Making Sense of Marketing Operations and the Role It Plays in Businesses Today!

Businesses that are looking to streamline their revenue, realize the importance of Marketing Operations and the role it plays in stretching their marketing dollars. Organizations are continually leveraging technology to keep pace with the speed of the business world and gain critical insight into business performance and customer needs. There is no denying that in the 21st century, the fastest growing role in business is marketing operations.

However, it is a relatively new field, and there are apparently a lot of questions surrounding the area. So, let’s tackle the critical issues, and try to make sense of marketing operations and the role it plays for businesses today:

• What is marketing operations, and why bother with it?
• Is there a conflict between operations management vs. marketing?
• How does it fit into the broader marketing discipline?
• What strategies can businesses use to improve their marketing campaign results?

We will aim to answer all these questions by the end of this piece. To find out more about marketing operations, read on.

What is Marketing Operations?

The most important question we must tackle is:
“What is the role of marketing operations?”

To put it simply, there are a lot of responsibilities placed on the marketing operations director or coordinator, which include:

• Developing Improving the overall marketing process
• Strategic planning
• Budgeting
• Measuring and evaluating marketing performance
• Selecting and implementing marketing technologies
• Providing professional development for the marketing team

This means that the relationship between marketing and operations is like a partnership; hence focus is on all the activities happening behind the scenes and ensuring that those processes are running efficiently so that the campaigns hit their targets and reach their goals.

If you dive deeper into the history of marketing operations, you can trace it back to the 1920s, even though it is considered a new field today. The reason for that is because marketing dynamics have changed entirely over the past century, and the evolution and growing influence of different marketing disciplines have played a role in that.

You can take your cue from “Mad Men,” a television series that portrays the bustling advertising world in the 1960’s when it was the driving force. Marketing has seen a seismic shift in its dynamics over the past decades, and even though the biggest corporations in the world had their own marketing departments, they were tasked with moving products and were out of touch with the market.

The role marketing operations (MO), can be best described as a cutting-edge concept involved in the process of creating, manufacturing, and promoting products and services. That is the reason you will often find the marketing operations department to be inhabited by a wild mixture of buttoned-up right-brain statistic ninjas, and creative left-brain thinkers, who all work in perfect synchronization towards a common goal.

Marketing Operations Strategies

The reason most marketing strategies fail is all down to an honest marketing mistake:
“Not staying in touch with the market, and collecting the wrong information about your target audience.”

That is why marketing operations strategies have become an integral ingredient for businesses to achieve marketing success. The most common myth related to marketing operations is that it is all about automating processes and crunching numbers.

However, any marketing operations analyst worth their salt will have the skills to interpret numbers and quickly fill in knowledge gaps. They will use their data-driven insights to help the marketing team boost engagement and enhance customer experience.

But that is not all marketing operations does, it also focuses on cross-team collaboration and improving processes. This can be done by coordinating different arms of the marketing organizational structure, which allows the marketing operations management to connect the dots between execution and strategy. They are the ones that must ensure that all inbound marketing and outbound campaign messaging is affiliated, the content managers are working with the Lead Gen team, and everyone is pulling in the same direction, in line with the business objectives and CMO’s priorities.

The ultimate goal of marketing operations is to combine different technology, metrics, and processes to support and facilitate the entire marketing organization.

The Future of Marketing Operations

Most companies have realized the value of marketing strategy in terms of operations and have adopted it to make their marketing efforts more effective and efficient. Marketing operations teams have a single focus, which is based on value creation – for employees, business owners, and most importantly customers.

This focus is key to marketing and further enhances the importance of marketing operations as a global discipline, which is used by the most successful corporations in the world.

The Four Key Pillars that Define MarkOps

So, where do you begin? First, we must look at the four critical pillars of marketing operations, which are:

• Budgeting:  The money assigned to every marketing function.
• Technology: The analytics, marketing automation, and CRM required to execute and run campaigns.
• Measurement: The measurements and frameworks are necessary for attributing success.
• Processes The workflows, which make the marketing tasks repeatable and predictable.

Out of all the four pillars, the easiest one is to start by measuring your own actions. When you start tracking your progress, you start seeing the picture clearly, and can quickly implement the rest of the three pillars. To understand your budget, you must calculate your ROI, and to create new processes; you must view analytics, to improve and refine results. You must understand, which of these three areas is the weakest so that you can implement new technology to enhance efficiency and effectiveness.

Ready to Get Started?

After reading all this, you must be convinced that your company requires a full-fledged department to achieve effective and efficient marketing strategy?

If you’re thinking like that, think again, because you can drastically improve your strategy with resources you already have today!

If you are interested in learning more about marketing operations, or you think you are ready to get started towards success, get in touch with our team today!