Building the Ideal Marketing Team Structure: A Comprehensive Guide

Are you struggling to find the right marketing experts for your business? Are you uncertain about when to bring a CMO on board, or how your marketing team will adapt as your business grows? No need to fret! I’m here to assist you in constructing your next significant venture with confidence and ease.

Understanding the Role of a Marketing Team

Before delving into the details of the ideal marketing team structure, it’s vital to define the role of a marketing team in a business. At its core, the primary responsibility of a marketing team is to identify the most profitable market opportunities for a company.

Once these opportunities are identified, the marketing team develops and implements strategies to engage potential customers and draw them into the sales funnel. This process involves four key strategic marketing initiatives:

1. Segmentation: How will you divide your market? Which segments are most appealing?
2. Positioning: Are you creating a new category? If not, how will you differentiate from competitors in the existing category?
3. Value Proposition: What are the key messages you want to promote? What’s your pricing strategy?
4. Go-to-market Strategy: How will you implement your marketing plan? What steps will you take?

Daily Responsibilities of a Marketing Team

Now that we understand the general role of a marketing team let’s delve into their day-to-day responsibilities. The marketing team members work in harmony to define their ideal customers and produce targeted messaging for them in both paid and organic channels.

This messaging helps brands to stay at the forefront of the customers’ minds throughout the buying process, from initial interest to purchase. A popular framework that marketers often use to guide this process is the AIDA model. AIDA is an acronym for Awareness, Interest, Desire, and Action. Each word represents a different stage of the buying process and poses a different messaging challenge for marketers.

Identifying Key Marketing Needs

Before recruiting marketers, it’s crucial to identify a few top-priority projects for them to tackle. Ask yourself the following questions to identify these needs:

1. What balance do I need to strike between “demand” and “brand”?
2. How many segments is the company targeting?
3. Is design and creative a full-time hire or can it be outsourced?

Once you’ve answered these questions, you’re ready to explore potential marketing positions and marketing team structures.

In-demand Marketing Skills

In the modern business landscape, digital marketing skills are highly sought after. Apart from the expected shift towards digital, newer marketing roles like marketing operations and demand generation are fast gaining popularity.

Growth marketers, who often lead digital channel exploration, continue to dominate marketer hiring demand. So, if you’re looking to build a marketing team structure for your startup marketing venture, remember to prioritize hiring growth marketers.

Common Marketing Titles

When building your marketing team, consider the following common marketing titles:

Leadership Roles:

• CMO/VP
• Directors
• Team leads

Contributor Roles:

• Writers
• Designers
• Data analysts
• Digital marketers
• Growth marketers
• Specialists (SEO, CRO, Email, Social, PR, Automations)

However, feel free to create new roles and titles as needed. For instance, marketing automation and growth marketing are both growing fields that might necessitate new standard roles.

What to Look for When Hiring a Marketer

When hiring a marketer, it’s essential to focus less on marketing proficiency and more on work ethic. Look for marketers who are smart, responsible, hardworking, and capable of figuring things out independently.

Avoid hiring “nice to have” employees. It’s better to wait for the perfect candidate than to rush and hire the wrong one. Use your network for recruiting as it can increase your chances of finding a good fit.

How to Start Building a Modern Marketing Team

Building an effective marketing team structure requires a strategic approach. Depending on your business stage, goals, and resources, you may consider different team structures. Here are a few examples:

1. Early Stage: Hire experienced folks who can use tools and agencies to test things quickly. This stage aims to discover early indicators of what will be the winning value propositions, channels, and product flows for your brand. If you hire less experienced people at this stage, you might struggle to get things done at a good pace. This is because anybody starting out will take time to learn the intricacies of the tools and resources required to conduct these experiments.
2. Rapid Growth Stage: At this stage, you’ll need to add the first-principle doers who can go deep quickly to discover what it takes to make 18-year-aged whiskey in just two months. Experienced folks might have their biases and might fail more often if put in these situations. So, have an experienced leader from the previous stage working with fresh or less experienced folks with the hunger to grow really fast, just like the company.
3. Late Stage: If you have reached this stage, it’s crucial to recognize the folks that got you here. This recognition & reward will go a long way in ensuring that you maintain the growth mindset & the culture doesn’t change drastically. If these folks leave, that is a sign that things have become boring, or the moving parts have gained enough momentum to keep churning growth without much new input.

How Big Should Your Marketing Team Be?

The size of your marketing team depends on your company stage and goals. For instance, startups and small businesses may only need a few marketing team members, whereas larger companies may require a more significant number of marketing professionals.

As a guiding principle, Refine Labs CEO Chris Walker suggests a strong ratio of marketing to total employees is 10%.

How Does a Marketing Team’s Structure Change as It Grows?

As your business grows, your marketing team structure will need to adapt. Small marketing teams are often made up of specialists led by a CMO, director, VP, or head of marketing. As the team grows, the marketing leader will assign specialists to sub-teams led by managers or team leads.

When Should You Hire More Marketers?

Hiring additional marketers should only be done when they add a skill set that isn’t already present on the team.

If you simply need more of an existing skill set, consider outsourcing to an agency or marketing contractor. This hiring tactic helps avoid redundancy and maintain flexibility.

Conclusion

Whether you’re building a marketing team from scratch or scaling your current team, remember that skills are transferable but passion plus a figure-it-out attitude goes a long way. Hire marketers and provide them with an environment that allows them to do their best work. In short, hire the right people, hold onto the talent you have, and outsource where possible.