How to choose a marketing organization structure

Choosing the right marketing organizational structure can help you strategically align your team to perform well and get the results you’re looking for from your marketing strategy.

And guess what? We know what the secret sauce is.

Whatever your business size (whether you’re a startup or enterprise), if you want your marketing team to be forward-thinking, dynamic and always ahead of the curve, it’s time to shift from traditional hierarchies and say goodbye to silos.

Today’s modern marketing teams need to be fluid and have regular interactions with the other parts of the organization, including sales, product, technology, and HR.

Here’s everything you need to know about choosing the right marketing team structure for your business needs.

6 types of marketing organizational structures

To rethink your marketing department, first, let’s look at some of the popular marketing organization structures so you can get a sense of your options:

1. Functional

Probably the most common type of marketing organization structures, a functional structure usually means there is a VP of Marketing or the Chief Marketing Officer overseeing different marketing functions. This can include digital marketing, product marketing, corporate communications, and so on. Within those divisions, you’ll have team members (including a team lead) with specific skill sets who perform specific tasks.

But here’s the deal: there’s a real tendency for this structure to create the silos we warned you against, which can result in losing a cohesive brand voice and ultimately, impact the customer journey.

2. Segment-based

Based on customer segments, this type of marketing organizational structure would require different teams based on industry or target audience. A popular choice within large enterprise companies, a segment-based marketing team structure might mean a B2B group and a B2C group, for example.

3. Geographical divisions

For companies with a large footprint, structuring teams based on locations like districts or regions might be necessary. This allows for more location-based personalization and marketing localization... very beneficial to the customer experience, may we add.

4. Product-based

If you’re a company that offers multiple product lines or solutions, you may choose to have dedicated marketing teams for each specific product.

🚨 Warning: Be careful not to fall into the trap of forgetting about the customer.

Perfecting your messaging and marketing with the customer in mind is crucial to the customer journey, and don’t you forget it.

5. Customer-focused

Some organizations divide the marketing teams based on the stage of the customer funnel they are working on such as acquisition, engagement, conversion, and retention. This ensures more personalized content for your customers as they move further down the funnel, helping with conversion.

6. Hybrid

In most modern marketing teams, the sweet spot is combining elements of different org structures. Taking a pinch from the different types of marketing organization structures, you can really tailor your own team structure to optimize your marketing efforts and meet those all-important business objectives.

How to decide which marketing organization structure is right for you

When it comes to deciding what the most successful marketing team structure would be for you, the first thing you need to do is assess your current marketing functions.

Here are some questions to ask yourself:

• How much content is being created in-house versus outsourced?

• Who’s involved in that content creation and distribution?

• Is there a separate social media team?

• What about email newsletter campaigns?

• Are marketing managers responsible for analytics, or someone more specialized?

• Who’s doing the SEO keyword research?

• Who’s coming up with a content strategy and specific content ideas?

• Who’s managing the workflow and the editorial calendar?

• Is anyone measuring performance or conducting up A/B testing?

In small businesses, a few people might be taking on more than one of these tasks each, but as companies scale and become larger organizations, people will take on more specialized roles.

Once you think through your functional team members, list out their responsibilities, and decide who’s accountable for various marketing activities, your marketing organization structure will start to come together.

Key attributes of modern marketing teams

Now you have your marketing goals, a killer marketing strategy, an effective marketing team structure to help meet those goals... what’s next? For one, making sure your team is aligned on key attributes for success.

Here are the key values we suggest your marketing team thrives on:

1. Be customer-centric

Instead of promoting products, marketing teams start by listening to customers and responding to their pain points and needs.

2. Make sure everything is centralized

It’s important to break free of silos. Everyone should have access to and be collaborating on the same systems.

3. Focus on growth

The CMO should be treated as an equal partner in the C-suite so that the marketing function can become an integral part of the company’s growth strategy .

4. Prioritize data-driven decision-making

Marketing leaders can connect with IT leaders like the CIO and CTO, so data and business intelligence can be shared and understood.

What a marketing department structure can look like

Though the same job titles might look totally different from one business to another, these are some of the most common positions or stakeholders that you’ll find within the typical marketing team structure:

1. CMO (Chief Marketing Officer): Sometimes called VP of Marketing, the CMO is the executive-level head of the marketing department

2. Content manager: The content manager handles content project management, overseeing all the content creation, content templates and optimization efforts within in the team

3. Head of Digital: This role focuses on the whole digital experience, including the company website, social media, apps and other channels

4. Marketing technologist: Working heavily with the IT department, a marketing technologist or marketing operations uses data to drive marketing decisions (eg. email marketing)

5. SEO specialist: Taking on all things ‘search’, an SEO specialist will contribute to the content strategy to drive more organic traffic to the site

6. Marketing operations manager: The markops manager will stay on top of that, as well as workflow and productivity to make sure everyone is working at maximum efficiency

7. Community manager: This is all about engaging and connecting with customers on social media, review sites and other platforms

8. Demand generation manager: The main duties of this role is generating leads, converting leads to sales, and improving customer retention using different techniques

9. Growth marketer: A growth marketer is responsible for optimizing and improving all parts of the customer experience to enhance conversion and retention rates

10. Marketing research director: As an analytical role, this involves diving deep into market research to inform new marketing strategies and business goals.

As we said, these are just common marketing department titles so if you don’t have them, no need to call the recruiters in just yet. The roles you have and the titles you choose depend on you as a company as, of course, every company is unique.

Streamline your marketing efforts

Enough about job titles now — let’s talk marketing team alignment. For agile marketing and business growth, yes, you need the right marketing organization structure, but you also need the right tools to allow you to work in unison and towards the same business goals.

An integrated martech stack is the answer.

Optimizely Content Marketing Platform is a project management tool that streamlines your entire content lifecycle, from end-to-end. That means your team has complete transparency from ideation through to production, from publish through to analytics — yep, there really is something for the whole team to enjoy.

Not only does it enhance team transparency (and a whole lot less messaging about “where is this at?”, etc) but it offers a centralized digital asset management system to make everyone’s lives a lot easier too.

Sounds good right? Find out more about Optimizely Content Marketing Platform.