Artikel
Dear C25 company: How to scale your marketing team for change and growth
By Carsten Bjerregaard, CEO, Marketingcapacity.dk
How do you build a team that can keep up with developments? A team with both strategic overview and the necessary specialist skills? A team that can move quickly – without compromising on quality?
Fortunately, marketing is no longer sitting in the back row as a staff function. In most large companies, marketing is the central engine of the company’s growth. And this has increased the pressure. You have to deliver faster. On more channels. With greater, documented effect.
This places great demands on the team. Because markets change from day to day. With new technologies, new expectations and increased competition. And here a problem arises: Most marketing departments are built for operation. Not for change. Not for scaling up and down when needs change.
Large organizations know the problem. I often talk to marketing leaders about it. Here is a brief summary of my thoughts on how to solve the task.
What does it mean to “scale” a marketing team?
When we talk about scaling in a marketing context, it’s not just about hiring more people. It’s about:
- Being able to handle multiple initiatives in parallel – without burning out
- Being able to adapt the team to new campaigns, markets or channels in a matter of weeks – not months
- Having access to specialist skills when they are needed – without necessarily having to hire them permanently
As McKinsey highlights in the report The agile marketing organization (2023), it is crucial that marketing functions today are organized modularly, so that they can be quickly adapted to the business strategy and market demands.
The three primary models for scaling
I believe that there are basically three approaches to building a scalable team:
Model A: Internal build
The classic approach, where you gradually build more skills and more capacity in-house. It provides high control and cultural anchoring – but is slow and less flexible.
Model B: External scaling via agencies and consultants
Here, capacity and competencies are purchased through permanent partners. This can be effective, but often also expensive, less flexible and with the risk of silo thinking and lack of ownership.
Model C: The hybrid model with flexible resources (freelancers, interim specialists, etc.)
This is a model where an internal core team controls strategy and project management, while drawing on external specialists as needed. This provides access to updated know-how, flexible scaling and fast time-to-market.
According to an analysis from Bannerflow (2022), 61% of larger marketing teams find that hybrid team models give them significantly higher pace and quality in their output.
The strategic benefits of a scalable organization
Being able to scale your team is not just about capacity – it is a competitive advantage:
Time-to-market improves significantly because you don’t have to wait for headcounts or recruitment
You can strategically prioritize what you want to own yourself – and what you want to bring in externally
You reduce the risk of burnout in the team by avoiding overload during peak periods
Gartner highlights in its report Marketing Organization Design Survey (2023) that 75% of CMOs plan to rethink their organizational structure precisely to meet these needs.
Scaling in practice
Take, for example, a large Nordic retail company with over 10 brands and a marketing department of +30 people. If it is going to embark on a major digital transformation and campaign calendar across markets, it has three options: Hire more, push the internal team – or think new.
If you choose to think new, you can introduce the aforementioned hybrid structure. With a fixed core team supplemented by a flexible pool of content creators, performance specialists and SoMe talents that can scale up and down depending on campaigns and seasons. Result: Faster campaign production, fewer bottlenecks and greater satisfaction in the team.
And then an economy that follows the level of activity.
How do you get started?
The transition to a hybrid structure can certainly be made the subject of a university study if you want to do it perfectly. If you want to get beyond the steps faster, I imagine a process that looks like this:
- Map your core competencies internally – what should be owned?
- Identify bottlenecks and the need for flexibility
- Build an “on-demand” pipeline of trusted freelancers and specialists
- Establish governance and onboarding frameworks so that quality and brand consistency are maintained
Those are only four points. But you then have to make an effort to fill them in. Not least the last point. Because even if you work with a flexible group of skills, you must understand your company, your products, your strategy and your brand guidelines to the same extent.
As Harvard Business Review writes in ‘Design your organization to match your strategy (2022)’, organizational design must follow strategy – not the other way around. If you want to execute faster, more data-driven and channel-diversified, your organization must be able to keep up.
Conclusion: Being ready for change is a strategic position. Scaling is not about growing unchecked – it is about being able to grow intelligently. By combining fixed resources with flexible solutions, you as a CMO or CMO can build a team that is ready to adapt – and drive growth, not just follow it.
The marketing team of the future is not bigger – it is smarter.
Sources:
- McKinsey (2023): The agile marketing organization – mckinsey.com
- Deloitte (2023): CMO Survey Highlights – deloitte.com
- Gartner (2023): Marketing Organization Design – gartner.com
- Harvard Business Review (2022): Design Your Organization to Match Your Strategy – hbr.org
- Bannerflow (2022): The Hybrid Marketing Model – bannerflow.com
