Building B2B Startup Marketing Orgs from 1 to 25+
Featuring marketing org chart diagrams
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I published my first guide to B2B startup marketing org charts as the first MKT1 Newsletter, way back on 12/1/20. Every company organized their marketing teams differently and I found myself explaining my POV over and over again. Nearly 4 years later, I’m still explaining it, but slightly differently—and I think a fresh post is needed on how to build a marketing team.
Marketing has changed (dramatically) over those years, from startups switching from a growth at all costs to an efficient growth mindset due to macro-trends to the rise of AI and no-code automation. That said, many of my core principles for building and organizing marketing teams are the same–I still recommend organizing around 3 main sub-functions (brand & content, product marketing, and growth marketing).
This post will dive into what I believe is the ideal marketing org chart set up today for various team sizes, and things to watch out for as you build and organize your marketing team.
This newsletter is the first of 3 on marketing org charts & roles
Newsletter 1: Org design at various team sizes
Marketing org design strategy
How org charts change as you scale from 1-25+
Nuances and details for each sub-function
Newsletter 2: How roles and org charts vary across marketing teams, with expert input from Marketing Leaders with experience at Mercury, Front, Lattice, Apollo, Cocoon, Anrok, Atlassian, and more - for paid subscribers only.
Newsletter 3: Data showing the evolution of marketing roles
Recommended products & agencies
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Part 1: Marketing org design strategy
Before you start hiring more marketers or (re)organizing your marketing team, make sure you understand a few basics of B2B startup marketing org design.
No two marketing org charts are exactly the same
Think of marketing hiring as a puzzle—unlike sales, there are over 20 unique roles, and no two marketers have the same skillset.
You need to customize your org structure based on your existing team, business model, audience, and market. To determine who you need to hire, understand your primary growth engine (inbound, outbound, ecosystem, events) and content strategy and formats (video, events, written guides, etc). Hire generalists first, and as you scale you can bring in specialists.
Remember while org design matters, the top priority is hiring people who are both strategic thinkers and effective executers. Scale the team by filling in gaps around these people.
Marketing teams are not sales teams…they’re actually more like product teams
Many founders, execs and even marketers themselves, view marketing as an extension of the sales team and think marketing should be focused on driving the pipeline this quarter. Marketing should have a much broader scope, otherwise, you’ll limit marketing’s impact on your business.
Yes, marketing should focus on top-of-funnel activities, but it also needs to drive full-funnel conversion, enhance the customer experience, and build a brand that fuels long-term growth.
In reality, marketing is more like a product team. Both are multidisciplinary and must balance short-term tasks with long-term, high-impact projects. Like product teams, marketing needs deep audience and market insights and a mix of multi-disciplinary roles—producers/product managers, infrastructure, designers, analysts, developers, and more.
For more on why marketing is less like sales and more like product, check out this newsletter on marketing and sales and this newsletter on marketing and product.
Balancing fuel & engine, across 3 marketing sub-functions
Your team must create value-add fuel and craft a well-running engine for your specific audience, in your specific market. Your fuel needs to be custom-made for your engine and your engine needs to be custom-made for your fuel.
This analogy is the simplest way I’ve found to throw away the marketing jargon, ever-changing marketing job titles, and complicated frameworks and explain the mix of things you need to create an efficient and effective marketing function. I wrote about my fuel and engine framework in this newsletter.
To balance fuel and engine successfully, you also need a “foundation.” This foundation—based on your specific product, audience, and market—drives both fuel and engine strategy.
Keeping in mind the fuel & engine analogy, marketing teams are typically organized into 3 sub-functions:
Content & Brand aka the Fuel: Responsible for creating fuel (words, design, video, etc) that aligns with your audience and engine.
Growth Marketing aka the Engine: Responsible for driving full-funnel growth and revenue, and distributing “fuel” across multiple channels–and setting up the tooling, tests, and optimizations needed.
Product Marketing aka the Foundation: Responsible for doing the research needed to understand your audience, market, product, and positioning, which informs all marketing activities. It also helps with fuel & engine activities that require deep product and audience knowledge, like product launches, sales and partnership enablement, and messaging for campaigns.
Organize marketing like product: The need for “producers”
You need a multi-disciplinary marketing team that not only covers fuel and engine activities but also builds the foundation needed to create the right fuel and engine. This results in a team that typically has the 3 sub-functions mentioned above.
But, what tends to happen is each sub-function works in silos–leading to fuel, engine, and audience misalignment.
Some examples: The fuel doesn’t always get distributed effectively (if at all) through your engine. The engine is built for the wrong GTM motion (i.e. all outbound for a self-serve sales motion). Product marketing research, including segmentation and positioning, aren’t considered when creating content (“fuel”), or targeting is done wrong when running paid campaigns (“engine”).
