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Digital marketing has evolved. Digital technologies have changed marketing strategies, processes, and outreach.
The marketing department has become a hub for activity. Marketers engage customers and influence them at various funnel stages, from lead generation to customer value and community management.
Marketing is at the core of all successful digital businesses. It plays a vital role in their growth and success.
How should marketing departments be structured in light of the new digital technologies?
While technology is essential to digital transformation, organizational and functional issues are critical. Marketing departments need to address these issues for the transformational vision to thrive. Modern marketing teams must align and structure their people, processes, and partners.
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In the digital age, new teams and roles appear while others disappear. As part of an influential people strategy, it is essential to maintain the skillsets that are changing.
You can organize your teams based on everyday tasks by structuring your marketing team based on functional expertise. The C-suite can act as an orchestrator to bring together employees with different focus types. The Orchestrator Model is popular. To make this model work, it is essential to group marketing expertise into “think,” “feel,” and “do.”
Tom de Baere is the managing partner of Invisible Puppy. He says that for this model to be successful today, it requires expertise in these areas:
Insights and Analytics: Provide market, customer, and product insights to marketing and sales to make analytically-based decisions
Customer Experience and Marketing Innovation: Responsible for identifying segments of customers, developing customer experience strategies, and promoting customer-focused marketing innovations to promote “customer-first marketing.”
Marketing Strategy and Planning: Responsible for setting up the marketing strategy, an annual marketing plan, budgets, and a high-level campaign calendar based on priority.
Marketing Operations: The marketing execution arm, which provides program management, agency and marketing tool management, process improvement, print and fulfillment, and reporting.
Marketing technology: The increasing complexity of digital marketing calls for expertise in marketing and marketing technologies.
This method of organizing your team can be problematic. Silos constitute a significant problem for businesses, as they lead to various tactics and mini strategies that don’t work well together.
T-shaped marketers are a solution. They have a vast knowledge of digital tactics and a deep specialization in one or two. You can achieve this by hiring new talent or upskilling existing employees. It is especially effective when employees are motivated by results and can work well with others.
Processes
Collaboration is a critical element of modern marketing, as we have discussed. If departments are to experiment and drive change, they must be willing to work together. Some teams are adopting agile processes to break down organizational silos.
Structure your marketing department with a data-driven strategy to help your team adapt to the digital age. Data is a revolutionary tool for building insights and growth. Open data access can empower teams with data-savvy skills.
Google’s Think with Google marketing insight arm offers three models to data-driven marketers:
Model of the center-of-excellence: A central digital expert (or a team) documents and establishes all guidelines and processes. This is a good option for companies that need an analytics team in some divisions.
Model of distributed teams: analysts are embedded within the various groups and locations in the company. Senior management can focus on overseeing without micromanaging data.
Model hub-and-spoke: A combination of previous models for organizations with adequate budgets and infrastructure. Encourages coordination between central management and divisions.
In addition, data-driven marketing can be more effective. High-performing marketing teams use AI more than three times as often.
This allows teams to personalize the experience at each customer journey stage. The algorithms can find correlations within vast and impenetrable data repositories and can be used to predict customer behavior, preferences, and desired experiences.
Successful marketing teams need to innovate through data to keep up with the customer’s expectations, which are increasing as technology advances.
Partners
It is crucial to have a fluid third-party organization to support the evolution of your marketing team. While many agencies and consultants work with marketing departments to guide the transformation of their people and processes, other companies abandon their partners and focus on developing their skills in-house. It’s all about flexibility to ensure a smooth journey for customers.
Amanda Rendle explains the consequences of an external partner losing their ability to adapt. Most agencies cannot fuse technology with creativity. They still see social media as a campaign tool rather than a way to engage with customers. They need to understand the customer journey, which is a problem entirely. Advertising agencies will become more limited if agencies do not come up with solutions that encompass the entire customer journey.
You can ensure you pay attention to everything by organizing your marketing department according to the customer journey. This structure comprises divisions led by “hub persons” with a broad understanding of strategies and tactics. They are responsible for taking a brief and finding the best solution to an integrated campaign. Using a combination of skills rather than a single channel is essential. This reinforces silos.
This strategy allows different disciplines to work together. It also helps all members feel validated and recognized, as it avoids an unhelpful hierarchy between skill sets. This is an excellent way to develop employees who are strong collaborators despite their specialism.
The conclusion of the article is
This article discussed some tried and tested ways to build a successful digital marketing team. How you structure your team to achieve the best results depends on what your business requires.
We have seen that aligning organizational structures with functional expertise is a common type of structure. Tom de Baere’s list, while it may create silos in your organization, will ensure that your team’s expertise covers all areas necessary for a modern marketing department. This list of skills, paired with T-shaped employees and training existing talent in communication and collaboration, will help create an environment hostile to silos.
In the digital age, data strategy has become even more critical. In today’s environment, it is essential to structure your marketing department around a data-driven approach. If you can do so, developing your AI capabilities to improve your marketing and customer experience is highly recommended.
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