Marketing Generalist vs. Specialist – Who Is Better?

Assembling a strong marketing team is no walk in the park. Besides selecting the best talents, achieving a balance between specialists’ roles and the tasks assigned to them either makes or breaks your marketing efforts.

Specialists are great for specific processes and narrow directions, while generalists are men of all work that delegate team members and help everyone stay on board and reach common goals. There’s a flip side to it, too – specialists are rather weak at managing processes and won’t give you business growth as a whole, while generalists become a one-man army prone to lose once you leave them without people to manage.

In this article, we’ll look into the “marketing specialist vs. generalist” issue and give you some insights to figure out what’s right for you.

Marketing specialists have deep expertise in one or two specific areas and are the opposite of “jack of all trades, master of none”. They focus on tasks within a specific discipline and build on them to strengthen the company’s marketing engine.

Content marketers, paid ads managers, SEO experts, and social media and influencer marketers are all examples of marketing specialists. You wouldn’t assign the tasks of one of these specialists to another because their skill sets simply don’t match. Let’s look at a few factors that clarify why having distinct roles is a better choice:

• Switching roles harms productivity. As stated by the New York Times, only 2% of people are actually good at multitasking. The funny thing is that they’re the least likely to do it. And as for the remaining 98%, research says that the more you multitask, the more likely you are to go down in flames.
• Immersion encourages unique expertise. Going deep into one channel of work, a marketer will have more chances to become an expert and make sense of the details that can be game-changing for the whole team. The same details a generalist is likely to miss or won’t get to altogether since they’re loaded with other tasks.
• Some areas are too complex for a casual, generalist approach. For instance, Google and Facebook marketing services are among the top ones marketers implement. But these are not just tools – they’re entire platforms with stacks of products, for which you’d need someone adept with the algorithms. Or, if you’re geared towards hitting video content, an all-rounder won’t cut it.

Of course, not every company can afford a separate specialist for each role. A few roles can be merged, like copy and blog writing, photography and video content creation, graphic design and illustration, or even email and SEO marketing.

However, we recommend hiring members focused on each discipline if you have enough budget and plan to release big content volumes while using multiple marketing channels. Just one area – like SEO – includes many tasks like keyword research and integration, SEO content optimization, page speed improvement, title and description optimization, and overall URL optimization. And another example: PPC advertising. Here, a specialist has to run keyword research and audience analysis, create ad content and supervise the design, monitor campaign performance and optimize campaigns to get the best results. See? If you want in-depth expertise, a generic approach won’t do it.

So, what do you get out of hiring a marketing generalist? First, let’s note that instead of focusing on one or two disciplines like marketing specialists, generalists are more range than depth, and they extend their efforts across many areas within a company. What are the perks?