How is your marketing organised?

As your business evolves, your marketing team must adapt and become instrumental in achieving your growth objectives. Current challenges, such as rising enterprise costs, constrained marketing budgets, and ongoing employee turnover effects, pose significant questions for CMOs assessing their marketing structures. To navigate these hurdles, a thorough examination and possible revision of your organisation's structure, roles, skills, personnel, and objectives are crucial to the success of your marketing endeavour.

Even though the chaos of the pandemic has receded, numerous marketing operations have experienced disruption. Elevated enterprise costs, marketing budgetary constraints, and the ripple effects of employee departures present persistent issues that CMOs must address in their organisations. Leaders must incorporate these evolving realities into long-term strategies to craft a resilient marketing function.

Streamlining your marketing efforts

Here are four key pieces of advice to guide your strategic planning.

Benefits and drawbacks of centralisation 

Although centralisation is a familiar idea in marketing, its adoption has accelerated due to certain operational excellence challenges, including priority setting, workflow management, and collaboration. Centralisation can offer superior control and economic efficiencies, yet it's critical to understand each structure's potential advantages and disadvantages. Initiate strategic organisational decisions: consider trade-offs based on restructuring objectives, competency gaps, and cultural dynamics.

Pinpoint key responsibilities

The exclusive responsibilities for marketing operations, strategy, and marketing-led innovation are rising, while the tasks for creative development, resource management, content tagging, and MarTech management are declining. Looking forward, it's important to identify the duties that marketing can afford to relinquish and the ones it must maintain to ensure marketing continues to play an active role in enterprise value creation.

Develop skills aligned with evolving customer journeys

As customer journeys grow more intricate, you must cultivate and acquire new skill sets to support these paths while fostering a creative and cooperative culture in the new hybrid workspace. The pursuit of talent is becoming more competitive, and the impact of staff turnover intensifies this challenge. Nevertheless, teams are expanding in size as the year progresses. 

Expand your business influence  

Aim to establish a contemporary marketing organisation that aligns with your broader business objectives, growth, and innovation. Growing executive-level influence should incorporate key stakeholders like the CEO, CFO, CIO or CDO so that marketing's value to your company is recognised and not continually put to the test. If your organisation consistently delivers on business outcomes, the worth of marketing won't be questioned but proven day after day. If you're not there yet, it's time to make a start.