Teams may try to solve for these silos by:
Adding a demand gen or campaign manager to the growth marketing (“engine”) team
Adding a role on the content & brand (“fuel”) team to think through content distribution
Requiring product marketing to connect the dots and across fuel & engine activities
Crossing their fingers and hoping the teams start combining fuel & engine more effectively
I think there’s a better way and I have a new recommendation for how to get fuel & engine aligned: You need what I’m calling “producers”, who serve as dot connectors or glue on your team. They unite fuel & engine activities, run campaigns, serve as project managers for the content creation process, oversee programs and events, and provide feedback back to individual teams on what’s working and what’s not, etc.
IMO, these “producers”, should report directly to the head of marketing, not into one of the leaders of the 3 sub-functions, and work across all areas of marketing. This will add leverage to the entire team, even when your team is just 5 people.
Part 2: Marketing org charts by team size
Here are my recommended org charts for B2B startup marketing teams at 3 sizes. These org charts are meant to be rough guides—the exact roles on your team may vary.
1 to 10 person marketing teams
When building a team from 1 to 10 marketers, make sure to avoid these common mistakes:
Hiring only on the engine side. I see teams have multiple growth marketers or demand gen contributors and don’t have anyone to create content to feed the engine they are building—this doesn’t work! And a reminder, that marketing shouldn’t be organized like a sales team with a bunch of people in the exact same pipeline generating role.
Hiring a very senior Head of Marketing too soon. The Head of Marketing will need to contribute as an individual contributor until your marketing team is well over 20 people. When a Head of Marketing only has big company experience before joining a much smaller startup, they often can’t get the balance of strategy and execution right.
Bringing on way too many contractors, with no one to manage them internally. It’s hard to make external marketers successful without someone setting overall strategy internally with deep knowledge of the business. I wrote about when and how to hire contractors and agencies in this newsletter.
Hiring just specialists, with no coverage across marketing. You need to hire generalists early on, who can at least help out with most areas of marketing.
10-20 person marketing teams
When scaling from 10-20 marketers, organizing your team gets a bit more complex, watch out for these common mistakes:
Unbalanced fuel & engine teams: One team may start to get bigger than others. I recommend making hiring plans that alternate between fuel & engine hires, making sure you have enough “producers” and product marketers to support their efforts.
Not adding process where needed: At this scale, you’ll need a defined process for reviewing and editing work, running campaigns, setting goals and tracking them, reporting on metrics, etc.
Too many direct reports for Head of Marketing: If the Head of Marketing doesn’t put leaders in place for each sub-function (who can scale) around a total team size of 15, things can get out of hand quickly.
Unclear responsibilities with gaps and overlaps: You will likely need to update your hiring plans after bringing each new person onto the team—and based on changes to your strategy and in your market. Constantly assess gaps and overlaps on your team and don’t be afraid to make changes to your plan.
For example, if a competitor is beginning to take market share, you may need to bring on a product marketer to focus on competitive and/or positioning. Or If you hire a marketing ops leader, who also knows lifecycle marketing well, a dedicated lifecycle marketer may become a lower priority over other roles in your hiring plan.
20+ person marketing teams
When your marketing team scales past 20, you need to shift how you organize and run your team, here are mistakes to avoid:
Process and hand off breakdowns: Once you hit 20 people you need to develop even more processes. Everyone won’t know what everyone else is working on, or even what everyone’s role is. The “producer” roles become even more critical.
Being reluctant to re-org marketing: At this point, it may make sense to have more than 3 marketing sub-functions, create centralized cross-functional teams (design, ops, partnerships), or move areas like events, ecosystem, and lifecycle to other sub-functions. Don’t be afraid to do this if it will help you scale from 20-50 marketers!
Cross-functional relationships become strained: When it’s harder to figure out who is doing what on marketing and dotted line relationships get blurred, it can cause challenges working across teams. Make sure all managers and leads on your team are focused on making these relationships positive. More in my newsletter on internal marketing.
To access these org charts and edit your own in Figjam become a paid subscriber and visit our template library.
Part 3: How roles and sub-functions evolve as your team scales
While those org charts are *extremely* beautiful and well done, I thought I’d add some words about how to build your marketing team over time as well.
Marketing sub-function coverage, plus generalists vs specialists
5-10 person team: When you begin to hire a marketing team, you won’t be able to hire for all sub-functions of marketing out the gate, but when you grow to a team of 5, you should have 1 person in each sub-function of marketing.
10-20 person team: As you scale from 5, to 10, to 15 marketers, you can have more than one person in each sub-function in marketing. While you may have initially hired a sub-function generalist, you can now hire people to cover specific areas within those sub-functions.
