Marketing roles: the types of marketer and which one to hire first

Marketing roles split into four types of marketer: those who set the strategy (marketing manager, brand manager, product marketer), those who bring in traffic and leads (SEO specialist, performance marketer, social media manager), those who produce the content (copywriter, content manager) and those who measure the results (web analyst, CRM and automation specialist). In the government's Employer Skills Survey 2024, 29% of vacancies for professional roles and 24% for associate professional roles, the two occupation groups most of these jobs fall into, were hard to fill because applicants lacked the skills, qualifications or experience needed.

The trouble is that nearly every guide to these roles is written for people looking for a job.

You, on the other hand, need to hire. Or pick an agency. Or work out who's missing from the team you already have.

And this is where the most common mistake has a name…

The marketing roles searched most on Google UK are copywriter and social media manager. In the UK "copywriter" gets 8,100 searches a month on Google and "social media manager" 4,400. "Web analyst" gets 40 (our own measurement, October 2026: the method is further down).

The other two mistakes we see most often:

• hiring a junior all-rounder and expecting strategy, campaigns and content from the same contract;
• buying traffic before you can count leads, then judging the campaigns on numbers that aren't enquiries.

Sounds like a technical detail, doesn't it?

It isn't. When we took over the Google Ads account of Valore Solare, a solar panel installer in Italy, the "conversions" column showed 15,267 conversions in one month from 5,467 clicks. They were technical events on the website, not quote requests.

Once that was fixed, the account reached 1,506 genuine enquiries, with the cost per enquiry down 40%.

Sunscape had the same problem the other way round: from May to November 2025, €1,500 a month in ad spend and zero tracked conversions.

And what has that got to do with types of marketer?

A lot, because in both cases one specific role was missing. And it wasn't the one the company thought it needed to hire.

In this guide you'll find:

• the marketing roles in one table, with what each one delivers and the number to ask for;
• the most-searched roles in the UK, with the search volumes we measured;
• four families of marketer, each with a real client case;
• which role to hire first, and when an agency makes more sense.

Let's start.

What types of marketer there are (and which number to ask each one for)

A marketer is "a person or business whose job is to present, advertise and sell a company's products in the best possible way", according to the Oxford Learner's Dictionaries. The job title tells you little, though: the same "digital marketing specialist" runs the ad campaigns in one company and writes the newsletters in another.

That's why the table below doesn't sort the roles by name.

It sorts them by what they deliver.

Role	Family	What they deliver	The number to ask them for
Marketing manager	Strategy	Plan, budget, priorities across channels	Cost per customer acquired, channel by channel
Brand manager	Strategy	Positioning, identity, consistent messaging	Searches for the brand name over time
Product marketer	Strategy	Messaging and launches for individual products	Enquiries or sales per product launched
SEO specialist	Acquisition	Pages that rank on Google	Keywords on page one and organic clicks
Performance marketer or media buyer	Acquisition	Paid campaigns on Google and Meta	Cost per enquiry or ROAS
Social media manager	Acquisition	Presence and community on social media	Visits and leads that came from social
Copywriter	Content	Copy for ads, pages and emails	Conversion rate of the pages they write
Content manager	Content	Editorial plan and production	Traffic and leads from content
Web analyst or CRM specialist	Measurement	Tracking, reports, automations	Share of enquiries attributed to a channel

Two abbreviations: ROAS (return on ad spend) is the revenue generated for every pound spent on advertising, and CRM (customer relationship management) is the database where contacts and customers end up.

A number to ask for that's made of likes or impressions isn't wrong. It just sits upstream of what you're paying for. If you want the detail on one role, we've written a guide to what an SEO specialist does and one on where SEO ends and content marketing begins.

The most-searched marketing roles in the UK (and the ones nobody looks for)

We measured how many times a month people in the UK search Google for the name of each role. (Method: Google Ads volumes pulled with DataForSEO on 10 October 2026, United Kingdom, English, average of the twelve months from September 2025 to August 2026.)

Someone searching for a role could be a candidate, an employer or a student. Volume measures attention, not hiring.

Role searched	Average searches a month	August 2026
copywriter	8,100	5,400
social media manager	4,400	2,400
content manager	3,600	2,400
marketing manager	1,600	1,000
performance marketer	1,300	720
seo specialist	1,000	390
media buyer	590	480
brand manager	590	390
digital strategist	590	260
product marketing manager	480	320
community manager	390	260
growth marketer	390	320
digital marketing specialist	390	140
ecommerce manager	320	260
crm specialist	170	90
marketing automation specialist	70	30
web analyst	40	20
sem specialist	20	10

Copywriter is searched about 200 times more often than web analyst. 8,100 searches against 40.

