The Marketing Team Structures Report 2017

Will there ever be the perfect blueprint for marketing teams?

Building an effective marketing team is one of the most pressing challenges businesses face today.

Not so long ago, it was possible that a senior marketer could have a fairly comprehensive overview of the various marketing channels on offer. Since then, the media landscape has fragmented in a thousand different directions. Customer data is spread across multiple devices and requires real-time, personalised responses.

Is it possible for any one person – or any one team – to be experts in all channels, all forms of content, its programmatic distribution, the analytics and technology, not to mention overall marketing strategy?

Unlikely. None of the areas of modern marketing are simple or easy-to-learn disciplines. The concept of ‘marketing’ itself has snowballed to encompass everything from technology spend to, well, pretty much everything a business does. So what is the ideal team structure?

In this report, based on the experiences of 290 marketing practitioners, we are seeing the marketing department move towards specialisms in order to develop expertise in new digital skills.

The transition is not easy. This is putting pressure on budgets, with tough decisions being made about how much can realistically be covered in-house, when to outsource to agencies, and how to work better with other departments.

The new Marketing Team Structures Report – created and produced by Pure360, Technology for Marketing and the Institute of Direct and Digital Marketing – reveals how marketers are resourcing and restructuring to cope with the technological challenges of the years ahead.

It is clear that the relationship between marketing and IT is ever changing, and that both traditional and digital marketing and now equally as important as each other.

The biggest challenge facing businesses now is how they structure and build a marketing team that will deliver both high performance and adequate results.