Why This Conversation Matters
Caribbean companies are failing before they even start — not because they don’t have good products, and not even because their campaigns are “bad.” The real problem is that their marketing teams are built on outdated structures that were never designed for today’s digital-first world.
For decades, outsourcing and vanity metrics carried us. The playbook was simple: hire an agency, run a few TV, radio, or newspaper ads, sponsor a trade show, and call it a success if you saw your logo everywhere. But that model is collapsing. Today, the world has shifted under our feet.
- AI is now the co-pilot for every marketer who knows how to use it.
- GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) is redefining search, as people move from Google to ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity to make decisions.
- Social commerce is turning platforms into full-blown sales engines.
- Community-led growth is outpacing one-off ads because loyalty and trust can’t be bought — they’re earned.
Yet in the Caribbean, too many businesses are still acting like it’s 2005. Teams are staffed with academics who learned marketing through textbooks, not practitioners who know how to execute in today’s landscape. The result? Companies celebrate “reach” or “likes” while their competitors abroad are measuring lifetime value, revenue per user, and retention lift.
Here’s the harsh truth: if your marketing team doesn’t understand SEO, GEO, ecommerce, data, community, and content, you are not even in the race. Posting three times a week on Instagram is not a strategy. Hoping an agency or an influencer skit can carry your brand is not a growth model.
This conversation matters because the gap is widening. The companies that redesign their teams for speed, strategy, and versatility will unlock new revenue streams and dominate their industries. The rest will keep outsourcing, keep counting vanity metrics, and eventually fade into irrelevance.
In this article, I want to give Caribbean businesses a blueprint.
I’ll break down what the ideal marketing team should look like for small, medium, and enterprise businesses. I’ll also map out the skills of the modern full-stack marketer — the type of professional every business, no matter the size, needs in its corner.
We need to learn how to build the right teams, with the right skills, so that Caribbean companies can finally compete on the global stage — and win.
2. Global Blueprint: How Marketing Teams Are Structured in 2025
One of the biggest misconceptions in the Caribbean is that there’s a single “right” way to build a marketing team. The truth is that team design depends on company size, resources, and goals. Globally, we’re seeing clear blueprints emerge — from lean cores in small businesses to agile squads in enterprises. And the common thread across all of them? AI is no longer optional; it’s baked into every stage of the workflow.
Small Business (1–3 People): The Agile Core
For small businesses, the marketing team looks less like a department and more like a scrappy strike force.
Core Roles:
- Founder/Director → sets the overall mission and brand direction.
- Full-Stack Marketer → the Swiss Army knife who manages strategy, content, ads, analytics, and community.
- Freelance Support → project-based specialists (design, video production, or web development).
How It Works:
- Operates lean, relying heavily on automation and AI tools like Zapier (for workflows), Notion AI (for content planning), and Jasper (for copywriting). These tools reduce repetitive tasks so the marketer can focus on execution and creativity.
- Keeps a tight feedback loop — strategy, execution, and analytics all run through 1–2 people, allowing rapid iteration and real-time decision-making.
- The full-stack marketer must also be a content repurposing machine. That means knowing how to shoot a video (even on a smartphone), edit it, and break it into multiple formats:
- One long-form video → short clips for TikTok, Instagram Reels, and YouTube Shorts.
- The transcript → a blog post optimized for SEO and GEO.
- Pull quotes → graphics for LinkedIn, X, or Pinterest.
- The audio → a podcast episode or micro-audio clip.
- With today’s AI editing apps, transcription tools, and design platforms, the heavy lifting is automated. A single marketer can transform one idea into dozens of digital assets and maintain presence across platforms.
Competitive Advantage:
Speed and scale without headcount. A small business can punch far above its weight by mastering repurposing and using AI to stay visible across channels (Search Solution Group, 2025).
Medium Business (3–7 People): The Specialized Pod
As businesses grow, the marketing team evolves into a pod of specialists. The challenge at this stage is producing more without losing agility.
