
The ability to measure performance and move quickly are essential to building for scale because it allows businesses to solve problems, as well as respond to changing market trends and conditions.
Efficiency is another hallmark quality of performant marketing departments — it’s what allows the business to grow at a sustainable rate and positions the team for long-term success, even in the face of challenges.
After you’ve set up a foundational growth framework for your marketing team, it’s important that marketing leaders consider the tools their teams will need to run effective marketing campaigns, the processes they can incorporate in their day-to-day, as well as the team structure that will best support and keep business growth on pace.
Use tools that help maximize productivity
Marketing teams need tools in place that support growth and optimize efficiency. Here’s a look at some of the solutions and tech marketing teams can lean on to properly scale their programs.
- Project management tools: Help capture ideas and prioritize them, encourage a collaborative environment where teammates can offer feedback, and let you plan, monitor, track, and report on team output.
- Team communication tools: Provide the ability to easily communicate with members of your team, company, clients, or stakeholders asynchronously. (Tip: Set up project-specific channels to help focus collaboration and stay organized)
- Data and analytics software: Monitor performance, ROI, and use data strategically to iterate on past tests and predict future trends.
- Visual CMS: Empower non-technical team members to own the website and rapidly iterate on marketing campaigns and messaging with a visual-first content management system (CMS).
- Automation tools: Streamline marketing processes and workflows to cut down on costs and save time by automating nurture, email marketing, social, and ad campaigns.
Before choosing to bring on a new tool, determine the features that are nice-to-haves vs. must-haves, and assess how well it will integrate with your existing stack and workflows. Also consider if the benefits of the tool will outpace the learning curve it may come with.
Clearly define roles and responsibilities
Traditional marketing teams are more likely to be sorted into functional areas. This can create undesirable and unintended silos that stifle collaboration. Highly-effective marketing teams tend to have roles that are more cross-functional, fostering a culture that is more integrated and innovative.
However, building a team can be complex, especially if you are moving into a different stage of growth. Leaders have to look at their marketing goals and decide what headcount will best support the business’s core needs. Pallis of Pavilion emphasized that as a company continues to grow and transform, the task of hiring becomes more complicated. “You’re trying to meet your company’s revenue and pipeline targets, [which means you] have to find the balance between building out a team that can solve [problems] right now, as well as building out a team that can [solve problems] for the long-term,” she explained.
For both Pallis and Arellano of Filevine, autonomy is one of the most important characteristics of a quality marketer. Although teamwork is a crucial part of high-performing marketing departments, a business positioned for growth needs people who can take action without a lot of hand-holding. Pallis specified:
“When you’re a lean team, it's really important that you feel that whoever you're hiring can come in and work relatively autonomously. You can have your initial setup meeting and say, ‘This is what I'm looking for. These are the goals. This is where I need you to focus.’ And they can take that and run with it.”
A leaner team is more likely to require cross-functional talent (i.e. can do both content and performance marketing), while a larger team’s members may have designated roles that focus on a single marketing function. Regardless, marketing teams typically own branding, content and SEO, events, paid marketing, data measurement and analysis, product marketing, and market research, for starters. Beyond these core competencies, modern marketing teams can be broken down by roles and responsibilities, such as:
- Team lead — Ensures that the team is meeting its objectives
- Marketing owner — Communicates with stakeholders and aligns with management; prevents unnecessary disruptions
- Coach — Onboards new team members, creates harmony within the team, supports the team, and facilitates the agile mindset
One other strategy marketing teams can consider as a business continues to grow is whether to bring on a contractor or agency rather than fully manage a particular function in-house, such as content creation, video, graphic design, or SEO. This may be a desirable choice if you are facing budget challenges, a backlog of work, or your team lacks some areas of expertise in the short term.
Implement efficient team processes
Teams looking to be more agile should ask themselves the following questions on a regular basis:
- What workflows should be in place?
- What are our priorities?
- What can we shift to focus on our core priorities?
- How do we determine what stays or goes?
Everything should come down to understanding and meeting your customers’ needs and optimizing your business’s performance.
Two practices that can help answer these questions are daily standup meetings and sprint planning. Daily standup meetings are high-level project check-ins that cover what you did the day before, and what you plan to do today and address any barriers or challenges that might prevent progress. Sprint planning is a meeting that engrains agility into a team’s standard processes (sprints are a length of time in which a team commits to completing a designated task or amount of work). While sprint planning, you’ll take a larger project and break it down into smaller pieces to be completed over a defined timeline.
Pavilion’s marketing team has a process in place where they write down their wish list of things they'd like to get done in a quarter. They decide what objectives they need to focus on to drive business growth and deprioritize anything that can’t support these goals in the next three months. Pallis describes these prioritization sessions as ruthless, with an end goal of whittling down their priorities to no more than three projects or campaigns that quarter.
Build teams and programs that best support your business
When it comes to organization structure, processes, and the tools you use, there’s no perfect template. Marketing leaders need to assess what’s most important for their specific business, consider the pain points they are trying to solve for, and determine what success looks like in their eyes. Doing so will inform who and what to bring on in order to create a highly effective and nimble marketing team.
