3 ways to structure your marketing team for growth

Friday July 14, 2017 , 3 min Read

If you want your marketing team to help your company grow and achieve the success you've dreamed for it, you need to structure it accordingly.. Restructuring is a vital tool—it disrupts established processes and clears the path for creativity and innovation. If you feel that your company's marketing team structure has started to hinder rather than accelerate your ability to leverage emerging opportunities, you need to consider re-structuring it before it does you more harm than good.

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Here are three simple ways in which you can structure your marketing team for growth.

Collaboration debt widens

The way you structure your marketing team sends a clear message about what your team is currently prioritising and what is being pushed aside for later. Instead of solely focusing on what you are prioritising, you should turn your attention to the tasks and projects you are pushing under the carpet to deal with later. Whatever you place in your 'things to do later' bucket creates debt somewhere in the organisation. You can simply call this as 'collaboration debt'. Collaboration debt is the thing that unavoidably arises as processes change, new lines of communication open, old lines of communication close, and the team grows. Ultimately, your shiny new structure will begin amassing collaboration debt. A structure that used to once drive growth, now inhibits growth and therefore it is time to change it once again.

Adjustments in the distribution model

For years, your marketing team is structured to consistently do well with a certain distribution model. With an inside sales model, growth is reliant on strong alignment between marketing and sales. On the other hand, in the freemium model, growth is reliant on strong alignment between product and marketing. Restructuring your marketing team places priority on the relation between those two teams. You therefore need to alter and adjust your sales and marketing team structures to capitalise on a different growing channel.

Shift in consumer behaviour

If you are smart enough to discover a new marketing tactic, you'll derive the most benefit from it. This is because marketing gives a huge advantage to first-movers. According to Andrew Chen, the first online ads were served by HotWired in 1994 and they got an unimaginable 78 percent CTR. Today, the CTR on Facebook ads is around 1 percent. The first-mover opportunities in today's day and age is in audio and video. Text-only campaigns are dying a slow-death. Keeping this in mind, it's possible that this will create a short-term gap in your lead-gen efforts and you'll need to adjust again to address the gap in the funnel.

Marketing is an evolving process and restructuring is part of the game. The goal isn't to find the perfect structure. It is to find a structure that helps you leverage your current growth opportunities.