[VIDEO] Structuring Your Marketing Department, Part 3: Marketing Team Operating Models

When thinking about structuring your marketing department, consider a marketing team operating model that gives you flexibility. There are three primary models to consider: all in-house, all-outsourced, and a hybrid model:

With an all in-house model, you employ every marketing person to drive marketing in your organization. An all-outsourced model involves having no full-time or part-time marketing employees as part of your organization, as you outsource the whole function. The hybrid model is where you have maybe one or two people in house, but you outsource a lot of pieces of the marketing program.

A Hybrid Model to Structuring Your Marketing Department

A hybrid model, one that involves having one or more in-house employees at the marketing coordinator or marketing manager level, works really well for small to mid-size businesses.

Marketing has become a discipline of specialties, and we are finding that there is really no “one size fits all.” No one marketer knows everything there is to know about the different areas of marketing.

In the marketing department, you should have some strategic marketing (specialized in marketing planning and strategy); content marketing (specialized in content creation based on strategy); and many other disciplines such as search engine optimization, web development, graphic design, and so on. Marketers who specialize in a particular focus day-in-and-day-out become extremely effective in that discipline.

The marketing team operating model that we really like is when companies have an internal in-house marketing coordinator and/or manager, and they outsource a lot of specialty skills to fit your marketing program.

The reality is, to generate results you only need specialists occasionally. You typically don’t need them full time on your payroll, as the specialized talent salaries would be a disproportionate part of your marketing budget, and you likely wouldn’t have much left over for your marketing outreach.

So again, when you’re thinking about the structure of your marketing department, you really want to think about what you need in house. It’s most likely more of a marketing generalist, who knows a lot about a lot of things, but maybe doesn’t have depth in any one particular discipline. That type of marketer can cover immediate needs while coordinating other outsourced talent providers.

How Marketri Embraces a Hybrid Approach to Marketing Team Structure

Marketri is a company with a roster of strategic marketers, a network of specialists, and dedicated resources in search engine optimization, content marketing, and the like. So we’re a great fit for companies with an internal marketing person looking to embrace the hybrid model, as we provide a one-stop resource to all of those different providers.

That delivery model tends to be very efficient, as we drive strategy, help execute, and partner with in-house resources to make companies’ growth objectives powered up and moving.

If you have any questions about structuring your marketing department or anything having to do with strategic marketing, please feel free to reach out.