Marketing Operations Defined
For marketers, it’s essential to focus on consistently delivering value to your audience.
However, to deliver a valuable experience to customers, marketing teams need help. In fact, they require Marketing Operations or the people, technology, and process that enables marketing to operate efficiently. In this post, learn more about Marketing Operations and why these teams are vital to a business.
What is Marketing Operations?
Marketing Operations or marketing ops enable the greater marketing team to run in a well-organised manner. Marketing ops provide planning, governance and support functions to allow core marketing functions to focus on delivering value. In short, marketing ops is the backbone of a marketing team.
Marketing Operations increases efficiency and focuses on end-to-end marketing optimisation; including budgeting to execution and analysis. It supports marketing teams by strengthening marketing strategy with infrastructure, metrics, budgeting, business processes and reporting.
Marketing ops have allowed for a left-brain approach to the traditional marketing function, creating the need for marketers to expand their skill set to include analytical and technical skills in addition to the more conventional marketing skills of writing and creative expertise.
Why does Marketing Operations matter?
Without the help and guidance marketing ops teams provide, marketing would struggle to accomplish necessary activities. For instance, technology is required by most teams to carry out their marketing tasks, therefore, a team to manage that technology and ensure it’s running smoothly is also required. That’s what marketing ops teams do.
Here are some benefits of having a marketing operations team:
- Streamlined data reporting and metrics tracking to discern ROI
- Provides you with your desired marketing technology solutions
- Execute strategies from start to finish in reduced time
Additionally, Marketing Operations combined with marketing automation has the ability to change the way you do marketing; influencing your strategy with new capacities, insights and aptitude.
What is a Marketing Operations strategy?
When you consider creating a marketing ops strategy, think about the problems they need to solve daily. Because marketing ops team members need to have an expansive skill set, they will typically deal with a wide array of tasks ranging from email operations to lead rotation and customer data.
All of these roles then come together to align the process and platforms required to carry out marketing tasks for the greater marketing team. To have an effective marketing ops strategy, you’ll need to solve the needs of stakeholders, customers, and the employees at your company.
What are Marketing Ops stakeholder expectations?
Marketing Operations, just like other parts of a business, is under pressure to increase efficiency, improve processes, perform at higher speeds, and show value to the company. Below are some examples of expectations stakeholders have for marketing ops teams:
- Grow revenue
- Measure and improve ROI
- Out innovate competition
- Manage complexity around buyer behaviour, channels, and technologies
- Drive customer intimacy
- Build scale with IT
- Build alignment with sales
- Maximise IT investment and usage
- Create IT roadmaps that align with CMO needs
- Control costs
- Innovate and evolve infrastructure for the future
- Campaign design and execution
- Accurate and actionable analytics
It is the role of Marketing Operations to function in a variety of capacities to assist and support stakeholders and their particular goals.
How to create a Marketing Ops strategy
Here are a few steps you can take to create your own marketing operations strategy:
- Determine what marketing ops teams want to accomplish for stakeholders
- Establish the steps that will help you achieve these goals
- Set a measurable metric to gauge strategy success
- Assign employees to specific tasks that will add to the completion of said goals
