Revenue Marketing Journey: Milepost 2
In a previous blog post, I talked about the initial steps in the Revenue Marketing JourneyTM. In this post, we will explore the first step in detail – organizing for success. What is the best marketing structure for driving revenue? Which old skill silos need to be broken down, and what new skills do we need to gain to enhance the customer experience?
Traditional B2B Marketing Organization Models Are No Longer a Good Fit
If, like me, you were in marketing in the 90s, we’re “old but not obsolete.” You may recall many B2B firms had marketing organizations that looked something like this:
That’s right, no marketing operations, and demand gen was part of the Marcom Director’s bailiwick, which included PR, direct mail, events and “branding.” Fast forward 25 years and we recognize the industry changes that lead to necessary updates in this structure:
- We now have multiple channels to engage prospects and customers, more than just sales contact, telemarketing, events and direct mail. And since the majority of these new channels are digital, we have “digital marketing groups.”
- We have an explosion of marketing technologies and customer data today, which benefits from having a team to govern these assets – Marketing Operations.
- We have increased pressures toward marketing accountability for revenue leading us to hire analytically-oriented individuals and data scientists.
- Content has become king. To drive engagement with our prospects we need relevant, educational content. This explains why content accounts for 30% of the marketing budget. (Source: “2014 B2B Content Marketing Benchmarks, Budgets and Trends—North America” – Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs.)
Let’s put aside the areas that haven’t changed much but are still needed—product marketing, product management, channel alliances, research/competitors, and analyst relations—and focus on three newer areas: 1) marketing operations 2) content and digital services 3) digital demand generation. These three teams could be combined into a Center of Excellence, offering demand generation, content, and data services to a larger global marketing organization. Together, they:
- Create and execute demand generation plans to influence revenue
- Establish best practices, governance and standards for demand generation and optimization of marketing productivity through the use of people, process and technology
- Create and deploy content and campaigns to field marketing for localized execution
Digital and Content Groups
Yes, these are two groups, but often they roll up to one director or VP since there are strong ties between the two. The Digital group owns the website infrastructure and the social channels. The Content group has the designers, writers, production managers, the content strategists, and are responsible for all the raw content. In many cases they will depend on subject matter experts (SMEs) in other parts of the firm. Given the close working relationship between these two teams wherein one owns many of the channels and the other owns the content, it is logical to put them under one leader.
Demand Generation (DG) Group
Demand Generation comprises brand awareness building, thought leadership, lead acquisition, lead nurturing, loyalty marketing and advocacy. The roles required for this team include campaign strategists, campaign program managers, technology power users, analysts, PR strategists, inbound marketing experts (paid traffic and organic traffic) and outbound marketing experts (email). You may be surprised to find the inbound team here instead of under the digital group described above. This is a recognition of the burgeoning unison of inbound and outbound in creating multi-channel campaigns. The two functions benefit from working in the same Demand Generation group. We have a choice of channels for lead nurturing these days. We can now use retargeting through social channels, so we need to keep the inbound team tightly linked to the outbound team that has traditionally been used almost exclusively for nurturing.
Marketing Operations (MO) Group
Marketing Operations centralizes the management of technology, process, data and marketing analytics. There is widespread belief that this centralization makes marketing more efficient, effective, transparent and accountable. The roles one finds in MO include analysts, competitive intelligence, data management, project management, marketing technology and vendor management, training, and process experts. Occasionally we have also seen firms put the technology power users into this group so they become a centralized service to the demand generation and field marketing groups.
Division of Functions
The division of functions between these three groups is not always clear. A guiding principal for determining where a team should live is whether they offer a function that is infrastructure and support related rather than day-to-day engagement campaign or content creation related. Is the website regarded as mostly infrastructure, or demand generation, or content for instance?
In the next three posts we will dive one level deeper into each of these three functional areas, starting with Marketing Operations.
For more insights, download TPG’s white paper: Introduction to the Revenue Marketing Center of Excellence.
Part 1: Revenue Marketing Center of Excellence – Introduction
The expectation of marketers to deliver pipeline and revenue for their organizations is the new norm. The newly released 4-part Revenue Marketing Center of Excellence White Paper details how your organization should be structured, role responsibilities and skill-sets needed to drive pipeline and revenue for your business.