How to build a marketing department

I work in SaaS, and specifically I work in marketing. This usually means that I do content for websites such as www.metricfire.com, www.baremetrics.com, and www.packagecloud.com.

The last couple years have been a journey to learn how to grow and build these websites. And I haven’t been just growing traffic, but growing meaningful traffic full of people that are interested in the real knowledge of your site.

Today I started thinking about how to build a marketing department. There are so many multifaceted campaigns that I want to see happen for my clients. It’s way more work than one person can do.

It’s way more work than even one person can stay on top of or monitor. If I hired ten people, would I be able to monitor all of their workflows?

If I hired ten people, would it 10x our output? How about freelancers, do all of these people need to be full time, or can I use agencies and freelancers? Can I use two different agencies to do the same thing and have them compete with each other?

To help answer my questions, I looked into example marketing department org charts to get an idea of what kind of roles exist in marketing.

This one was my favorite:

This org chart comes out of a recent HubSpot study into marketing organization.

What I love about this org chart is separation of creative and marketing. However, creative is still housed within marketing. That makes a lot of sense to me.

The purpose of marketing is to go out into the world and find your customers. This requires a lot of research into your customer behaviour, your customer psychology, and their needs. A lot of what goes into marketing is is not creative at all.

However, attracting people, building a brand, and having an identity that people bond with is a deeply creative thing. And not just creative in the “pretty pictures” sense, but videos, content, voice, people’s identities, and the character of your brand.

A good marketing campaign needs to have the execution of an email campaign coupled with mascots/images/banners/copy/character that is composed of many different people’s work.

My second favorite org chart was this one:

What I love about this chart is the separation of product marketing from regular marketing. Having a product-knowledge focused marketer is fantastic. That person can focus directly on your products functions and your existing customers, and they can hone in on the customer-success circle.

This product-knowledge focused person can then support content marketing and other more “outward looking” roles.

I also love the combination of copywriter and design/video under the same creative services role. Copywriting inherently supports design, as well as script writing and other asset creation.

In this org chart, I wonder if the VP of product also has their own copywriters, or do they send requests for specific articles to be written to the creative services.

Finally, more on my level, let’s look at the most fundamental roles for b2b SaaS:

Kalungi shows us that content marketing and creative would be separate in a small team. Product is still essential, independent of content. As well, digital gets coupled with demand gen, and I’m guessing also channel marketing.

I wonder where this team would place the social media marketing? I also wonder if creative would lead any campaigns of their own, or if creative would support campaigns lead by product/content/digital.

Thank you for reading! This is just the start of my dive into this question, but I will continue to publish more as my journey continues in b2b SaaS marketing!