An In-House Digital Department That Works Like an Agency

Ranks ITT Limited, part of the RANCON Group, operates across 16 distinct strategic business units spanning sectors from automotive to real estate to consumer electronics. As Digital Marketing Strategist, I was brought in to address a structural problem: each SBU needed genuine digital marketing support — strategy, not just execution — but hiring a dedicated specialist team for all 16 individually wasn’t realistic, and the alternative, a single generalist team stretched thin across all of them, wasn’t actually serving any one business unit well.

The Problem With Spreading One Team Thin

The existing approach before this restructuring was close to a round-robin: whichever SBU asked loudest or most recently got the team’s attention that week, while others waited. This produced inconsistent quality and, more damagingly, no SBU ever got the kind of sustained strategic relationship that produces real results — the team was always reacting to the most recent request rather than building a real understanding of any single business’s market and customers.

Restructuring Around an Agency Model

The fix borrowed directly from how a well-run external agency operates: account ownership, not shared responsibility. Each SBU was assigned a specific internal lead who functioned as its dedicated account strategist, responsible for understanding that business’s specific market, competitors, and goals deeply, the same way an external agency account lead would specialize in a client relationship rather than splitting attention evenly across everyone. Specialist resources — paid media, content, design — were organized as shared internal services that account leads could draw on, similar to how an agency’s specialist departments support multiple account teams without belonging exclusively to any one of them.

Giving Each SBU a Real Strategic Cadence

Every SBU received a structured planning and review cadence — regular strategy sessions, a documented quarterly plan, scheduled performance reviews — the same rhythm a business would expect from an external marketing agency it was paying a retainer, rather than ad hoc support whenever the internal team had spare capacity. This was the single biggest shift: SBU leaders stopped experiencing the digital team as an overworked internal resource to be rationed, and started experiencing it as a strategic partner they could actually plan around.

What This Produced

Within this restructured model, the digital department built genuine specialist depth per business unit while still operating as one coordinated internal team, giving each of the 16 SBUs access to a quality and consistency of strategic digital support that would otherwise have required 16 separate external agency relationships, or 16 small, under-resourced internal teams duplicating effort and specialist capability across the group.

The Underlying Principle

An in-house team doesn’t have to choose between being a single generalist pool or fragmenting into disconnected unit-specific silos. Structuring it deliberately around account ownership and shared specialist services — borrowing the model that makes external agencies work well — lets one team deliver dedicated, strategic support at a scale that would otherwise be impossible without either overspending or diluting quality everywhere.