desktop. Your work must appeal to all three.
• Personal interest in staying up-to-date on the latest trends, including agile methodology and emerging best practices in the UI community.

Ready to assemble your dream team?

To fill out your team even more, download our full collection of 37 marketing job descriptions here. 

Keep these roles and skills on your radar as you take your marketing to the next level. Then check out these interview question from HubSpot’s CMO himself to help weed out the best of the best.

Lastly, while everyone wants to hire top marketing talent, not everyone thinks about how to ensure these rockstars keep their skillset strong. Hiring the right people is critical to your company’s growth, but remember to encourage them to continue their education through the various types of marketing training that are available. If they’re really an all-star marketer, they’ll probably want to always be learning anyway.

Editor’s Note: This post was originally published in January 2014 and has been updated for accuracy and comprehensiveness.