Marketing Organization

Achieve organizational goals by aligning people, processes and technology with marketing strategy

Marketing leaders need to deliver growth

Marketing organizational design and operation is a complex and ongoing challenge for marketing leaders as the marketplace shifts in an unpredictable business environment. CMOs are evolving their teams through increased centralization, more functional alignment, and continued exploration of agile marketing practices. 

Download our Marketing Organization Survey 2020 research to get an inside view of your peers’ and competitors’ strategic plans for their marketing organization.

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    I went [to Time Inc.] to really transform the company, to optimize the business, and to create new revenue streams to drive growth — with a very, very short runway. I spent a lot of time with Gartner and the experts ... to bring in outside best practices ... So It was really a team — [Gartner was] helping me and helping my leadership team to succeed, go to market quickly, to put the strategies together quickly.

    Leslie Doty

    Former CMO, Time Inc.

    Marketing Leaders can deliver growth through integrated marketing departments

    CMOs or Marketers tasked with delivering growth in their marketing org must be able to operationalize their strategic plans. This includes gathering and deploying the resources, processes and tools that power capabilities of marketing departments according to marketing strategy plans — and executing those plans effectively and efficiently.

    Master profile types: Traditional T, Fat T, Specialist and Emerging

    Marketing Organization Insights you can use

    Gartner insights and advice help leaders optimize their marketing organizations to achieve their business goals.

    Prove the Value of Marketing to the Enterprise

    To link marketing initiatives to business value, CMOs must seek out metrics that are indicators of marketing success and operational excellence. Find out how to plan and prepare for measuring marketing’s quantitative value in your Marketing Organization and develop a future outlook.

    Driving Cost Optimization Across the Marketing Organization

    Leading CMOs approach cost-optimization/budgeting as an expansive, always-on effort that can have both an immediate and a long-term impact on how marketing delivers against business goals. Learn how to identify and implement cost optimization strategies into your marketing organization.

    Cut Costs, Not People: 7 Cost Optimization Questions for Marketers

    Marketing leaders must calibrate priorities and fine-tune spending as part of continued marketing operations. Use our cost optimization framework to redeploy talent more effectively at a time of shrinking budgets in your marketing organization.

    Build a Best-in-Class Marketing Analytics Organization

    Nearly 50% of all marketers say their biggest challenge is building a competitive analytics organization. Watch our on-demand webinar today to learn what skills you need for a best-in-class marketing analytics organization and if you might already have those skills in house.

    How we support Marketing Organizations

    Our experts, backed by unbiased data, will support you as you build effective organization structures, optimize operations in your marketing organization and grow your marketing department’s capabilities to deliver measurable results.

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    Marketing organization questions Gartner can help answer

    A marketing organization refers to the way a  business’s marketing department is structured and designed. It takes into account the roles and responsibilities of marketing within the framework of the business’s strategic objectives. An effective marketing organization delivers a strong focus on driving customer engagement and retention through a project-centric work style. 

    Due to the flattening of organizational structures, increased adoption of dynamic, adaptable work environments is required to lead and manage the marketing organization of tomorrow, as well as establish a marketing team capable of strong internal and external collaboration.

    The effectiveness of marketing organizational structures depends on the right mix of critical skills and talent aligned to business objectives and goals. This enables effective management of outsourced talent (agency and service providers) and marketing operations.

    Marketing delivers measurable value to an organization. You can have the best product or service in the world, but without an effective marketing strategy, no one will know about it, and your business goals will fail. 

    Marketing operations works to establish the processes and tools that power marketing planning, investment, campaign execution and performance measurement. From this vantage point, business leaders can review the performance of a product or service marketing strategy and identify improvements to drive a more successful campaign, ultimately achieving broader business goals. 

    The more effective your marketing strategy is, the more successful your business strategy will be.

    Marketing leaders in the evolving digital landscape need to optimize their organizational structure by transforming their existing project management approach. This means using agile marketing practices to build a more scalable, flexible and resilient marketing organization.

    Agile marketing is a flexible approach to managing marketing projects that uses frequent iterations to test and learn, enabling responsiveness to change. One of the core agile principles is frequent calibration of work and resources, which enables marketers to more quickly adapt to disruption and effectively change course as needed. Agile marketing planning is about setting a simple primary goal and adjusting details over time by iterating continually based on feedback from your team, your customers and your analytics.

    For greater flexibility and agility within marketing organizations, marketing team members should be able to “toggle� between roles, filling gaps where required on individual campaigns or projects. That means they should be capable of leading one project, contributing to another, and planning or collaborating on multiple initiatives.

    Your objective should be to build a balanced portfolio strategy, ensuring that safer bets such as servicing existing customers and driving repeat purchases are balanced with more transformative options. Most marketing organizations consider brand strategy the most important marketing capability, followed by marketing analytics, marketing operations, digital commerce, and market research and competitive insights.

    The metrics you focus on also shape the customer experiences you deliver. At the top of the list is return on investment, with marketing qualified leads a close second. Sales qualified leads and conversion rate are additional critical metrics.

    Gartner is a trusted advisor and an objective resource for more than 14,000 organizations in 100+ countries.

    Learn more about how we can help you achieve your mission-critical priorities.