Centralizing Your Web Marketing Function, by Lee Huang, Guest Blogger

The following is written by guest blogger, fellow Web Strategist, Lee Huang. Lee and I have interacted through the Internet Strategy Forum, and we struck up a great conversation on departmental organizations of web marketing within corporations.

Thank you Lee for sharing your insight with the community.

Centralizing Your Web Marketing Function, by Lee Huang
Many organizations are planning to consolidate their web marketing functions under one centralized department, rather than having individual business units handle it. To successfully do this requires convincing business units of the benefits of a centralized web marketing department, as well as implementing organizational changes and new business processes to ensure smooth on-going operations. If you’re planning to go this route, here are some pointers to help you reap the desired benefits and avoid any nasty surprises.

1. What’s In It For Me
You’ll need to get buy-in from folks at the business units early on by convincing them that a centralized web marketing department will make them more successful so that they are willing to partner with you and to relinquish some autonomy. Here are a few key benefits of a centralized web marketing team:

A team of web marketing experts that is dedicated to leveraging this evolving platform and implementing best practices will deliver more successful campaigns for each business unit.

Expenses will be reduced because the centralized group can realize cost savings from vendor consolidation, volume discounts, and increased negotiating power.

Time to market should be reduced since the experienced web team should be able to deliver campaigns faster and work with vendors more efficiently. * (see point 3 below).

By “aggregating” assets/brands, the centralized team can create more cross-unit marketing campaigns and bundled deals that will expand reach, exposure, and value propositions.

2. Welcome to the Client Services Business
All these individual business units are now your clients. Therefore, in addition to your day job of “web marketing,” your centralized team will have a new set of “client management” responsibilities.

You’ll need to collect project requests from the business units, evaluate their goals&requirements, present solutions, answer questions, and report out regularly on project status and campaign results. All this requires clear accountability, tracking systems, escalation procedures, and service level agreements.

3. Project Prioritization
It’s important to know at the outset that no matter how hard you try, your centralized team won’t have the internal resources to complete every project request. You will inevitably get more requests from the business units than you can handle at once. Therefore, you’ll want to have outside vendors and freelancers available on-call to assist you when you get overloaded. There will still be times though, when you’ll need to play triage and put some projects on hold pending resource availability. You’ll need to have a thick skin when its time to inform the business unit of this.

To minimize the obvious frustration that this will cause and subsequent shouts of “bottleneck”, it’s important that you establish a clear “project prioritization process” and get buy-in. For example, one option is that each project request must include an ROI model that describes anticipated benefits. Projects will be reviewed and those with higher anticipated ROI will be completed sooner. This process also helps weed out project requests that aren’t worth doing.

4. Aligning Compensation Plans
Too often when companies reorganize and change individual responsibilities and departmental objectives, they forget to update individual compensation plans and departmental key performance indicators. Therefore new responsibilities are still tied to legacy metrics and this misalignment causes huge problems.

To avoid these problems, you need to update compensation plans and targets so that they properly reflect the goals of the new organizational structures. In addition, you’ll also need to clearly define what (if any) department allocations/chargebacks are needed with this new structure and how it impacts the budgets and P/L of the business units.

This entry was posted on Monday, December 3rd, 2007 at 2:55 am and is filed under Web Marketing, Web Theory. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.