Structuring Teams for Engagement Marketing Success

# Format: Best Practices & Playbooks

# Theme: Leadership & Executive Perspectives

# Theme: GTM Strategy & Trends

# Challenge: Career Growth

Explore how to structure teams across education, lifecycle, and community to scale engagement marketing and drive GTM outcomes.

December 4, 2025

Joshua Zerkel

Engagement marketing brings together three disciplines—education, lifecycle, and community—to support customer adoption, retention, and advocacy. But the strategy is only as strong as the people behind it. Many organizations struggle because these functions are either siloed in different departments or collapsed into a single role. Both extremes undermine effectiveness. The right structure provides clarity, focus, and collaboration.

The core disciplines

Education. Specialists in instructional design and learning programs who create the content that teaches customers how to succeed.

Lifecycle Marketing. Experts in customer communications who deliver the right content at the right time through digital channels, most often email.

Community. Builders and facilitators who create spaces for customers to connect with each other and extend conversations around content.

Each discipline requires different skills, yet all share the goal of driving customer engagement. Structuring teams with these distinctions in mind ensures that each function can excel while reinforcing the others.

Common structural pitfalls

Silos. Education lives under Customer Success, lifecycle under Marketing, and community under a separate function. Without coordination, customers receive fragmented experiences.

Overlapping ownership. Teams compete to own the same touchpoints, leading to inconsistent messaging.

One-person bands. Early-stage organizations often ask a single individual to cover all three areas, which stretches capacity and limits depth.

Principles for structuring teams

1. Distinguish by discipline, not channel. Avoid lumping education into lifecycle just because both use digital tools. Define roles by expertise: educators design learning, marketers orchestrate journeys, and community managers facilitate dialogue.

2. Create a shared vision. Unite the three disciplines under an engagement marketing mandate with common goals such as adoption and retention. Shared objectives encourage collaboration across channels.

3. Start small, scale intentionally. In early stages, one person may cover multiple areas. Over time, grow into specialist roles while maintaining cross-functional ties.

4. Enable career paths. Position engagement marketing as a growth function. Generalists can progress into specialized roles such as education program manager, lifecycle strategist, or community lead.

5. Align leadership. Ideally, the three disciplines roll up into a single leader responsible for engagement marketing. This ensures consistent strategy and execution.

Lessons from the field

Atlassian pairs education teams with lifecycle and community under a shared engagement strategy, ensuring product education is consistently delivered through multiple channels.

Shopify integrates its academy-style education with lifecycle campaigns and community programs, showing how structured collaboration fuels merchant growth.

Asana aligned community and lifecycle under engagement marketing leadership, enabling seamless integration of content, campaigns, and conversations.

These organizations demonstrate how intentional structure creates clarity and amplifies impact.

Why GTM leaders should care

For GTM leaders, engagement marketing structure is not just operational. It directly affects outcomes:

Marketing gains better campaign performance when lifecycle teams align with education and community.

Sales benefits from adoption and advocacy driven by well-supported customers.

Product receives clearer insights from engaged communities and structured feedback.

Customer Success scales with education programs that reduce repetitive support.

Building your team for the future

The shape of engagement marketing teams will vary by company size and stage, but the principles remain. Distinguish disciplines, align goals, and scale intentionally. When education, lifecycle, and community work together under a unified structure, they create an engine of customer engagement that powers retention and growth.

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