Core Roles:
- Marketing Manager/CMO → ensures campaigns align with business goals and manages budgets.
- Content & Social Specialist → creates blogs, videos, graphics, and engages communities.
- Paid Media Manager → manages ad campaigns across Google, Meta, LinkedIn, TikTok.
- Data Analyst/Marketing Technologist → tracks KPIs, manages the tech stack, proves ROI.
How It Works:
- Members are T-shaped — each with deep expertise in one area but broad knowledge of others. This ensures collaboration and prevents silos.
- The content specialist drives repurposing workflows: one video or campaign concept becomes multi-format content across all channels.
- The data analyst feeds insights back into the loop, showing what formats, platforms, or hooks drive the most engagement or conversions.
- The paid media manager amplifies the best-performing content with targeted ads to scale results.
- Together, this pod structure balances creativity, execution, and data-driven refinement — a mix that turns marketing into a true growth engine (Factors Blog, 2025).
Competitive Advantage:
The team is small enough to stay nimble but big enough to specialize. The presence of data and ad specialists ensures marketing isn’t just about activity — it’s tied directly to growth and ROI.
Enterprise (7+ People): The Agile Squad Model
For enterprises, the old model of siloed departments (SEO team here, PR team there, social team over there) is dead weight. In 2025, global leaders are restructuring into cross-functional squads built around customer journeys and business objectives.
Core Roles Emerging:
- Growth Lead → orchestrates systems and automation to maximize revenue per user.
- Marketing Data Engineer → ensures clean, validated data pipelines for AI tools (no hallucinations or broken insights).
- AI Creative Specialist → part-artist, part-prompt engineer, producing high-performing content at scale.
How It Works:
- Squads are organized around outcomes like new customer acquisition or retention, not around single channels.
- AI handles much of the execution — from creative copy to competitor intelligence — while humans orchestrate, refine, and ensure brand safety (Writer, 2025).
- Repurposing scales even bigger here:
- An AI Creative Specialist can generate dozens of ad variations, video concepts, or product visuals in minutes.
- Data engineers ensure every campaign runs on clean, unified data pipelines, making personalization at scale possible.
- Growth leads focus on revenue lift and long-term value, not vanity metrics.
Case Studies in Action:
- Procter & Gamble cut 60% of its agency relationships, saving $750M, by insourcing more of its marketing (BCG, 2018).
- Unilever reduced content costs by 30% and sped up campaigns by 50% using AI-powered platforms (Pragmatic Digital, 2025).
- L’Oréal consolidated media buying with Google, boosting ad recall by 37% and view-through rates by 39% (Google Display & Video 360, 2025).
Competitive Advantage:
When enterprises adopt agile squads, they stop wasting time on disconnected campaigns and instead deliver personalized, consistent customer journeys at scale. This model makes marketing not just efficient but transformative — shifting from cost center to profit center.
👉🏾 What’s clear across all three levels — small, medium, and enterprise — is that team design is the new marketing strategy. Whether you’re a solopreneur with one full-stack marketer or a regional enterprise, your structure will determine your speed, your adaptability, and ultimately your growth.
3. The Rise of the Full-Stack Marketer
If there’s one role that defines modern marketing in 2025, it’s the full-stack marketer. But let me be clear: this isn’t just a buzzword or a fancy way of saying “jack of all trades.” The role has evolved into something much more strategic — the orchestrator of the entire funnel.
Whereas a generalist might dabble across channels without depth, the full-stack marketer understands how every piece connects — SEO, content, ads, analytics, community — and can build a system where each element feeds the other. They don’t have to be the best videographer, writer, or data scientist in the world. What makes them invaluable is that they know how to execute, integrate, and, most importantly, scale.
And I can tell you this from my own journey: I’ve been forced to be that full-stack marketer. As a solopreneur, I don’t have the luxury of a 20-person department or million-dollar budgets. But because I understand the principles — and because I know how to use the right mix of AI, software, and physical tools — I can take one idea and turn it into 100 pieces of content (I’ll be having a webinar on this soon).