20+ person team: At this point, you’ll have a mix of generalists and specialists in each sub-function team, and will start to have managers reporting to the Head of Content & Brand, Head of Product Marketing, and Head of Growth. Again, the exact specialists will depend on your strategy.
Head of Marketing
1 person marketing team: For your first marketer, I’ve previously written about hiring “π-shaped marketers” instead of T-shaped marketers as your first marketer–these are marketers who spike in 2 of the sub-functions of marketing, but also can set strategy and hire marketers or across all 3 sub-functions.
Note: Your 1st marketer doesn’t need to be your future of Head of Marketing, but if they can grow into that role, why not?!5-10 person team: When you get to 5 people, it’s likely time to promote or hire someone into the Head of Marketing Role. It may be possible for your Head of Marketing to also lead one or two sub-functions. As in, you may not need a Product Marketing Lead if your Head of Marketing has that core skill set.
10-20 person team: The Head of Marketing should hire core leaders in each of the sub-functions as you move towards 20 people—and stop having direct reports beyond the leaders of the sub-functions and producers.
20+ person team: At 20+ people, it may make sense to bring in a more experienced VP of Marketing, especially if your Head of Marketing was stretching into the role after being the first marketer. Team dynamics change a lot at this point and the role of Head of Marketing changes to be more focused on strategy, cross-functional relationships, and pure people management.
“Producers”
5-10 person team: Even at this team size I think it’s helpful to have a entry-level to mid-level “producer”. As I described above, these are generalists who help ensure fuel & engine are working together. This person adds leverage to everyone else on the team and jumps in to pinch hit where needed. They need to be scrappy and able to figure things out—and they should report to the Head of Marketing.
Responsibilities can include: project managing content creation and design projects, managing contractors, executing campaigns across channels, making web updates, and coordinating events.10-20 person team: At this point I recommend hiring 2 producers to help manage content & brand creation, web development, distribution of fuel through your growth engine, and high-impact campaigns. This ensures your team doesn’t operate in silos as the team scales; creates high quality, value-add work for your audience; and focuses on high-impact projects—instead of doing random acts of marketing. I wrote about running campaigns in this newsletter.
20+ person team: The “producers” of the team become more critical than ever, as the team will become more siloed and everyone on the team won’t know each other well anymore.
Content & Brand Marketing
Changes to content marketing roles
Hiring for content used to mean hiring content marketers who were most skilled at writing. Today, content marketers need to be more versatile and understand a wider range of channels, mediums, and tools. While a dedicated writer might still be needed, you may also hire a social media creator or video creator early on. Content marketers today need to understand modern tooling and AI to create efficiency in their work—so they can focus on the true creative work.
Sub-functions within content & brand: I include design, comms/pr, brand, brand-focused events, and content all under one umbrella—the goal here is to create fuel. But you can adjust this as needed: events are often placed under growth marketing, comms can be it’s own sub-function, and design may be part of a centralized design team with product design.
5-10 person team: Hire a generalist who understands content marketing strategy, spikes in 1 to 2 areas, and can hire contractors to augment their skillset across media types (i.e. hire someone that writes well, but understands video and social). Typically, you do not need a full-time designer at 5 people, but it’s helpful if someone can make edits in Figma or even Canva on the marketing team—especially if a contractor has helped develop a design system.
10-20 person team: Begin to add specialists to the content team based on what types of content are working best. It’s also time to bring a designer in house. Depending on how critical events are to marketing and what the goal of events are, it may make sense to bring on an events role under brand–until this point the producer can help manage events.
20+ person team: Now it makes sense to hire a brand manager, comms/pr lead, design lead, and content lead–and some specialists who focus on different types of content. As the team evolves, design might become centralized with a product design team or decentralized under product and marketing. If this is the case, the role of the producer is even more important as they help bring the marketing designers who sit on the product design team together with the marketers.
Product Marketing
Sub-functions within product marketing: In addition to product marketing owning research, enablement, and launches, it sometimes includes ecosystem marketing (partnerships, customer marketing, influencers, channel, etc). For more ecosystem marketing, jump down to that section.
5-10 person team: Hire a product marketing generalist. This person should handle audience, market, and product research, lead positioning and segmentation, manage launches (with help from a producer), and collaborate with sales, customer success, content marketing, and product on enablement.
10-20 person team: Add more product marketers. You can organize product marketers (PMMs) by segment or product line, or keep everyone as generalists.
20+ person team: You should define specific roles for product marketers (PMMs). In addition to roles for specific segments or product lines, consider dedicating PMMs to enablement or the self-serve/PLG funnel based on your business model.
Growth Marketing
Sub-functions within growth marketing: I use growth marketing as the umbrella term, which includes inbound (ads, SEO, Social, Referral Traffic, etc), demand gen (ABM, demand gen campaigns, demand gen events, outbound), lifecycle marketing, and marketing ops & analytics.