So what?

So attention goes where the work can be seen. An advert can be seen. A conversion tag can't.

Second point, less obvious: all 18 roles were searched less in August 2026 than in September 2025. September 2025 was the busiest month of the year for 15 of them and August 2026 the quietest for 15. "Performance marketer" dropped from 2,400 searches to 720, "SEO specialist" from 2,900 to 390.

We don't know why: these are search figures, not a survey. What they do show is that interest in a job title can fall to less than a third in under a year. A title that sounds current when you write the job advert may not be the one candidates are typing a few months later.

The four families of marketer (with a client case for each)

Amy Saper, a partner at the venture fund Uncork Capital, splits marketing into three disciplines: product marketing, demand generation (traffic and leads) and brand marketing (Uncork Capital, June 2024). It's a split designed for American tech startups.

For a small or medium-sized business we add a fourth, which her model leaves implicit: the people who measure.

1. Strategy: marketing manager, brand manager, product marketer

The marketing manager decides where the money goes. It doesn't sound like much. It's the decision that weighs most on what a customer costs.

Macropix, a Milan-based maker of LED video walls, has been through three Google Ads budget cycles: €25,000-29,000 a year between 2018 and 2021, €16,000 in 2022-2023, and €11,000-13,000 from 2024.

2024 was the worst year in the series: 120 enquiries at €94 each.

2025, on half the 2020 budget, closed with 328 enquiries at €39 each.

The spend didn't make the difference. A decision taken at the end of 2024 did: restructure the campaigns by product cluster and clean up the conversion signal. The same client's SEO journey, from position 88 to 2, is told in our guide to SEO for manufacturing.

2. Acquisition: SEO specialist, performance marketer, social media manager

Here the marketer brings people to the website. The channel changes, the job doesn't: finding the people who are already looking for what you sell.

Bosatta sells motorbike and scooter parts. With €65,000 of ad budget over twelve months and separate campaigns for consumers and for workshops in four markets (Italy, Spain, France, Germany), it generated €240,000 in sales and 127 enquiries from dealers.

Is the channel the secret?

No. The split is. A consumer and a workshop type the same words with different budgets: if whoever runs the campaigns doesn't separate them, you pay the same for a click from two customers worth very different amounts. We've put the budget and structure figures in our guide to Google Ads for small businesses.

3. Content: copywriter and content manager

The content manager decides which pages are needed. The copywriter writes them. When both start from search data, the editorial calendar comes second.

Sunscape looks for land for solar farms all over Italy. In March 2026 the site had 329 organic impressions a month, nearly all of them on the company name.

A landowner searches with the name of their region, so we built one page per region.

By August 2026 impressions had reached 5,809, and 38 of the 143 tracked keywords were on page one (up from 1). Monthly organic clicks went from 46 to 195. Why it took five months rather than two weeks is explained in our guide to how long SEO takes.

4. Measurement: web analyst, CRM and automation specialist

This is the role that decides what counts as a result. And it's the one that barely shows up in the search table.

Contesini Consulenze, an energy consultancy, had no conversion tracking at all. With Google Tag Manager and GA4 set up: 299 enquiries in seven months at €7.20 each, with 68% judged workable by the sales team.

That 68% is the number that matters. Without someone asking the sales team for it, the report stops at 299.

Scovaventi, a food e-commerce shop on Shopify, couldn't link sales to campaigns because GA4 and Tag Manager weren't set up. Afterwards: €77,000 in sales in a year on a €20,000 budget, with an average order of €190. How to attribute a lead to the right channel is covered in our guide to attribution models in GA4.

The marketer almost no small business hires first (and what it costs not to have one)

Of the six client cases in this guide, five started with measurement: no tracking at all (Scovaventi, Contesini), conversions inflated by technical events (Valore Solare, Sunscape) or in need of a clean-up (Macropix).

Lined up together, the numbers are striking:

• Valore Solare: 15,267 "conversions" in a month from 5,467 clicks. In the first full month we managed the account, October 2025, €1,909 spent and 9 genuine enquiries, so €212 each;
• Sunscape: in 2024, 1,487 "conversions" in a month at €0.61 each, then from May to November 2025 zero tracked conversions;
• Macropix: €94 per enquiry in 2024, €39 in 2025 after the signal was cleaned up.

How much does that cost, in money?

For Sunscape the sum is simple: seven months at €1,500 comes to €10,500 spent without knowing which enquiries it had brought in.

