Reorganizing Marketing to Match the Customer Journey

If you work in the marketing department for more than one company, chances are that you’ll experience more than one structure. Some companies organize their marketing teams by function, others by product, and some are all grouped together.

A new structure, one gaining in adoption of late, is to organize your marketing team based on the customer journey.

By now we should all be familiar with the customer journey. This is the full pathway, every step that a customer takes from the time they first identify a need that you can fill, through awareness of your brand, up to the moment they decide to purchase, through to using your product or service and deciding whether or not to continue shopping from you.

At each step in the journey, there are marketing functions that exist. And it easy to separate those functions from the ones that exist at other steps in the journey. And so, it makes sense to organize your marketing team, matching people to the specific goals you set at each stage of the customer’s path.

For example, you might have a team dedicated to brand awareness, which can include media buying, social media, market research, etc. And you might have a different team dedicated to the final purchase decision, which would include sales, promotions, ecommerce optimization, etc.

For smaller teams, where people where more than one hat, they might exist on more than one team at a time. But each team should have a point person, who coordinates priorities between the groups and sets strategy for their team.

When your marketing team is organized in this way, they will gain a better understanding of the customer. They can target their efforts to have maximum impact at each stage of the journey. It’s a focused approach that has advantages over other, more traditional structures, especially as more data becomes available to marketers.