Marketing Organization

A marketing organization refers to the way a business’s marketing department is structured and designed. It takes into account the roles and responsibilities of marketing within the framework of the business’s strategic objectives. An effective marketing organization delivers a strong focus on driving customer engagement and retention through a project-centric work style. 

Due to the flattening of organizational structures, increased adoption of dynamic, adaptable work environments is required to lead and manage the marketing organization of tomorrow, as well as establish a marketing team capable of strong internal and external collaboration.

The effectiveness of marketing organizational structures depends on the right mix of critical skills and talent aligned to business objectives and goals. This enables effective management of outsourced talent (agency and service providers) and marketing operations.

Marketing delivers measurable value to an organization. You can have the best product or service in the world, but without an effective marketing strategy, no one will know about it, and your business goals will fail. 

Marketing operations works to establish the processes and tools that power marketing planning, investment, campaign execution and performance measurement. From this vantage point, business leaders can review the performance of a product or service marketing strategy and identify improvements to drive a more successful campaign, ultimately achieving broader business goals. 

The more effective your marketing strategy is, the more successful your business strategy will be.

Marketing leaders in the evolving digital landscape need to optimize their organizational structure by transforming their existing project management approach. This means using agile marketing practices to build a more scalable, flexible and resilient marketing organization.

Agile marketing is a flexible approach to managing marketing projects that uses frequent iterations to test and learn, enabling responsiveness to change. One of the core agile principles is frequent calibration of work and resources, which enables marketers to more quickly adapt to disruption and effectively change course as needed. Agile marketing planning is about setting a simple primary goal and adjusting details over time by iterating continually based on feedback from your team, your customers and your analytics.

For greater flexibility and agility within marketing organizations, marketing team members should be able to “toggle” between roles, filling gaps where required on individual campaigns or projects. That means they should be capable of leading one project, contributing to another, and planning or collaborating on multiple initiatives.

Here are 4 steps for integrating an agile approach into your marketing strategy.

Your objective should be to build a balanced portfolio strategy, ensuring that safer bets such as servicing existing customers and driving repeat purchases are balanced with more transformative options. Most marketing organizations consider brand strategy the most important marketing capability, followed by marketing analytics, marketing operations, digital commerce, and market research and competitive insights.

The metrics you focus on also shape the customer experiences you deliver. At the top of the list is return on investment, with marketing qualified leads a close second. Sales qualified leads and conversion rate are additional critical metrics.