- A single idea doesn’t just stay as a video for me — it becomes an entire content ecosystem.
- Video: I’ll start by recording it — that one video can go to YouTube, then be clipped down into Shorts, TikToks, Reels, and LinkedIn snippets.
- Audio: I strip the audio and now it’s a podcast episode, or I cut micro-clips for social audio bites.
- Written: I take the transcript, refine it, and it becomes a blog post for my website (optimized for SEO/GEO). That same piece can be reshaped into a newspaper column or a LinkedIn article.
- Media: Key ideas can be pitched as angles for my radio show or a TV segment, so I’m hitting traditional audiences too.
- Community: Parts of that same content can become an email newsletter issue, or a series of posts inside my community platforms.
- Social Assets: Pull quotes, stats, or frameworks from the idea get turned into graphics, carousels, or quick posts across Facebook, Twitter/X, and Instagram.
- And here’s where the loop gets powerful: I look at analytics from each platform to see what resonated. Maybe a line in the podcast clip gets people talking, or a chart from the blog drives LinkedIn engagement. That tells me what to double down on, what to refine, and how to spin off new angles.
👉🏾 So from one idea, I can create a dozen touchpoints across video, audio, written, social, and traditional media. This isn’t theory — this is exactly how I run my brand every day.
This is why I’m so blunt when I challenge Caribbean companies: if one solopreneur can do this without a corporate budget, then what excuse does a multimillion-dollar company have for not showing up consistently online?
Defining the Full-Stack Marketer (2025)
- They are the central nervous system of lean teams.
- They research, strategize, execute, analyze, and adapt — without silos or bottlenecks.
- Their superpower is repurposing: turning one asset into many, stretching ideas across every channel customers use.
- In a world where AI handles much of the grunt work, the full-stack marketer adds value by knowing what to ask for, how to feed AI clean data, and how to transform AI outputs into strategy.
(Mondo, 2025)
Essential Skills for the Full-Stack Marketer
- Data & Analytics
- Interpreting data is more important than simply reporting it. Full-stack marketers see cause-and-effect, forecast trends, and connect campaigns to ROI.
- Tools: Google Analytics, Adverity, predictive analytics.
- AI & Automation
- Comfortable with Jasper (copywriting), Zapier (workflows), Notion AI (planning), Synthesia (video).
- Understands how to train AI systems, not just use them — because garbage inputs = garbage outputs.
- Content Creation & Strategy
- Capable of producing blogs, videos, podcasts, graphics.
- More importantly: understands repurposing workflows — one long video = multiple shorts, blogs, social posts, and even podcasts.
- (This is exactly how I run my own brand: I squeeze every ounce of value from one idea.)
- Every piece of content is a Compounding Asset for your business when done correctly.
- Paid Ads
- Proficient in Meta, Google, LinkedIn, TikTok Ads.
- Optimizes for and can show ROI (Sales/Leads), not vanity metrics.
- SEO + GEO
- Solid in SEO, but also understands Generative Engine Optimization — optimizing content so AI tools like ChatGPT and Gemini cite you in responses.
- This is especially crucial for Caribbean businesses, since we’re barely represented in global search results (because we do not produce searchable content).
Global Market Insights: Salaries & Demand
The demand for full-stack marketers is exploding because companies want leaner teams with bigger impact.
- United States: $89K–$96K annually (ZipRecruiter, 2025).
- Europe: ~$96K (BeInCrypto, 2025).
- Singapore: ~$88K (SecondTalent, 2025).
- Australia: ~$81K (SEEK, 2025).
But here’s where I bring it home: Caribbean companies are nowhere near paying these rates — and that’s part of the problem. Too many still want one underpaid marketer to handle six specializations, without investing in the tools, training, or support to succeed. This isn’t about overpaying; it’s about paying for value and portfolio, not paper credentials.
Case Studies: Lean Teams in Action
- A small team of full-stack marketers at Lazarus Design Team drove $24M in pipeline value in one year for a client by owning the digital funnel end-to-end (Lazarus Design Team, 2025).