5-10 person team: Hire a generalist who understands growth marketing strategy overall as you figure out which channels work best. Make sure they know the basics of marketing ops (enough to hire and manage a contractor to get things set up).
10-20 person team: Depending on your audience, market, and GTM motion and the core channels you plan to pursue (inbound, paid search, outbound, events, lifecycle, web/self-serve, etc), you’ll choose which specialists to hire to support the head of growth marketing. It also might make sense to hire someone dedicated to marketing ops—or continue working with a contractor here.
20+ person team: You should know what your core channels and growth levers are at this point, and build up more specialists in those areas. If you have a sales-led GTM motion, you’ll likely need more demand gen, ABM, and outbound-focused marketers. If you have an inbound motion and/or self-serve or PLG motions, bringing on more SEO, paid, and web-focused hires will make more sense. Lifecycle marketing also operates differently depending on your GTM motion, so make sure you hire someone with experience with a similar motion.
A note on outbound marketers and SDRS: With new tooling available, you may choose to move the role formerly known as an “SDR” or “BDR” to marketing. I call this role an outbound marketing manager. You still might have SDRs on sales focused on things like cold-calling and high-touch outbound. But anything that’s 1 to many or mostly automated can fall under marketing. This is a whole newsletter itself, maybe i’ll write that one sometime soon!
For more on organizing a growth marketing team, check out this newsletter on that exact topic.
Ecosystem marketing
Definition: Ecosystem marketing is my catch all phrase for marketers who work with third-parties to drive growth–this can mean partner, channel, affiliate, customer, influencer, or community marketing.
5-10 person team: Typically you don’t need someone focused on partner, customer, or community marketing at this size–unless its core to your strategy.
10-20 person team: At this point, you will likely want to bring someone on to own partner, customer, or community marketing. The specifics of the role will be highly-dependent on your marketing strategy.
20+ person team: You may need a dedicated ecosystem people manager at this point as the team scales. And you may even decide to spin Ecosystem marketing out as a 4th sub-function at this point.
Where ecosystem marketing fits in your org chart:
Your company’s goal for ecosystem marketing, plus the types of 3rd parties you partner with, informs where this sub-function should sit on your marketing team. Since product marketing owns the research into the market and audience, ecosystem typically works well within product marketing. However, “ecosystem” marketing can primarily mean using partners as a channel to drive pipeline, in which case it may make sense under growth marketing. Or “ecosystem” can mean using customers in marketing efforts, in which case it may fit better in brand.
Contractors
5-10 person team: Its helpful to pull in extra help as you build the team to 5+. Often, teams of this size will have a contractor to help with design & initial web dev; growth marketing contractors to help with paid channels and/or rev ops; and content creators.
10-20 person team: You’ll still need contractors to fill in the gaps on the team. But you may may move from working with contractors to working with small agencies that can offer more support and sophistication in how they work with you.
20+ person team: I think it always makes sense to augment your core team with contractors and agencies as you scale, as some marketing work tends to ebb and flow and/or deep specialists who work with many companies at once are needed. Agencies that I typically recommend at this size include: web dev (even if using Framer or Webflow, it’s still helpful for larger projects to have a developer), paid search and social agencies that deeply understand the channels you are using, and comms/pr. All of these areas benefit from having an agency that works with many companies and can deeply specialize.
Roles that don’t fit squarely into the 3 marketing sub-functions
How you organize these roles or teams within marketing depends on the people in these roles, career pathing, and your specific goal for the function. These roles include: Events, Ecosystem, Design, Marketing Ops, Comms/PR
Takeaways
Scaling a multi-disciplinary team like marketing is a puzzle and a challenge. You can follow org chart conventions (like the diagrams above) to make it easier to hire and build marketing process, but you should also create a structure that works for your specific business, GTM motion, market, and team.
“Producers”, whether focused on campaigns, content & creative, one-off-programs, etc. that report into the Head of Marketing can create a ton of leverage across the team and help you balance ebbs and flows in work.
Roles are evolving, especially in content and outbound/growth marketing, with some leaders having SDRs directly on their team today. I’ll cover this more in the next 2 newsletters on org charts.
Design, partnerships, community, events, and ops: Can fall in different places in a marketing org, depending on the business needs and people on the teams. Producers can help make sure these roles and sub-functions work well together, no matter the org design.
Remember: Balance fuel and engine, make sure fuel & engine roles have the support of a great product marketing team (aka the foundation), and hire “producers” to help you keep the fuel and engine humming through your marketing machine.
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-Emily
Hi Emily - Great insights, as always. Where do you see responsibility for organic social fitting into your framework? Does this align to content, or do you treat it like any other inbound channel and align it with Growth marketing? Thank you!