How Should You Structure a Marketing Department?

Marketing departments are fundamental to the success of any company, driving brand awareness and promotion, and attracting people to a business’s products or services.

With the dominance of social media, marketing departments — perhaps more than any other function of an organization — have had to undergo a seismic shift in the way they operate, namely in how they talk to customers and develop brand relationships. Now, marketing is inextricably fused with technology.

Marketers have had to adjust to analyzing data and talking to customers in real time, while finding ways to develop sustainable and long term relationships — no easy feat.

Look into the best ways to structure a marketing department to meet the new age of scrolling consumers.

The changing role of the marketing department

A marketing department is the face of the company and its main goal is to pull customers into a company’s orbit, implementing the strategies to encourage customer growth and brand development.

In our now social media obsessed world, marketing has been disrupted and has largely pivoted from product-focused to customer-focused, attempting to develop genuine and long lasting relationships with customers by speaking to them in a unified and relatable voice.

Data is collected and used in real time to develop these relationships, meaning the department now has deep ties to the work of technology teams. Companies have learnt that consumers form their opinions on a brand through each interaction they have with it, meaning the work of a marketing department is no longer siloed within one department, but affects departments companywide.

Within a marketing department, there are typically teams centered around paid marketing, search engine optimization, social media, content marketing, digital marketing, marketing channel, marketing campaigns, potential customers and business goals. These teams have typically worked relatively independently, but as times change so too do needs for internal collaboration.

Some the key roles in a marketing department

At the head of most marketing departments is the chief marketing officer. Traditionally CMOs looked after the marketing tech budget, but did not necessarily need to be an expert in tech. However, as times are changing so are the remits of the role.

CMOs increasingly need to be able to understand and use data in order to leverage it for customer and revenue growth, and some companies even have CMOs developing their own marketing technology stack.

Under the CMO there is typically a VP of marketing that works across teams to ensure alignment. As mentioned, there are often a range of teams within a marketing department and typical roles within those teams include: SEO specialist, analytics specialist, creative head, writer, brand manager, content strategist, marketing analyst, influence specialist, social media manager, marketing innovator, marketing director, content lead and marketing operations specialist.

As technology needs begin to dominate marketing strategy, marketing technologists are increasingly being employed to bridge the gap between marketing and tech teams, and chief digital officers are being used to build digital expertise and drive digital media channels.

Best ways to structure a marketing department

Marketing departments should always be customer focused and forward-looking, no matter how individual companies go about structuring them. In this day in age, many companies are choosing to integrate marketing teams within the department and also across other departments, rather than keeping teams siloed within their own remits. This can sometimes include an agile approach to marketing, where teams are built within tribes for specific projects rather than having concrete teams that stay the same.

These changing approaches come down to changing technologies and the way people consume advertising and company content. Consumers now stick to companies for life, and want transparency in and involvement with many aspects of a company’s operations. This means the company has to be able to talk to customers at every step of the way: a big job for marketers.

Unlike days gone by, when larger companies often had individual marketing teams within each business unit, marketing can no longer be structured around certain products or services and must be approached as a whole of company function organized around customer segments, Deloitte Australia partner and head of customer strategy and insight, Jenny Wilson, says.

Segment marketing is based on engaging the right group of customers and moving them through the purchase funnel using a range of marketing disciplines. Divisions are aligned around the same group of customers and insights, with the same goal.

Tien Tzuo, former chief marketing officer of Salesforce and founder of US-based subscription service provider Zuora, says that as companies become more customer-centric versus product-centric, “they need to start breaking down their functional silos to present a single view of the company to the customer.”

“As a result, there needs to be much more interaction between marketing and sales, between marketing and product, between marketing and customer service, and so on.

“In a business-to-business company, this sometimes means combining marketing and sales under one chief. In a business-to-consumer company, this sometimes means combining marketing and product (or technology) under one chief.” Tzuo adds that within marketing departments, the disintegration of silos is also required as public relations, brand, product marketing, demand generation and field marketing all blur together.

“The content that public relations drives is used by demand generation, and the messages are created by product marketing, and it all needs to be unified under one brand and one corporate identity.”

Adding to this, Tzuo says that marketing is now a “data-intensive and technology-enabled function,” and demands new skill sets.

Overall, marketing is no longer just about selling products and increasing revenue; it is at once a voice for the customer within a company and a source of intelligence that can be used companywide. In turn, marketing departments need to focus their structure on maximizing that unified voice and engaging and retaining market segments throughout their whole experience with a brand. And of course, keep those customers coming back.

How to restructure a marketing department

According to The Economist Intelligence Unit, four in five marketers believe teams need to be restructured to adapt to the changing marketing environment.

Marketing resource management software Simple has laid out six steps to help management departments tackle that restructure. They are:

Analyze the market

Use the market to inform a new flexible and forward-looking structure

Define current processes in detail

It is important to map out all current procedures at a granular level, including talking to key stakeholders to see where current processes are failing to meet consumer needs. This will inform what needs to be included in new processes.

Assess those processes against the company’s strategy and marketing goal

Doing this will allow you to see where current processes double up or don’t measure up to overall goals, and where there is room for new approaches and clarifying objectives.

Create models that align marketing structure with business strategy This needs to take into account the culture of the organization, and how a marketing structure can be designed to best fulfill the company’s needs.

Map the transition process

The transition process should detail all the steps between moving from the old approach to the new, but have room for agile and iterative change when it is needed.

Communicate why change is needed and drum up support

This communication should be aimed not just internally but also at key stakeholders, given support needs to come from all facets of the company and its consumers

Preparing for the future

There’s little doubt that within the changing marketing environment departments and the teams within them will have to become more agile and experimental, with the focus squarely set on the customer.

Segmentation looks set to become a marketing trend moving forward, but that does not mean there is a one-size-fits-all approach to structuring a marketing department. Each company must analyze their market and see how they could better communicate and understand their customer base, and then tailor a structure and approach to suit them and their stakeholders.

However, it seems clear that no matter the company scope or size, marketers now need to understand customer data and marketing technology in order to fulfill their roles in the modern ecosystem, and that is certainly the case for the CMO.