An experienced performance marketer or an analyst spots this the first time they check the account. A social media manager usually never goes into that account at all, and that's not their fault: it isn't their job.

If your site gets visits but the leads don't come, the problem is often halfway between the two, and we deal with it in our guide on what to do when your website doesn't convert.

Which marketer to hire first (depending on the problem you have)

The first role to hire is the one that fixes today's bottleneck, not the one with the best-known title. Saper suggests a first marketer who "majors" in one area and "minors" in the others: a generalist with a speciality.

We'd add one condition. Before the first pound is spent, someone has to have decided what counts as an enquiry.

If the problem is…	The role you need	The first number to look at
Nobody finds you on Google	SEO specialist	Keywords on page one
They find you, but they don't get in touch	Copywriter and whoever works on conversion	Page conversion rate
You need leads this quarter	Performance marketer	Cost per enquiry
You don't know where customers come from	Web analyst	Share of leads attributed to a channel
Leads come in, but you don't close	CRM specialist, working with sales	Workable enquiries out of total enquiries
Nobody knows your name	Brand manager	Searches for the brand name

The order we recommend to a small business is this: measurement, one acquisition channel, content, and only then brand strategy. If you have to choose the first channel, the search-by-search comparison is in our guide SEO or Google Ads; the tools you need at each step, with their costs, are in marketing tools for small businesses.

In-house, freelance or agency (what the data says, and which of it applies in the UK)

In the UK the problem with hard-to-fill roles is usually skills, not headcount. The Department for Education's Employer Skills Survey 2024, based on interviews with 22,712 employers across all four nations, found that 27% of all vacancies were skill-shortage vacancies, down from 36% in 2022. For professional roles the figure was 29% and for associate professionals 24%. In the same survey 12% of employers had at least one member of staff who wasn't fully proficient in their job.

And beyond the UK?

Gartner's 2025 CMO Spend Survey heard from 402 marketing leaders in North America, the UK and Europe, mostly at companies with more than $1 billion in revenue. Marketing budgets are stuck at 7.7% of revenue, 39% plan to cut agency spend and 39% to cut spending on staff. 22% say generative AI has reduced their reliance on agencies for creative work and strategy.

Does that apply to a 30-person firm in the West Midlands?

Not directly. These are large corporations, with in-house teams a small business will never have. They do tell you one useful thing, though: with budgets flat, staff and agencies are the two lines people try to squeeze. Every role, in-house or external, has to show with a number what it brings in.

On salaries, the closest official figures by role are the Home Office Skilled Worker going rates, the minimum an employer must pay to sponsor a worker in each occupation (updated 22 July 2025, based on a 37.5-hour week): £33,400 a year for advertising and marketing executives, £37,000 for public relations professionals, a group that includes social media managers, £50,100 for marketing managers and £87,300 for marketing, sales and advertising directors. They're a floor, not an average: they help you gauge the weight of each role, not write an offer letter.

Our view, for a small business: one in-house person who knows the product and the customers and coordinates, with external specialists on the channels. With only one channel running, an in-house specialist won't fill the week. With three channels, three in-house specialists are three salaries.

If you go down the external route, we've set out how to choose an SEO agency, how to hire an SEO specialist and what you actually get from SEO consulting. For the channels we handle ourselves, the detail is on our Google Ads and SEO pages.

What a marketer isn't (and when you don't need one yet)

A marketer isn't a designer who lays out the trade show flyer. Nor is it whoever "does the social media" in their spare moments.

And sometimes you don't need one yet. If nobody in the company calls leads back by the next day, more leads won't fix anything. We said it plainly to Contesini: a lead at €7 from outside the area is worth nothing. First sort out who answers the door, then pay for people to knock.

Frequently asked questions about types of marketer

In short (and one thing the industry rarely says)

Four families: strategy, acquisition, content, measurement.

Copywriter is searched about 200 times more often than web analyst.

In five cases out of six, our work started with measurement.

First the person who counts the enquiries, then the person who brings them in.

One in-house person who coordinates, external specialists on the channels.

Now the thing that rarely gets said. The names of these roles change fast and mean different jobs from one company to the next: in the UK "performance marketer" was searched 2,400 times in September 2025 and 720 times in August 2026. So when you hire or choose an agency, the title counts for little. Ask which number they commit to moving and how they'll measure it. Someone who answers with a number of enquiries or sales is offering you marketing work; someone who answers with followers is offering you social media work, which can be useful, but won't tell you what a customer costs you.

If you want to work out which role is missing from your team, book a strategy consultation: we'll start from your numbers.

Speak soon!