Building the Marketing Team of the Future
What are the key skills that Marketers are going to need in the future? Well, if you read enough articles on the topic, you’ll think marketers needs to know and do everything.
Or you may subscribe to the school of thought, put forth in the book ReWork, that everything is marketing.
Either way, marketing needs to do everything, or everything is marketing; sounds like basically the same thing to me. And that’s how I build my teams.
Developers:
All the tech savvy thought leaders say that everyone should learn to code. And I agree. But I don’t have any developers on my team. However, everyone on my team can (or is learning to) edit and write basic HTML and CSS. This means that we can update our email templates, and make simple copy changes and layout tweaks to the blog or merchandising pages.
Data Scientists:
Everyone says data is the future of marketing. And I agree. But I don’t have any Business Intelligence (BI) engineers, or data scientists on my team. However, everyone on my team has learned to use Tableau, and can edit basic SQL queries. This way we can take the queries, tables, and dashboards our BI team created for us and reuse them for our next initiative.
On other teams I’ve built, the tools changed, but the approach was the same. Learn to gather and analyze as much of your own data as you can.
Design:
People tell me that design is a moral imperative to marketing. And I agree. But I don’t have designers on my team. However, everyone on my team has Photoshop and/or InDesign on their laptops and can create simple graphics or make basic changes to creative so we don’t have to go to the creative department every time we need an image resized, or change the text on an infographic.
Content is King:
We all know that content is the essence of marketing and without it you’re just wasting everyone’s time and money. And I agree. But I don’t have any writers or editors on my team. However, everyone on my team is expected to write and edit. We don’t always write our own content, (because we have an amazing editorial team), but we frequently do.
Customer Support:
Everyone knows that Customer Service is the new marketing. And I agree. But my team doesn’t do Customer Support. However, everyone on my team has sat with our CS teams and goes through their training. We regularly invite them to our marketing meetings. We also work with CS on every promotion or campaign to get their feedback and make sure they’re aware of what we’re doing.
Developing Expert Learners
Some of you might be thinking that I build teams without experts. In one way (the traditional way), I am. Expertise is overrated, except where it matters, like being a perpetual learner.
Learning is the most important skill you can have. With my team of generalists I’m able to test faster, analyze data better, and learn more. Strategy and plans are great starting points. But to quote Mike Tyson, “Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.” Marketing should be able to get punched in the mouth (figuratively) and adjust those plans quickly (to avoid getting punched in the mouth again).
Not One Size Fits All
The reality is that there is no right way to organize a marketing department (there are lots of wrong ways though). I found that staffing with generalists, is more cost effective, makes your team nimble, flexible, and eliminates single points of failures.
Instead of staffing your team with developers, designers, and data scientists, leverage the product and other teams for these resources (assuming they have those resources). This will create dependencies on other teams, but I prefer to keep as much strategy and execution in-house, and leverage outside resources to reduce the impact of these dependencies.
I even try and avoid marketing specialists, but certain channels may justify it. Most commonly I’ve hired specialists for email, CRM, and SEO/SEM, but even then I bring in one specialist and support them with generalists. This allows you to cross train the rest of your team, reducing the risk of having a single point of failure (the specialist), and allows for employee growth.
In the end, Marketing’s job is to work with the product teams to create the marketing strategy, turn those strategies into plans, and then get punched in the mouth. It’s easier to adjust your plans if you staff, smart cross-functional people, who can learn and react quickly after getting punched in the mouth.
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Originally published at tacanderson.com.
