Grow Your Team
Learning Objectives
After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:
- Describe options for staffing.
- Identify team process best practices.
Grow for Success
Small marketing teams can do amazing things, but when it comes to growth and digital transformation, it’s worth reviewing your team structure and considering new roles to accommodate campaign growth. For teams that are ready for that next level, there are some additional roles to consider.
| Role | Responsibilities |
|---|---|
|
Experience designer/planner |
Focused on improving customer experience, an experience designer or planner:
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Audience strategist |
Focused on getting the right message to the right customer, an audience strategist:
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Data scientist |
Focused on advanced data and analytics, a data scientist:
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Copywriter |
Focused on writing content for communications, a copywriter:
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Deployment specialist |
Focused on deploying campaigns, the deployment specialist:
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Technical QA/QA specialist |
Focused on improving operations, the QA specialist:
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Deliverability consultant |
Focused on analyzing email deliverability, the deliverability specialist:
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Development Stages
While some companies can simply hire all these roles, it may not be practical for every team. After all, there is no magic formula that works for all companies. Expertise in these areas may need to shift throughout the year based on internal and external factors. And resources are often needed at specific stages of a team’s development. Here are the three main development stages and the roles to consider for each.
| Stage | Goal/s | Related Roles |
|---|---|---|
|
Implementation |
Configure a new Marketing Cloud Engagement account or add new functionality. |
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Operations |
Send, analyze, and improve processes with automations. |
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Transformation |
Plan for the future and expand into new channels. |
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For the first two stages, check out the following chart which further highlights the skills needed during implementation and operations. In an implementation, 33% of the effort goes toward architecture, which includes developing your data model, designing solutions, and integration tasks. And in operations, 30% of the effort goes toward the development of campaigns—including audience configuration, building campaigns, and journey development.
Focus shifts as you go in and out of these marketing stages and depends on the tasks your team works on. This is why it’s important to analyze your team’s structure before beginning a new implementation project. This helps you identify critical blockers, like not having enough capacity for architecture. Luckily there are ways to bridge these gaps! Let’s follow along as NTO addresses its own staffing shortfalls.
Solve for Staffing Gaps
While the marketing team at NTO is successfully getting campaigns to its customers, they aren’t able to tackle new projects to improve processes and the customer experience. Ralph is eager to adopt a new customer journey that has been discussed for over a year now. Isabelle says it’s on the backlog, but admits that her team spends most of their time focused on campaign deployment, and everything else is secondary. Let’s review some staffing solutions for Ralph to consider.
| Solution | Description |
|---|---|
|
Hire staff members |
After assessing current skill sets, Isabelle knows that Michele and Pia can complete any project work needed. However since Isabelle and Michele will be busy with project work, they have a gap in campaign deployments. Isabelle has proposed hiring a dedicated campaign manager and technical producer to work with Paulo. |
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Hire short-term project help |
While hiring staff could help support deployments, Ralph knows that while Michele and Pia are capable of project work, it could take them longer to implement a new feature they aren’t familiar with. Since NTO leadership is considering new Marketing Cloud Engagement features, Ralph thinks it could be a good idea to hire services or a partner to help with implementation. This would allow his team to focus on improvements, while quickly getting started on a new product. |
|
Hire ongoing campaign support |
The last option that Isabelle and Ralph have discussed is to hire a full-service campaign team to focus on campaigns. This would allow Isabelle, Michele, and Paulo to focus on strategy and process improvements, while the services team focuses on campaign deployment. |
What hiring decision would you make?
Whether your team has a marketing need, restricted budget, hiring challenges, lack of capacity, or you just need help for one project, there are several reasons companies consider outsourcing some or all work. Ultimately it depends on your current needs and marketing team goals.
Keys to Success
No matter the composition of your team, there are recurring best practices and processes that successful marketing teams share. Here are a few tips to help your team be successful.
- Define roles and specific responsibilities. Make sure each team member understands their role in all projects, and specifically the tasks they are responsible for. It may be helpful to create a team RASCI chart.
- Minimize team members working in silos. All team members, regardless of channel, should work together in support of a common marketing strategy. Even if team members work on different teams, alignment and goal sharing can help minimize conflict.
- Establish a communication plan. Whether your team uses Slack, email, or shouts down the hall, establish a consistent policy for sharing when tasks are completed. Consistent internal communications between teams and internal stakeholders help form healthy team habits.
Process Improvements
Another way to create an efficient team is to clearly define the work.
- Create an intake process. How can internal stakeholders request something from your team? Many intake forms ask for deadlines, content, audience requirements, and required assets. Whatever process is used, be firm and consistent with requiring that process.
- Define configuration and deployment processes (and document them). Outline the entire process and create reference and enablement materials. Once created, find a common place to store all marketing documents.
- Determine how you track and respond to changes. Establish a method for tracking the status of requests and where they are in the process. This should also include how feedback from stakeholders is captured and consolidated.
- Organize your Marketing Cloud Engagement account. Within each business unit of your Marketing Cloud Engagement account, create a consistent email folder structure. Also, it’s helpful to create a standard asset naming convention—for emails, data extensions, automations—that all production team members use.
- Define a quality assurance (QA) testing process and use checklists. Intertwine QA throughout the entire production process. It’s helpful to create checklists to ensure all requirements are accurate and have been reviewed and tested by the team. Typos and broken links be gone!
One Team, One Goal
Overall, successful marketing teams align based on the common goal of improving customer experience. Marketing decisions should be constantly evaluated and prioritized based on how they impact that goal—and your team structure is no exception. With these roles and responsibilities in mind, we’re sure you’ll find even more ways to improve the customer experience from all aspects of your business.