Understanding the roles within your marketing team structure

As the need for brands to produce more and more content to keep audiences engaged grows ever stronger, as well as balancing this with the desire to stay consistent across all channels, the emphasis on a well-built, organised marketing team is more pressing than ever before.

But, what is the ideal marketing team structure? As the responsibilities and functions of marketing continue to expand, knowing the roles you need when building your marketing team is critical to covering all bases and guiding the growth of your brand.

Explore our insight into the role of marketing for an organisation and how to structure your team to deliver the most effective output.

What is the role of a marketing department?

So let’s start with the million-dollar question: what does a marketing team actually do? The specifics of this will vary from company to company – what you consider the role of your marketing department could be very different from another company in your industry.

But, as a broad summary, we can define the role of a marketing department as the promoters of your brand to your audiences worldwide.

It crafts the face of your company. It reaches out and attracts leads to your company, its products and its services. It plans, creates, and coordinates the materials that represent your brand. In many ways, your marketing team is the bridge between your brand and your customer.

Due to this weighty responsibility, a marketing department’s functions are often extensive and demand specialists drive them. So, before you can consider the roles and structure of your ideal marketing team, you have to first establish what functions they need to fulfil…

Establishing your marketing department functions

Here is a snapshot of the various functions today’s global marketing teams are expected to perform to connect audiences to their brand:

Define and manage your brand

One of the key roles of a marketing department is to establish exactly what your brand stands for – its values, characteristics, visions – so you can translate this to your audience.

Develop marketing strategies

From determining the price of your products/services to cementing what channels your brand should focus on, marketing teams should make data-driven decisions to inform your overall strategy.

Plan and oversee campaigns

As part of your overarching strategy, the marketing team will also take responsibility for individual campaigns and initiatives – the resources required, how long they will run, the milestones across this timeframe, and analysing the results.

Research your target market

The best marketing teams understand their target audience inside-out, and conduct thorough research into the demographics, behaviours and motivations of your market, as well as what your competition is doing on this front.

Produce assets for your marketing channels

A critical function of the marketing department will be developing content and assets across the spectrum of your marketing network. Social media, email marketing, blogs, print and digital adverts – it’s a long list (and is only getting longer).

Drive traffic to your website

One of the most important marketing team goals is to generate more high-quality leads towards their brand and nurture these for as long as it takes to score those all-important conversions.

Coordinate your social media presence

Everyone needs to be on social media nowadays, so an increasingly vital marketing role is managing and monitoring these platforms to keep these up-to-date and protect your brand’s reputation.

Identify and utilise advertising opportunities

Marketing teams should be actively locating opportunities to advertise their brand, be that through digital or print platforms, and communicating with organisations that can afford them that space.

Organise internal communications

As well as connecting customers with your brand, marketing departments are also responsible for keeping employees continuously aware of the organisation’s values, goals and priorities.

Act as your media liaison

When your brand is mentioned in the media, either in a positive or negative light, a marketing team member will often be in charge of coordinating with the media and preparing communications on these platforms.

Planning and handling events

When you host an event, seminar or webinar, it will typically be your marketing team that will organise and manage these.

Manage third parties

Particularly for small or mid-sized businesses, marketing departments will need to work closely with outside vendors, be they agencies, PR companies, influencers or freelancers, and ensure they produce work in-line with your brand’s values.

Defining your marketing department roles

With a clearer perspective of the functions of modern marketing team structures, you will be in a stronger position to outline the roles you need to build your marketing team.

Of course, the breadth and of your marketing team positions will depend on the scale of your company. The marketing team structures for a large, globally recognised organisation will be far different from a smaller company. Smaller firms will typically have more dual-role positions and generalists in their marketing teams, supported by specialist agencies and freelancers.

Meanwhile, larger organisations will often have a range of specialists in-house to fulfil the functions mentioned earlier. However, they may face greater challenges collaborating across locations, and still may look to support from external agencies and freelancers to deliver work.

In order to cover the broadest range of marketing roles here, we will focus on the largest of these marketing structures and the individuals you could expect to find within it.

Marketing Management/Strategy Team

This strand of your marketing team structure will be responsible for developing, adapting and refining your overall marketing strategy, and conducting the research informing that. In addition, they will also oversee the work of the other segments of the marketing department, maintaining a birds-eye view over all operations.