How is your marketing organised?

Marketing teams must become strategic partners in driving your company's growth objectives. Yet, the increased enterprise costs, tighter marketing budgets and the continued repercussions of resignation are some of the concerns CMOs face as they examine their marketing organisations. To combat these challenges, you must rethink your organisational structure, the key responsibilities, skill sets, headcount, and goals to ensure your marketing organisation's success.

While the turmoil at the height of the pandemic has faded, most marketing functions have faced disruption. Increasing enterprise costs, marketing budgets, and the continued repercussions of resignation are just some of the concerns CMOs face as they question their organisations. To shape your marketing function, leaders must account for these new realities in their long-term plans. 

How to organise your marketing

These are my four main pieces of advice to give you some guidance.

Weigh the pros and cons of centralisation 

Centralisation is not a new concept in marketing. However, the pace of centralisation has quickened due to various operational excellence issues — such as prioritisation, workflows and collaboration. Centralisation often promises greater control and economies of scale, but it's important to remember that each structure brings both benefits and drawbacks. First, place your organisational decisions in a strategic context: make trade-offs based on restructuring objectives, capability gaps and cultural realities.

Identify value-added responsibilities

Marketing's sole responsibilities for marketing operations, strategy and marketing-led innovation are increasing, while duties for creative development, resource management, content tagging and MarTech management are decreasing. In the years ahead, you must identify the responsibilities that marketing can afford to cede and those you must fight to ensure marketing plays an active role in future-forward enterprise value creation.

Acquire skills to support evolving customer journeys

As the customer journeys become more complex, you must develop and recruit new skill sets to support these journeys and, at the same time, maintain a creative and collaborative culture in the new hybrid work environment. With increased competition for talent and in the face of resignation, the talent challenge is amplified. Regardless, teams are growing and significantly more extensive as the year progresses. 

Grow your business influence  

It's not just about building a more modern marketing organisation but ultimately aligning marketing to overall business goals, growth and innovation. It's critical to increase executive-level influence to include the CEO, CFO, CIO or CDO, so marketing doesn't have to work hard to prove its value to your company. If you're running a tight organisation that repeatedly delivers on business outcomes, marketing's value isn’t questioned because it is demonstrated daily. If not, get started.