“How many members does your marketing team have?”. This is how I started my HARO query, which is the platform I used to conduct the research for this brief case study.
17 lovely marketing managers (and people in charge of managing a team) were kind of enough to respond to my preliminary question, and then my follow up ones. I will be mentioning each and everyone throughout the article along with their thoughts.
I believe it’s important to know how our industry peers structure their teams, how they manage to get things done in such a dynamic environment. At the same time, we should be aware of how they overcome everyday challenges in order to finish projects and reach their KPIs or if there’s an optimal solution to such problems.
In the beginning, I had no idea I would stumble upon so many new opportunities for writing and thinking about the teams of the future. But speaking to each of these leaders has helped me uncover certain insights, ideas about team structure and also challenges they face.
After all, there’s so much content online about strategies, ads, social media, content optimization and other topics, that we often forget that everything starts way before we start focusing on these things.
It really is all about the people, their skills, and how the team members are able to collaborate when working on long-term projects.
You will get to find insights to help you structure your very own marketing department, understand challenges you will be facing and ultimately see if in the future you will be required to share the same office space, or if you can just work remotely.
My goals were to find out:
Please bear in mind that I’m not trying to extrapolate these findings because the sample size is not representative. However, it definitely brings new aspects to light as well as the needs that arise within marketing teams.
Since there is very little documentation available today regarding this topic, I think it will be a very interesting read.
Let’s start by talking a little bit about the size of the companies I interviewed, their profile and the number of people they have in their marketing departments.
There were 17 employees from different companies who responded to my questions.
Now that I think about it, the questions seemed a little bit intrusive, so I thank them once again for being so open.
First, let’s see how many employees these companies have and what’s the size of their marketing team.
Now, onto their marketing department.
I wasn’t aiming for a particular industry for this case study (find more marketing case studies here). I was more interested in talking to marketing managers or people who were in charge of marketing teams.
Even though I didn’t ask, most of the people who answered my query were kind enough to tell me a little bit about what their company does.
As you can see, the companies came from diverse industries:
You’re probably aware that remote working has become more and more popular. Not only that, but many different employers have shown over and over that not only remote working has decreased their employees stress levels, but it also improved their productivity.
I was curious to know whether some of the companies I discussed with were adopting the remote work arrangements as well.
What I found was that 5 out of these 17 companies are fully remote, and the other 12 share the same office space.
There are, of course, more insights to these numbers, but I’m going to develop this portion down below in the takeaways section.
Now that we’ve seen an outline of the companies that were involved in this study, I will go ahead and start digging through their answers, and I will also be adding some quotes I received from them about two critical areas:
I hope you’re eager to see what I discovered because I’m excited to share this with you.
Let’s get started.
Marketing is such a dynamic environment, and it’s interesting to see how diverse marketing departments are, depending on what businesses focus on.
Here are the key findings when it comes to job roles:
Now, let’s dig into the next topic, which is all about finding out what are the biggest struggles these companies have when it comes to setting KPIs for their campaigns.
When I read their answers, I have to admit that I resonated with most of them, as I’m sure you will too.
Metrics, results, objectives, data.
Us, marketers, are driven by all of these words when we manage campaigns or projects. And most of the time, not everything is as easy as it seems.
That’s why I wanted to know whether marketers have any setbacks when they manage projects. The responses were extremely interesting and diverse.
Here’s what I found:
According to Carlo Borja, who is Head of Online Marketing at Time Doctor,
“Knowing which metric to measure so as to contribute to the overall company goal can sometimes be a challenge in itself”.
Gary Morris, founder at Grafted-In, adds that:
“Understanding the business and how it works is important in determining the right KPIs to deliver.”
James Nuttall, copywriter at Roman Blinds, says that
“Establishing budgets is usually our biggest hold-up, particularly for social media campaigns”.
John Valentine, who is part of the marketing team for the NGO NJ Sharing Network, finds that because of their limited budget and staff,
“It’s difficult to determine how/where our resources should be allocated to most effectively communicate our awareness and educational messages.”
Who else agrees with Erin McCormick, Director of Marketing at Hergenrother Realty Group? She says:
“Oftentimes the direct impact of marketing campaigns isn’t easy to track”.
Eleni Cotsis, marketing manager at AllTheRooms, is on the same page with Eric because her struggle is to
“measure the value of long term brand-building activities versus direct marketing.”
Michael Heiligenstein, Director of SEO at FitSmallBusiness, makes an excellent point about quality vs. quantity:
“To talk about quality, you often have to take a step away from your KPI and say “Hey, this was really great, here’s something the numbers don’t fully show,” or “Hey, we’re hitting our targets, but we’re not exactly doing it in way that actually advances the business.”
Max Robinson from Ace Workgear says that
“Limited data makes it very hard to provide a fully comprehensive report”.
Leeyen Rogers, VP of Marketing at JotForm, compiled campaign KPIs in a very straightforward manner, by saying
“There is no perfect way to determine what success looks like.”
Emily Sidley, Senior Director at Three Girls Media, couldn’t have said it better:
“Clients often want to see results right away, but a content marketing and social media strategy is a long-term approach”.
Stephen Twomey, owner at MasterMindSEO, illustrates another important aspect when it comes to working with clients:
“We really have to set proper expectations from the get-go when onboarding a new client. If they have never done SEO before, they might think, it only takes a week.”
A lot has been said in this case study, so I think it’s time to wrap it all up with the key takeaways.
To keep my thoughts organized, I decided to divide the conclusions into 3 main sections:
Let’s get started.
Even though you’ve reached the end of this case study, I will continue my research and do an additional roundup with another group of marketers who responded to a different set of questions about their workflow.
So stay tuned for part two!
It was so nice exchanging emails with the lovely people I mentioned throughout this article. A big THANK YOU to all of them for taking the time to discuss this with me.
I do hope you enjoyed reading this post and that you learned quite a few things about marketing teams.
Please leave a comment if you liked it or share it with your social media friends so they can find out about it too. Until next time!
