The Marketing Team Audit: Are You Staffed for Success?
Insights, delivered.
Our world is moving at a fast pace these days. We’re on the cusp of a technological revolution (hello, AI), and evaluating the effectiveness, adaptability, and return on investment of your marketing team is more important than ever. Still, in all the ways the world is changing—socially, economically, politically, and technologically—many mission-driven organizations feel their marketing efforts aren’t yielding the impact they expect to see. Your organization may both invest in and fully optimize marketing technology and digital advertising, yet ROI feels like an uphill battle. Your team is giving all they can, but the squeeze just isn’t producing enough juice. You can’t exactly pinpoint it, but you know something isn’t working. If you’re struggling to keep up with—and meet—organizational goals despite seemingly doing all the “right things,” it may be time to consider assessing one of your most significant resources: your people.
Part of having a savvy marketing team is to have the right people in the right place—supported by the right processes. Organizations transform over time, and marketing teams do as well—gaining and losing capacity, often filling immediate needs as they arise. It then makes sense that, over time, the unified front of your marketing team may not be optimized for success.
In working with hundreds of mission-driven organizations over the last 25 years, we’ve found that having an unbiased, outside party examine your team’s structure, roles and responsibilities, and internal marketing and communications operations has significant benefits. As advancements in MarTech and how your audiences engage with you become exponentially more complicated, aligning your marketing efforts with your organization’s strategic goals becomes ever more challenging.
What is a Marketing Staffing Audit?
A marketing staff audit evaluates how well your marketing and communications efforts support your organization’s mission. This entails looking at your marketing and communications team, their position within your organization, skills, roles, and responsibilities. An audit can identify opportunities and recommendations for:
Better alignment with your organization’s top strategic goals
Further investing in what is already working (technology, human resources, etc.)
Maximize existing marketing tools and better utilize current marketing staff
Prioritizing marketing initiatives
By examining your marketing operations, your organization can gain a comprehensive understanding of its strengths and areas of focus. This evaluation is crucial as it leads to improvements that enhance your department’s contribution to the overall business strategy and is especially valuable when combined with a strategic marketing plan.
Assess Your Current State
One of the first questions you should ask yourself is: What is your organization ultimately trying to achieve? How does your marketing show value (and results) that align with your mission?
A marketing staff audit can validate or challenge assertions about your marketing effectiveness. Sometimes, an external analysis alone can bring about the necessary changes. In other cases, the audit reveals issues below the surface within the organization’s culture, prompting leadership to reconsider how they support marketing in the first place. Ultimately, the staff audit empowers your organization to make informed decisions based on evidence, addressing the specific challenges your business (and the marketing team) faces and maximizing growth opportunities.
Unearth Uncomfortable Truths
The reality of this process is that it can be uncomfortable. Assessing roles, responsibilities, dynamics, and functions across teams can feel like a weeding-out, but really, it’s an opportunity. A marketing staffing audit grants permission to have conversations that wouldn’t come up otherwise. Team members can voice their concerns and perspectives, and the resulting changes will only increase employee engagement and overall performance.
Another significant aspect of conducting a staffing audit is evaluating your organization’s risk tolerance and readiness for change.
These issues must be addressed before any valuable or long-lasting change can occur. This is particularly important now, with AI technology disrupting the creative process and the marketing industry overall. That lack of alignment may not be obvious or visible, especially when different components align toward slightly different goals. Effective staffing audits evaluate the organization comprehensively, sometimes identifying gaps in leadership as well.
Define and Redefine—A Process
Think of a staffing audit as a refresh of your game plan. There is real value in delving into aspects of your organization, like team structure and departmental expectations. Identifying internal issues or underdeveloped areas helps highlight where improvements are needed, whether in tracking the right metrics, providing adequate staff training, or defining—or redefining—roles and responsibilities to enhance accountability.
Optimize Your Marketing Team with Mighty Citizen
Do you need help identifying issues impacting the optimization of your marketing team? We can help align your marketing operations with your business strategy, prioritize and plan for future resources, re-evaluate roles and responsibilities of staff, and even interview candidates on your behalf to determine optimal fits with your organization’s culture and marketing maturity. Reach out to our team—we’d love to chat.
Measure Your Team Dynamics
Get a pulse on your effectiveness through The Mighty GPS™, Mighty Citizen’s self-assessment for measuring your marketing maturity. Our assessment can help you evaluate your organization across six key marketing categories, including Team Dynamics, and gives you access to a custom report and recommendations in just 10 minutes. Start now.