- Zappos and Dropbox both scaled by leaning on marketers who could wear multiple hats, rapidly testing and iterating with small teams (iSixSigma, 2025).
- My own journey mirrors this: as a solopreneur, I’ve built a digital presence that spans podcasts, YouTube, news columns, lecturing at universities and workshops — all by leveraging a full-stack approach plus AI. Caribbean companies could achieve the same (and more) if they structured their teams right.
Why This Matters for the Caribbean
The Caribbean can’t afford bloated marketing departments. Budgets are tight, and talent pipelines are thin. But what every company can afford is at least one full-stack marketer at the core. Without them, you don’t even have the basics in place:
- No blogs → no SEO.
- No web content → no GEO presence.
- No repurposing workflows → wasted effort.
- No data literacy → just vanity metrics.
The reality is simple: the full-stack marketer is the bridge between today’s digital complexity and tomorrow’s opportunities. And in the Caribbean, where most companies are still playing outdated games, having one can be the difference between irrelevance and market leadership.
4. Why In-House Beats Outsourcing (But Hybrid Wins)
Here’s the thing — I’ve been saying this for years: outsourcing is increasingly becoming a liability and a handicap.
In the Caribbean, we’ve leaned so hard on agencies that it’s become the default answer: “Oh, we’ll hire an agency to run the ads, shoot the video, design the graphics.” But let me ask you — how has that really worked out?
Nine times out of ten, here’s what I see:
- The internal team pushes vanity metrics because that’s all they know.
- The agency takes the brief, creates something splashy, runs some ads, and maybe you see likes or views.
- But nobody is building out the assets you actually need: your blog, your SEO/GEO strategy, your email and push lists, your analytics setup, your ecommerce integration.
So what happens? The company is still in the same place next quarter — except with a lighter bank account.
Now, I’m not saying agencies are useless. There’s a place for outsourcing. You should bring in outside help when you need niche expertise or extra capacity. I’ve done it myself. But if you don’t have the right in-house core team that understands your brand, your data, and your strategy, then outsourcing is just putting a plaster on a bullet wound.
Globally, we’re seeing companies wake up to this.
- The Association of National Advertisers (ANA) reported that 82% of its members now have an in-house agency — up from just 42% in 2008 (ANA, 2023).
- Procter & Gamble cut 60% of its agency relationships and saved $750M in fees by bringing media buying in-house (BCG, 2018).
- Unilever reduced content costs by 30% and sped up campaigns by 50% using an AI-powered in-house content platform (Pragmatic Digital, 2025).
- L’Oréal consolidated media buying with Google, boosting ad recall by 37% (Google Display & Video 360, 2025).
These case studies show a clear shift: companies want more control, speed, and data ownership.
And let’s pause on that last one for a second: data.
If your marketing team doesn’t own your customer data, you don’t own your customer relationships. Full stop. Outsourcing often means your data is sitting in someone else’s system, and they decide what you get to see. That doesn’t work in 2025, where personalization and AI-driven campaigns are the difference between relevance and invisibility.
So what’s the solution?
- Build your in-house brain trust: strategist, content executor, and community/ads manager.
- Outsource selectively: the big video shoot, the complex web dev project, the overflow work when your team is maxed.
- But never outsource the core strategy and customer understanding. That has to live inside your business.
Because here’s the reality: agencies can’t keep up with the speed and depth of execution that digital requires today. Heck, the agencies can’t keep up with the amount of content and touchpoints that your brand needs in order to succeed digitally and be doing that for multiple clients. If you’re waiting two weeks for a content calendar approval, you’re already behind. And if your team doesn’t know how to adapt in real-time, then no external partner will save you.
👉🏾 The companies that win in 2025 — Caribbean or global — are the ones that build the right in-house teams and use outsourcing as a supplement, not a crutch.
5. My Caribbean Blueprint: Minimum Viable Teams
Alright, so let’s get practical. I’ve spent years auditing companies across Trinidad, the wider Caribbean, and now comparing what I see here in Asia. The truth is simple: most of our businesses in the region don’t need a 20-person marketing department. What they need is a core team that can actually execute.
