As a B2B digital business, you need to be hyper-focused on customer engagement to generate more sales.
According to a study by Gallup, 21% of accounts with high engagement scores grew their revenue by 20% or more the following year.
And those will low engagement? A staggering 60% of these accounts declined by 20% or more!
So if highly-engaged relationships get more money in your pocket, how do you build a system around this?
How do you scale what seems to be an “unstructured thing that only startups do”?
How can you forge long-term partnerships — something so personal — using a team of marketers?
The answer is simple.
It’s all about building the right marketing team structure to carry out your defined B2B marketing strategies effectively.
Now it may sound simple, but it’s quite tricky.
Marketing teams shouldn’t be structured the same way for every company. Don’t copy a 100-person marketing department in a fast-growing SaaS for your 10-person marketing team.
That said, here’s how you can build yours. Read on.
Contents
Marketing organizational structure: what is it?
A marketing organizational structure is a framework that outlines how your company’s marketing department is organized. It shows the relationships between various positions within the department.
But it doesn’t necessarily reveal the responsibilities of each one.
Most marketing departments are organized into similarly shaped divisions and have similar functions. Let’s discuss the most common ones in the next section, so it’s clearer.
Modern B2B marketing models: A visual guide
New B2B marketing models are constantly emerging. It can be hard to keep up with the latest trends and know which ones will work best for your business.
To help you out, we’ve put together a handy guide to the most popular B2B marketing models. Take a look.
You’ll find inspiration and figure out which one’s the right one to model for your business.
The Revenue-focused Team
The current buying decision has become so sophisticated that some teams have restructured their entire org to focus on demystifying this. Revenue teams often have marketing and sales team members working together to break revenue ceilings.
For these teams, they’d have a Revenue marketing department that focuses on building the pipeline and keeping churn at bay.
The Inbound Marketing Structure
If you’re a company like HubSpot that focuses on the inbound game, then
content is your primary fuel. That will tell you to focus on getting people who can supply you with this fuel.
It would be wise to hire an Inbound Marketing Manager to work closely with a VP of Demand Generation (a new arm of modern marketing). And if you notice, this org puts great weight on specific channels like social media, email campaigns, and paid ads.
The Creative Marketing Structure
Now, if you have a creative org, then you’d most likely focus on having art directors, content writers, and designers. As you invest in visuals, you’ll need words and graphics to play together.
You can divide your teams into different departments, but underneath each department is a content and design team to support your strategy.
The Product-centric Organization
Now, for product-centric organizations like a SaaS company, the org chart will be patterned to the one above.
There are generally different marketing heads responsible for each product, and each has a team to implement the marketing strategy that could be different for each product.
Now, these 4 models alone illustrate how varied a marketing team can be organized. At this point, it might still not be instantly clear how you want to design your own.
No worries, we’ll get there. Let’s now look at the core people you need in your B2B org chart and work from there.
Starting your B2B team from scratch
Your team’s success is mainly dependent on the people you hire for your B2B marketing organization. They need to have the right skill set, and they need to work well together.
If you’re starting, here are your leading players.
The 3 most valuable players in your B2B team
There are typically 3 main people behind every B2B marketing organizational structure:
The Strategist
The strategist is responsible for planning and implementing the overall marketing strategy. They develop a plan on how the entire team can contribute to the company’s goals. It is also their responsibility to create campaigns and initiatives to reach those goals. Ideally, they should be good with numbers to make decisions based on data.
The strategist is frequently your CMO.
The Word Weaver
No marketing can run without content, so it’s essential to have a writer on your team. In the early stages, you’ll need a person who can write any kind of material — blog, emails, social media posts.
The Artist
Next, you will want to have a graphic designer. Sure, the content writer can whip up a Canva graphic, but if you’re going to be taken seriously as a B2B company, you have to invest in your branding on day 1. A graphic designer can help you establish that.
Start with these 3.
Scaling your B2B marketing team
As you scale, the 3 core people in your team will have too much on their plate, and that’s a sign for you to start scoping out their work and getting more people to join your team.
If you’re following the modern marketing trend, you would want to break up your marketing team into 3 key functions:
- Demand generation – to attract leads
- Lead generation – to push those leads down the funnel
- Revenue marketing – to help convert the sale easier (this could be done closely with your sales team)
You can assign subgroups inside your marketing team based on these functions. And your additional hires could be…
Content writer
- Creates written content to meet the needs of their audience
- Researches topics and prepare material about the business that will educate, inform or entertain readers
Social media specialist
Helps brands create engaging content, increase followers and build an online presence on social media
Email marketer
Responsible for sending out email campaigns that promote the company’s products and services
Content strategist
Achieves effective communication through a combination of all channels to convey the brand’s message clearly to the audience.
Automation specialist
The marketing automation specialist is responsible for implementing new business systems to maximize efficiency.
Paid ads specialist
Runs paid ads on Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, or any platform of your choice.
5 Factors that affect your B2B marketing structure
It helps to remember that each company is different. And so is your organizational chart.
The way your org chart will be heavily affected by these 5 things:
1. The nature of your company
Are you a product-focused company like a SaaS? Or are you offering services or maybe even physical products? Decide how to build your org. Will it be by function? By product? By channel or segments? By geography, perhaps?
2. Your current and near-term marketing strategies
How are you generating leads today? Podcast? LinkedIn outreach? Partnerships or affiliates? You will want to hire people who will build upon these strategies and tactics, so it’s vital to get roles to support these strategies.
3. Where your company is at right now, revenue-wise and team size
Of course, your budget will also dictate your org structure. This is why you need to consider your revenue too.
For startups, a 1-man marketing team is just enough to jumpstart things. They will have to wear multiple hats. An 8-person team with scoped-out roles will make more sense for mid-sized marketing teams.
4. Where your company wants to go in the next 12-18 months
You’d also have to future-proof your org structure. You do not wish to have redundancies in your team as much as possible. At the same time, you want to have people capable of skills you’d need in the future if you’re not planning to hire anytime soon.
5. How marketing interacts with sales
Another key area to consider is how marketing work with sales. Today’s modern teams have overlapping responsibilities as the customer goes from one stage of the customer journey to the other.
An aligned sales and marketing team can drive up to 208% revenue growth from marketing strategies. A great B2B marketing structure can help keep these 2 teams close.
When should you hire and outsource?
Probably a question you have right now is…should I fill every role with an in-house team member?
More than half of the marketing leaders will say no.
“52% of marketing leaders say their organization relies heavily on agencies and third parties”
Today’s business needs are often specialized, especially if you’re working in B2B. And it’s challenging to find in-house experts, so marketers often turn to agencies or third-party experts.
For instance, email marketing is often considered a complicated task. As a B2B company, you might feel nervous handing over a valuable email list with sophisticated customer journeys to an intern, won’t you?
One wrong move, and you might just annoy potential customers or, even worse — existing customers. And that could potentially lose you thousands of dollars in revenue.
There are some things that you wouldn’t take a chance on.
That’s why hiring experts to fill that gap would make more sense. For instance, Encharge supports a vetted directory of email marketing experts that clients could rely on. You can get a consultation on email strategies, marketing automation, copywriting, and even implementation services from our list of vetted experts.
Get the right people on your side
To run a successful B2B team, you need to identify the most fitting org structure, get the roles right, and onboard the right people who can execute.
It’s a challenging task that will take time, a few experiments, and (probably) some hiring mistakes before you get it right.
But it is worth investing in it because the proper B2B marketing organizational structure is key to driving exponential growth to your bottom line.
