How to set up and establish a marketing department that works now and beyond 21st century

When it comes to marketing, any organization that is not thinking beyond the 21^st century is simply wasting time and resources. The marketing strategies and techniques that worked years back may not necessarily work now and beyond. Being able to set up and establish a suitable marketing department is a critical success factor of doing business today.

To get it right, businesses must establish a marketing department that is highly operational and scalable to meet both the present and future needs of an organization.

In today’s article, I will be discussing tested tips on how to set up and establish a fluid marketing department that will an entity achieve all its goals and objectives.

It is important that we establish a working definition of marketing so as to remove any ambiguity that may arise in the mind of our readers.

Meaning and Definition of Marketing

One of the best definitions of marketing that I have ever seen is the one provided by Philip Kotler and Kevin Keller in their book titled ‘Marketing Management’. According to them, marketing is ‘an organizational function and a set of processes for creating, communicating and delivering value to customers and for managing customer relationships in ways that benefits the organization and its stakeholders’

The above definition shows that marketing is a win-win non-parasitic engagement. So, to full derive the benefits of marketing as contained in the above definition, the establishment of the marketing department must be done correctly and that is why this article on how to set up and establish a marketing department is written.

Seven (7) steps to building a sustainable marketing department for your business

1. Setting marketing goals: clearly, the marketing goal of every organization should be to fully deliver on every promise that the marketing profession made in the definition of marketing. However, organizations are free to stretch these goals a little bit more as long as doing so would not cause suboptimal behaviour in management. It is one of the 8 functions of management is to ensure that resources are profitably coordinated, hence, setting of marketing goals should be done in a way that it smoothly coordinates and integrates with other functions. For example, an overly ambitious marketing goal may pose threat to the finance manager’s ability to function well in the area of resource allocation. The setting of a company’s marketing goal is not a task for a single individual or a department.

• Staffing: there is no way a square peg can fit into a round hole without causing some noticeable frictions. Nothing hurts an organizations effort to achieve her objective more than having the wrong staff in key marketing positions. An individual with a tendency to commit fraud will always work against a company’s internal controls just to ensure that he or she commits fraud. Performing a background check on prospective staff members of marketing department is fundamental – this is unfortunately where many companies get it wrong. This is because they see marketing as a very trivial task that can be performed by anybody.

• Develop and implement marketing policies, rules and procedures: it is always a recipe for chaotic ending when a business does not have a written and actionable marketing plan, policies, rules and regulations. No single staff of the marketing team of an organization can be help accountable for wrong doing when there is no clearly stated guidelines.

• Remuneration: the remuneration package of the marketing department staff needs to be closely management for various reasons. A business does not want to grossly underpay their marketing staff to the extent that they become easy target for their competitors, yet, the company should not pay unnecessary premium to just keep a staff who really isn’t going anywhere. Employee remuneration scheme is another key area of marketing department management that is not meant for all – handle it with care.

• Training: for a marketing department to live up to its expectations, it must have a relevant and up to date training package for its staff members. This is one area where the human resource department play active role in. it will be inappropriate and counter intuitive for marketing department staff to be working with ancient training. Things as simple as subscribing to corporate online on demand training package like Udemy business will go a long way.

• Deployment of technology: the marketing function of today can achieve little to nothing without the help of technology. However, not all technologies will meet the needs of your business. The fact that businesses are unique means that what works for company A may not necessarily work for company B. This is where the application of software acquisition techniques comes into play. Read the hyperlinked article for a full post on how to acquire technologies. Deployment of technologies also includes the management of business technology – including marketing department business technologies.

• Monitoring mechanism: power without control quickly becomes a nuisance. All of the points mentioned in this article on how to set up and establish a marketing department be amount to nothing if there is no control. One of the major functions of budget is to motivate stakeholders of an entity into action but things quickly goes south when adequate monitoring is not put in place. Same goes for marketing management. Management control tools like variance analysis and ratio analysis can easily be utilized in this regard.

Please note that a major role of the CFO of today is to smoothen all rough edges of business, setting up and establishing a functional marketing department is one of such tasks of a modern CFO towards ensuring that marketing rough edges of organizations are smoothen.