If you’re serious about competing in 2025, here’s what I’d tell you to build at minimum.
Small/Medium Businesses (the majority in the Caribbean)
You don’t need a bloated team. You need three people, and if you have these three, you will punch way above your weight.
- Digital Strategist / Data Researcher
- This is the brain. They connect your marketing to your business objectives.
- They’re not here to chase likes — they’re here to prove ROI, build funnels, and make sure your marketing dollars are tied to revenue.
- Content Executor
- This person knows how to take one idea and explode it into multiple content assets.
- Shoot a video, cut it into shorts, pull the transcript for a blog, repurpose quotes into graphics, clip audio into a podcast.
- With today’s AI tools, the heavy lifting is done for you. But you need someone who understands the process and is disciplined about executing it daily.
- Community + Ads Manager
- Handles engagement, email lists, push notifications, and keeps the conversation alive with your audience.
- Also knows how to run and optimize paid campaigns across Google, Meta, TikTok, LinkedIn — because ads without community are wasted spend.
👉🏾 Put these three roles together and you’ll immediately leapfrog 90% of businesses in the Caribbean, because let’s be honest — most companies in the region are still running on one overworked “social media person” and calling it a day.
Enterprises (Banks, Telcos, Retail Giants in the Caribbean)
Now, let’s be real: when I talk about dismantling silos, I’m not talking about Caribbean companies having “SEO teams” and “social media teams” that don’t communicate — because the truth is, most of our enterprises don’t even have that level of specialization.
Here’s what the typical Caribbean enterprise marketing team actually looks like:
- A handful of people who know how to organize trade shows, buy ads on TV, radio, or newspapers, and manage relationships with agencies.
- Maybe one or two “digital people” thrown in, but they’re usually tasked with posting on social media and nothing more.
- SEO? Treated as a line item — something the “social media person” is supposed to magically figure out on top of everything else.
- Ecommerce, content strategy, CRM, automation, GEO? For the most part, completely missing.
That’s the reality. And it’s why so many of our biggest enterprises are struggling to stay relevant in digital.
What Needs to Change:
Caribbean enterprises can’t keep pretending that “having a Facebook page” means they’re digital-first. If they want to compete in today’s landscape, they have to:
- Rebuild their teams from the ground up. The old trade-show/media-buying setup doesn’t translate to an AI-driven, data-first economy. I’d rather see companies go to agencies that specialize in trade shows or media buying, but internally, this shouldn’t be a focus.
- Create agile squads organized around outcomes — like customer acquisition, customer retention, or product adoption — instead of events and vanity campaigns.
- Introduce new roles that reflect modern marketing realities:
- Growth Lead → focuses on incremental revenue and customer lifetime value, not just campaign impressions.
- Marketing Data Engineer → ensures clean, reliable data so AI tools and analytics actually produce insights.
- AI Creative Specialist → a hybrid of visual creator and prompt engineer, generating high-performing creative at scale.
Why It Matters:
Right now, enterprises in the Caribbean are being outpaced by leaner businesses and even solopreneurs who know how to execute digital strategy. If you’re a bank, telco, or large retailer and your marketing team is still built around trade shows and agency management, you’re already behind.
The companies that make the shift will start unlocking new revenue streams, faster execution, and a level of personalization that Caribbean customers have been waiting for. The ones that don’t? They’ll keep burning budgets while customers move on to brands that actually show up where they live — online.
6. Mindset Shifts Caribbean CEOs Must Make
Here’s where I need to be blunt: most of the problems with marketing teams in the Caribbean don’t actually start in the marketing department. They start in the C-Suite.
Too many CEOs and executives still see marketing as a cost center, not the growth engine of the business. They’re measuring success in impressions, likes, or how many times they saw their ad in the newspaper instead of actual ROI. And because of that, they’re building the wrong teams before the race even begins.
