The Changing Marketing Department

The traditional marketing department focused on brand management, advertising and communications, event management (tradeshows, lead generation etc.) coupled with Product Management with ownership of the product across all sales channels.

If your marketing department still sits with these roles you are likely part of the old school and you are likely going to be replaced by a new roles and responsibilities you may also not be very comfortable with.

While traditional media such as TV, newspapers, magazines and radio advertising continues to drop the new media advertising requiring a very different skill sets such as banner ads, PPC advertising, mobile and social media continues to grow.

The modern Marketing department should probably be renamed to customer relationship management and analytics department. The new roles in the Marketing departments are typically:

(1) Social media management. The rapid fire and free language of social media is very different from the traditionally carefully analyzed advertising process and the skill sets are very different requiring a good understanding of do's and dont's in this social media world. A simple answer written to one individual and delivered in a few minutes without any formal internal reviews process may be read by millions of potential customers. One bad move and a large number of customers can be lost. The freestyling methods requires a special skill set of enormous importance.

(2) Web marketing / lead generation and channel management. The modern marketing department has responsibility for keyword analytics for PPC, banner advertising (for quality sites which properly represent the brand) as well as channel relationship management to make sure you are effectively using and branding your company on partner sites.

(3) Data Quality Management. With the amount of data from social media, web analytics and complexity of customer master data now available to the Marketing department the responsibility in managing the data quality does not only lie with the IT department but also the Marketing department.

(4) Marketing Data analytics (Big Data). The marketing department is now a key consumer of Big Data and new data sources and is starting to employ data scientists to crunch through the large amounts of information becoming available to generate new leads, improved personalized service/offerings and analysis of complex web marketing strategies and campaigns. The traditional saying that "only 50% of advertising is effective but the problem is that we don't know which 50%" can to a greater extent be gone. With careful comple analysis of the data the effectiveness of campaigns can be better understood.

(5) Search Engine Optimization and Blog management. The Marketing department (not the IT department) should own the responsibility for Search Engine Optimization as more and more the strength of search engine ranking is made through social media, web content and interactive communications with other web media outlets.

If your marketing department are missing these responsibilities you are likely missing out on significant opportunities which can be had in this new media world. If your competitors are effectively using these techniques and methods you are quickly ending up with a competitive disadvantage.