Like the unhappy families of Anna Karenina, no two B2B marketing teams are exactly alike. Every company has its own history, values, strategies, and quirks that impact how marketing happens on a day-to-day basis.
And the hallmark of a good marketing department is simply that it works. When your team is structured well, everyone knows who’s accountable for what responsibilities and which roles. But if you’re dealing with misaligned priorities or chronic miscommunication, it might be worth taking a second look at your org chart.
And you can use this article as your guide. We’ll cover:
- The most common approach to B2B marketing organizational structure
- Areas that are often overlooked, or need to be tweaked
The most common approach to B2B marketing department structure and roles
Today’s B2B marketing departments are usually structured into three major buckets:
- Growth Marketing
- Product Marketing
- Brand Marketing
Some organizations have a fourth bucket: Content Marketing. It can be separated into its own function, but if not, it usually falls under Brand.
This is just a big-picture overview. You might have experienced something different in your career, or hear hot takes from podcast hosts and LinkedIn influencers on how they’ve discovered a better way.
But by and large, these are the high-level, functional areas that most B2B marketing departments use when structuring their teams. So let’s break them down into key responsibilities, as well as the sub-teams and specialists who manage them.
Growth Marketing
Growth Marketing handles “how you sell” — they develop and execute the programs and campaigns that move prospects along their buying journey.
Responsibilities:
- Inbound marketing
- Supporting outbound sales
- Account-based marketing
- Website
- Distribution channels
- Paid ads
- Events/field marketing
- Marketing operations and analytics
Sub-teams and roles:
- Demand generation
- Inbound marketing
- Lifecycle marketing
- Operations and analytics
- Social media (sometimes)
Product Marketing
Product Marketing handles “what you sell” — they define and communicate information about your product and value proposition.
Responsibilities:
- Product launches
- Partner marketing
- Messaging and positioning
- Pricing (with Revenue or Finance)
- Competitive analysis
- Sales enablement
Sub-teams and roles:
- Partner marketing
- Sales enablement
Brand Marketing
Brand Marketing handles “who you are” — they use storytelling to engage prospects, customers, and partners.
Responsibilities:
- Brand standards and guidelines
- Creative production of assets (outside of Product)
- Web and print design
- Company swag
- Content calendar
- Case studies (with Product Marketing)
Sub-teams and roles:
- Content Marketing
- Copywriting
- Design
- Communications/PR
Note: we’ve included Content Marketing as a sub-team here, but as we said above, it can also operate as a standalone function. And sometimes it lives under Growth. This all depends on the size of your content budget and team, the volume of content you produce, and the business goals content marketing is meant to achieve.
B2B marketing department structure considerations and common exceptions
Again, there’s no right or wrong way to structure a marketing team. Here are some of the most common exceptions and a few key considerations to keep in mind.
Consider your GTM motion
Before you start sketching out your org chart, stop to think about your go-to-market (GTM) or sales motion. Do you rely on a sales team to handhold prospects through a lengthy buying process? Or do you have an easy-to-onboard product that relies on self-serve signups?
These different go-to-market motions require radically different approaches to marketing strategies, and you’ll want to structure your team accordingly.
For example, at a company with a traditional, sales-led model, lifecycle marketers will usually fall under the Growth Marketing team. But if you have a self-serve motion with a freemium product that relies on upselling to drive revenue, lifecycle marketing may make more sense as part of the Product Marketing team.
Think beyond full-time employees
Don’t stop at full-time employees on your org charts. Consider how your team will use agencies, consultants, and freelancers to support marketing programs. Contractors can be especially useful when:
- You’re experimenting with a new channel or tactic
- You need deep channel expertise, but not enough to warrant a full-time hire
- You need to scale production quickly to support a time-sensitive initiative
- You’re early in a growth phase, or experiencing some economic uncertainty, and not able to hire a full-time specialist
Including contractors in your org charts and team structure planning helps ensure there’s visibility into who’s responsible for managing budgets and workflows. And clearly documenting these roles can also help identify opportunities for sharing resources between teams.
For example, rather than Growth and Product Marketing contracting separate content writers, you could onboard one shared resource who becomes more familiar with your audience and product — and creates higher-quality content for both teams.
Don’t neglect the dotted lines
Marketing is a team sport. Beyond direct reporting structures, consider including dotted-line relationships on your org charts to formalize collaborative relationships and build alignment among teams and across departments.
For instance, you may want to represent that a designer will report to a creative director, but have a dotted-line relationship with the demand generation team. And any shared resources, like operations or analytics, should be clearly defined.
Common exceptions
Here are some of the most common gray areas to b2b marketing department structures:
- Social media can live under Growth or Brand (or Content!)
- PR and Comms may be its own department separate from Marketing altogether (but that dotted-line relationship needs to be strong to avoid misaligned storytelling)
- Sales enablement may fall under Content rather than Product Marketing
- Customer Marketing can live basically anywhere, depending on the goals of your program
- Designers may live under Brand, or even report up to Product, if your organization aligns all graphic designers and experience designers into one team
- Same goes for copywriters — they may report into the marketing function they support, or all be aligned under a central creative team or in-house “agency” with its own management structure (and there may be separate UX writers or content designers that report up through Product)
- Product Marketing occasionally reports into Product (but that can lead to silos, so proceed with caution)
- Business Development Representatives (BDRs) occasionally report into Marketing (proponents say this creates greater accountability and messaging alignment, while others believe these reps should live under sales to foster their career growth)
Improve your marketing team performance
The big takeaway here: there’s no one right way to structure a B2B marketing team. But, there are some principles and proven approaches that can help you pinpoint the right strategy for your team’s specific needs.
Once you have the big-picture layout in place, you may want to focus on one area of specialization: your marketing automation team. The marketers who oversee the personalization, segmentation, and automation of your campaigns play a vital role in your overall performance, so check out our guide to building your marketing automation team structure to learn more.