The ability to measure performance and move quickly are essential to building for scale because it allows businesses to solve problems, as well as respond to changing market trends and conditions.
Efficiency is another hallmark quality of performant marketing departments — it’s what allows the business to grow at a sustainable rate and positions the team for long-term success, even in the face of challenges.
After you’ve set up a foundational growth framework for your marketing team, it’s important that marketing leaders consider the tools their teams will need to run effective marketing campaigns, the processes they can incorporate in their day-to-day, as well as the team structure that will best support and keep business growth on pace.
Use tools that help maximize productivity
Marketing teams need tools in place that support growth and optimize efficiency. Here’s a look at some of the solutions and tech marketing teams can lean on to properly scale their programs.
- Project management tools: Help capture ideas and prioritize them, encourage a collaborative environment where teammates can offer feedback, and let you plan, monitor, track, and report on team output.
- Team communication tools: Provide the ability to easily communicate with members of your team, company, clients, or stakeholders asynchronously. (Tip: Set up project-specific channels to help focus collaboration and stay organized)
- Data and analytics software: Monitor performance, ROI, and use data strategically to iterate on past tests and predict future trends.
- Visual CMS: Empower non-technical team members to own the website and rapidly iterate on marketing campaigns and messaging with a visual-first content management system (CMS).
- Automation tools: Streamline marketing processes and workflows to cut down on costs and save time by automating nurture, email marketing, social, and ad campaigns.
Before choosing to bring on a new tool, determine the features that are nice-to-haves vs. must-haves, and assess how well it will integrate with your existing stack and workflows. Also consider if the benefits of the tool will outpace the learning curve it may come with.
Clearly define roles and responsibilities
Traditional marketing teams are more likely to be sorted into functional areas. This can create undesirable and unintended silos that stifle collaboration. Highly-effective marketing teams tend to have roles that are more cross-functional, fostering a culture that is more integrated and innovative.
However, building a team can be complex, especially if you are moving into a different stage of growth. Leaders have to look at their marketing goals and decide what headcount will best support the business’s core needs. Pallis of Pavilion emphasized that as a company continues to grow and transform, the task of hiring becomes more complicated. “You’re trying to meet your company’s revenue and pipeline targets, [which means you] have to find the balance between building out a team that can solve [problems] right now, as well as building out a team that can [solve problems] for the long-term,” she explained.
For both Pallis and Arellano of Filevine, autonomy is one of the most important characteristics of a quality marketer. Although teamwork is a crucial part of high-performing marketing departments, a business positioned for growth needs people who can take action without a lot of hand-holding. Pallis specified:
“When you’re a lean team, it's really important that you feel that whoever you're hiring can come in and work relatively autonomously. You can have your initial setup meeting and say, ‘This is what I'm looking for. These are the goals. This is where I need you to focus.’ And they can take that and run with it.”
A leaner team is more likely to require cross-functional talent (i.e. can do both content and performance marketing), while a larger team’s members may have designated roles that focus on a single marketing function. Regardless, marketing teams typically own branding, content and SEO, events, paid marketing, data measurement and analysis, product marketing, and market research, for starters. Beyond these core competencies, modern marketing teams can be broken down by roles and responsibilities, such as:
- Team lead — Ensures that the team is meeting its objectives
- Marketing owner — Communicates with stakeholders and aligns with management; prevents unnecessary disruptions
- Coach — Onboards new team members, creates harmony within the team, supports the team, and facilitates the agile mindset
One other strategy marketing teams can consider as a business continues to grow is whether to bring on a contractor or agency rather than fully manage a particular function in-house, such as content creation, video, graphic design, or SEO. This may be a desirable choice if you are facing budget challenges, a backlog of work, or your team lacks some areas of expertise in the short term.
Implement efficient team processes
Teams looking to be more agile should ask themselves the following questions on a regular basis:
- What workflows should be in place?
- What are our priorities?
- What can we shift to focus on our core priorities?
- How do we determine what stays or goes?
Everything should come down to understanding and meeting your customers’ needs and optimizing your business’s performance.
Two practices that can help answer these questions are daily standup meetings and sprint planning. Daily standup meetings are high-level project check-ins that cover what you did the day before, and what you plan to do today and address any barriers or challenges that might prevent progress. Sprint planning is a meeting that engrains agility into a team’s standard processes (sprints are a length of time in which a team commits to completing a designated task or amount of work). While sprint planning, you’ll take a larger project and break it down into smaller pieces to be completed over a defined timeline.
Pavilion’s marketing team has a process in place where they write down their wish list of things they'd like to get done in a quarter. They decide what objectives they need to focus on to drive business growth and deprioritize anything that can’t support these goals in the next three months. Pallis describes these prioritization sessions as ruthless, with an end goal of whittling down their priorities to no more than three projects or campaigns that quarter.
Build teams and programs that best support your business
When it comes to organization structure, processes, and the tools you use, there’s no perfect template. Marketing leaders need to assess what’s most important for their specific business, consider the pain points they are trying to solve for, and determine what success looks like in their eyes. Doing so will inform who and what to bring on in order to create a highly effective and nimble marketing team.
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