If you’re a Caribbean CEO and you want to future-proof your business, you need to change the way you think about marketing. Here are the key mindset shifts:
1. Forget Vanity Metrics
Stop celebrating “reach” and “likes.” Those numbers don’t pay salaries, they don’t open new revenue streams, and they don’t build long-term loyalty. Marketing in 2025 is about lifetime value, retention lift, and conversion. If your team can’t show you how their efforts tie to revenue, you don’t have a marketing strategy — you have noise.
2. Stop Hiring for Degrees — Hire for Portfolios
A marketing degree in 2025 doesn’t prove someone can navigate AI, GEO, or content ecosystems. The tools change too quickly. I’ve seen too many resumes with lists of qualifications and “big brands” like Coca-Cola or Nestlé. That’s nice, but global conglomerates don’t need you to build their brand — they already come with authority. Show me your portfolio.
- Your website.
- Your analytics.
- Your content.
- The smaller businesses you’ve actually moved the needle for.
That’s how I know you can execute today, not just live off what you did five years ago.
3. Educate Yourself Before You Hire
If you don’t understand how marketing works today, you’ll keep building the wrong teams. And to be honest, a lot of CEOs and execs in the Caribbean are guilty of this. They expect one marketer to do six specializations or they outsource strategy completely.
Start with education. Here are four books I recommend for every CEO or C-Suite leader who wants to understand the current landscape:
- Day Trading Attention — Gary Vaynerchuk (faster than most MBAs on marketing today).
- You Ask, They Answer — Marcus Sheridan (shows how purposeful content wins in search and now GEO).
- Content Inc — Joe Pulizzi (the bible on understanding the business of content).
- The New Rules of PR & Marketing, 9th Ed. — David Meerman Scott (teaches how to blend traditional and digital media; a game-changer in my own career).
4. Speed is Non-Negotiable
Caribbean companies often act like the market will wait for them. It won’t. The difference between winning and losing is often execution speed. If your team is waiting weeks for approvals or struggling because they don’t have the tools or skills, you’re already behind.
5. Own Your Data
If your marketing data lives with an agency, you don’t own your customer relationship. Period. The companies that win in 2025 will be the ones that control their data, personalize at scale, and act in real time.
👉🏾 Until CEOs and C-Suite leaders in the Caribbean embrace these shifts, no amount of outsourcing, rebranding, or influencer campaigns will save them. The companies that get it will not only compete — they’ll dominate, because the bar is currently set so low.
7. The Advantage of Getting This Right
Here’s the part Caribbean business leaders need to sit with: if you build the right marketing team today, you will obliterate your competition.
I don’t say that lightly. I’ve seen it with my own eyes — the gap is so wide that any company in the region that gets this right will have a field day. Why? Because most of your competitors aren’t even in the race. They’re still posting three times a week on social media and calling that “digital strategy.”
But when you rebuild your marketing team around strategy, data, content, and community, and when you layer in AI, GEO, and automation — you unlock advantages that compound fast:
- New revenue streams that never existed before.
- Relevance and leadership in your industry because you’re showing up everywhere that matters.
- A loyal community that buys from you repeatedly, talks about you, and advocates for you.
This isn’t about keeping up anymore — it’s about setting the pace. A properly structured team doesn’t just help you run campaigns; it turns your marketing into a growth engine.
And here’s the kicker: you don’t need a massive department. You don’t need 15 approvals for a single post. You don’t need to keep throwing money at agencies without building internal capacity. What you need is the right structure, the right mindset, and the courage to upskill your people.
The blueprint is simple:
- Small businesses: lean, versatile teams built around a full-stack marketer.
- Medium businesses: specialized pods that balance creativity, data, and growth.
- Enterprises: agile squads that prioritize outcomes and put AI + data at the center.
The future belongs to the companies that understand this. The ones that don’t will keep chasing vanity metrics while the market passes them by.
👉🏾 The question is: will your business be the one setting the pace — or will you still be waiting for the race to start?
If you are looking for assistance in building your marketing team or upskilling your team, reach out to me here —-> Contact Me.