Digital Marketing: Organisational Structures and Resourcing Best Practice Guide

This report accompanies the Growing and Managing Digital Teams Roundtable.

Overview

The Digital Marketing: Organisational Structures and Resourcing Best Practice Guide aims to identify common issues, themes and challenges faced by managers and organisations in structuring their digital marketing capability. The best practice recommendations included in this report are designed to help you respond to these challenges, with a focus on the best strategies, frameworks and opportunities for digital success.

About this report

This best practice guide, written by renowned blogger, writer and consultant Neil Perkin, involved three main research phases:

• Phase 1: Identification of the key challenges faced by organisations and digital marketers in structuring and resourcing their digital marketing programmes in an optimal way. Also, how organisations are tackling these challenges, and resourcing their digital marketing in order to maximise their opportunity within competitive and rapidly changing markets. This first phase involved a series of in-depth interviews with a broad range of digital and non-digital marketers and e-commerce leads across different sectors and markets.
• Phase 2: Identification of existing thinking, issues, examples and models that are relevant to a comprehensive consideration of digital resourcing and structures. This phase involved desk research.
• Phase 3: This involved an online survey of a range of organisations designed to better quantify feedback and enable cross-tabulations to identify sector-specific variances.

The 84-page report covers everything you need to know about digital resourcing and structures, including sections on budgeting, skills and training, recruitment and retention and opportunities for the future.

Table of contents

1. Executive Summary
   1. About Econsultancy
   2. About the author
2. Introduction
   1. Aims and methodology of the research
   2. Scope of survey
      1. Size of company by turnover
      2. Business focus
      3. Business sector
   3. Market trends impacting digital structures and resourcing
   4. The only constant is change
3. Digital Resourcing and Structures
   1. Size of teams
   2. Organisational structures for digital marketing capability
      1. The rise of digital centres of excellence
      2. Advantages and disadvantages of centres of excellence
      3. Migration toward hub and spoke
      4. Relationship and interface with offline marketing
      5. Global, regional, local teams
   3. Allocation of digital marketing capability
      1. Allocation of resource
      2. Key sector differences
      3. Location of e-commerce
      4. Location of social media capability
      5. Technical infrastructure, support and build teams
   4. Outsourcing vs in-sourcing
   5. Allocation of specialist digital resource
      1. Areas of specialism and generalism
      2. Key sector differences
      3. Balancing specialism with generalism
   6. Senior organisational management and digital
      1. Senior level buy-in to digital
4. Budgeting
   1. Integration of digital into annual planning and budgeting
   2. Prioritisation of digital projects
   3. The role of strategy and planning
   4. Allocation of digital budgets
      1. Digital in the wider marketing mix
      2. Budgeting for digital channels
5. Knowledge, Skills and Training
   1. Level of organisational knowledge of digital
   2. Priority of digital training
   3. Budgeting for digital training
      1. Working with partners and agencies
   4. Knowledge sharing and innovation
      1. Informal knowledge sharing and Enterprise 2.0
      2. Innovation and the networked enterprise
6. Recruitment and Retention
   1. Challenges in recruiting for digital
   2. Challenges in retention for digital
   3. Increasing requirements for ‘T-shaped’ people
      1. A definition
      2. Why ‘T-shaped’ people are becoming increasingly important
   4. Graduate recruitment
7. Growth, and the Future
   1. Growth in resourcing
      1. The strategic imperative for change
      2. Approach to resourcing emerging channels
      3. Key areas of predicted growth
      4. The rise in product management
   2. Challenges and barriers to growth
      1. The challenge of always-on marketing
      2. The challenge of a multichannel approach
      3. The challenge of being agile
      4. The increasing need to break down organisational silos
      5. The talent time bomb
   3. Opportunities for the future
      1. The digital team of the future
      2. Agile digital marketing structures
      3. The rise of talent networks
8. References and Further Reading
   1. Books and web articles
   2. Econsultancy best practice guides, briefings, studies
   3. Econsultancy blog posts
9. Appendix

Download a copy of the report to learn more.

A free sample is available for those who want more detail about what is in the report.

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