Andrea is CEO and cofounder of AgileSherpas, the leader in Agile transformations for marketers and other cross-functional teams.
Remember the Mad Men scenes when Don Draper would have a stroke of genius in the middle of a pitch meeting? The client would love it, his colleagues would swoon and the implication was always that everyone made a lot of money and lived happily ever after.
A nice bit of marketing in its own way, but that vision just isn’t true any longer (if it ever was). Great modern marketing demands creativity, sure, but it also requires customer centricity, careful attention to data and an agile, iterative approach.
Like it or not, the days when bombarding people with product-centric messaging and gimmicky campaigns are long gone.
And yet many marketers cling to their Don Draper ideals.
We think we can get away with lone wolf creatives or last-minute brain waves, but we’re far beyond that. We need organizational structures and processes that match the sophistication and complexity of the marketing strategies, campaigns and brands that we support.
Here are three ways that the best in class marketing teams are structured:
Marketing Sructure Strategy 1: Value Delivery
A traditional structure tends to be focused on our own skills, like content, social media or analytics. The goal of these more modern team structures is to bring people together around the value that customers will get, instead of the tiny part of their journey that we like to think about.
In this value delivery model, we start by asking ourselves how our organization gets value to customers. Some common options are:
• Geography
• Business unit
• Product line
Once we identify the options, we can structure teams accordingly.
If you’re struggling to identify the way that your organization provides value, ask yourself: What makes people delighted to do business with you? How can you talk to them about that more and in a better way?
Focus more on the end goal than the steps. Think about where you want people to end up, what you want them to think and feel when they see your brand.
Then set up teams that are focused on making those things happen.
Marketing Structure Strategy 2: Customer Segments
The first structure focused on the end goal and value delivery while this one zeroes in on who your buyers are. It works best when you have significant distinctions between customer groups or segments that impact the way you approach marketing.
The goal is to create teams that live and breathe the problems of a subset of your overall customer base. So if you’re considering using this structure, try asking if it would make a material difference if one team focused on Customer A while another team focused on customer B.
If both of those teams would probably end up doing very similar kinds of work, this structural strategy probably isn’t for you.
But if the messaging and the channels would vary significantly, this might be the right organizational philosophy for you.
If you go this route, don’t hesitate to allocate resources to the segments differently; rarely are they completely equal.
In all three of these structure strategies, the teams you build don’t have to be identical. Some segments or regions will be more valuable or more complex than others; that relative value can—and should—be reflected in the makeup of the teams that serve them.
Marketing Structure Strategy 3: Functions, But Make Them Modern
Historically, we’ve organized marketing departments around functions. We’ve focused on what we’re good at, or were trained for, or like to do, and built teams based on that.
It’s not always a bad idea, but it can make us seem self-centered.
However, if we can create functional teams that aren’t about territory or owning any particular piece of the marketing mix, this can still work. But only if it’s about how the functions come together harmoniously, rather than how they jockey for attention and budget.
In many ways, a modern marketing organization structured around functions is like a symphony. Sometimes different sections are louder and more obvious, depending on what’s needed. But everyone contributes to create a beautiful end product.
Of course, getting functional teams to work together in this way requires agile, modern ways of working. There can’t be any pitching work over the wall to people and expecting the end product to magically change.
Whatever structural strategy you choose, remember that your only real constraint is your organization and what it’s trying to accomplish. Value delivery, customer segments and modern functions aren’t the only way to organize marketers, but they are good options.
The important thing is to realize that the marketing work we produce will reflect the way we made it. We can’t expect to modernize our work without modernizing our ways of working.
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