Advertising and Marketing Department

Recently, there has been a situation where small and medium-sized businesses are gradually coming to understand that without organizing systematic work with the market and without at least fundamental marketing skills – the cost of promoting the company and attracting customers, often go into a “black hole”…Therefore, more and more entrepreneurs allocate the advertising and marketing department of the company to a separate structural unit. Or at least they hire a specialist for marketing functions and do not delegate them to sellers, office managers, administrators and other professionals who have an extremely remote attitude to the marketing department.

However, with the organization of the marketing departments, business owners, as well as marketers who do not have enough experience, often face some difficulties – how to organize it, how to manage the department, what functions it should perform, where to start and so on.

In this article, I will share my personal experience with how I organized or restructured marketing departments. I, being a marketing director, hope that my experience will be useful to those who also have a similar task now.

Functions of the marketing department

First, let’s see what functions the marketing departments of your company will perform. After all, those responsibilities of the marketing department that you impute to him, will form the basis of all the job descriptions of your marketing specialists – the marketing director or the head of the marketing department , directly marketers and other specialists of the department, if you need to separate an individual from a job site (working with the media, for example, or promotion to the Internet).

All companies have a different market, different customer audience for the product and different methods of promoting and attracting customers. Accordingly, the functions of the marketing department can also vary from company to company. More precisely, marketing functions are uniform in principle always, but their set can vary from business to business – in some functions of the marketing departments, the company may simply not be necessary. And others, on the contrary, are carried out in the company.

For example, we did not place absolutely any ads. But the department had a huge amount of pr-functionality and work with sponsors of tournaments – development of sponsorship packages, fundraising and so on.

Or another example – in the distribution company Vital in our marketing department, there was also no promotion function with the help of direct advertising or public relations. But there were a lot of actions in retail, a lot of forecasting of sales and a lot of work with beverage producers and our distribution network in the regions.

Therefore, to make it easier for you to determine the functions of the marketing departments of your company, sit down, think and write down what your marketing department should do. I was usually helped by the following three steps:

• Identify the main goal of the marketing department
• Break the work of the marketing department into several large blocks
• Formulate the tasks of the marketing department within each block

The goal of your marketing department is likely to be creating prerequisites for increasing sales and increasing profitability from sales.

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Only the goal must always be fixed in time, space and the final result. Otherwise, this is not a goal, but a dream.

Of course, all departments of the company (not just the marketing department) need to know about this goal, have their own tactical calendar plans for its achievement and work together on the result, not just the marketing departments.

On the second step, you should get blocks, which really will go the work of the marketing department of the enterprise. It can be:

• Involvement, retention and work with clients (study, polls, increase of loyalty, service)
• Support sales (sales department – materials, information, reports)
• Monitoring of competitors
• Analysis and market research
• Advertising
• PR (working with the media, articles, publications, expert interviews)
• Events (like strangers – exhibitions, conferences, and their own – seminars for clients)
• Marketing materials (printing, information, advertising)
• Design (corporate identity, marketing materials, packaging)
• Trade marketing (design of sales points, merchandising, shares)
• Affiliate marketing (promotion through partners)
• Work with the network (regions of presence, branches, distributors)
• Promotion on the Internet (support and content of the site, Internet marketing, social networks)
• Training (employees of the department, sellers, customers, distributors)
• Analytics and forecasting
• Internal marketing (work with other divisions of the company, increase of loyalty of employees, strengthening of corporate culture)
• And so on (but I usually had a combination of several listed)

If the company has the advantage of a single promotion channel, then the responsibilities of the marketing departments within this channel must be broken down into narrower ones.

For example, we had the overwhelming majority of communications, of course, on the Internet, therefore, only the point “Promotion to the Internet” in our country was heavily fragmented into more narrow functions (which were performed by different people):

• Content marketing (many unique articles on the portal)
• SEO optimization
• contextual advertising
• Other online advertising (banner, teaser)
• Design
• Promotion in social networks
• Partnership with other online resources
• A lot of analytics

When you have clearly formulated the goal, and you have broken the anticipated tasks of the marketing department to achieve this goal in large blocks, the third step will be easy to formulate the responsibilities of the marketing department within each of the blocks you have obtained.

I think the principle is clear. In fact, the functions of the marketing department of your company follow from the tasks of marketing and are, in fact, a more extensive and detailed presentation of the latter.

Marketing department structure

From the received tasks and functions, you can easily form the organizational structure of the marketing department of the company, grouping them into key specialists based on your needs.

Again, if you have a larger organization, then probably you will get a Marketing Department or a Marketing Directorate that includes several departments.

This is a greatly expanded and detailed structure of the marketing department; I have included in it more narrow areas and different positions in the marketing departments and related units. It is clear that in real business it is so rare and the scheme is much simpler, but you can build your structure by taking only those specialists that meet your tasks.

At the same time, the intellect-map presents the structure of the marketing departments in, so to speak, “pure form”, that is, without performing commercial functions and merging into the “marketing and sales department”.

In other words, you can create any structure of the marketing departments that is convenient for you, if only it would meet your tasks and functions.

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Organization of marketing department

To complete the organization of the marketing department, you will need the following basic documents:

• Regulations on the marketing department describing the general activities and principles of managing the marketing department and its interaction with other structural divisions of the organization
• The job description of the head of the marketing department
• Job descriptions of specialists of the marketing department
• Plan of the marketing department, describing the complexity of marketing for the future
• Reports of the marketing department for short-term control

Samples of all these documents you can easily find a search on the Internet, and I attach them to working materials to some of my training.

For example, a bonus to the course “Organization of the Marketing Departments” is a set of templates and samples of ready-made working documents, including both the above documents for the creation of the marketing department, and additional – a test when accepting a marketer for work, a table of SWOT analysis, a template of the annual budget, questionnaires for market research, forms of weekly reports and department plans, and others.