The Scope Of Marketing Operations
The scope of marketing operations is quite broad and includes activities that can be broadly categorized as collateral creation and maintenance, demand generation, and performance measurement.
Although many components of Marketing Operations can be done manually, proper processes with the right technology is the enabler that allows for scalable operations.
- Collateral Creation and Maintenance – Includes administrative duties like budgets and schedules, along with the creation of materials such as web pages, brochures, templates, videos, images and logos.
- Demand Generation – Segmenting the total market to identify logical targets for your product and service, engaging in a meaningful exchange of information with your target, providing them with enticing offers, sustaining their interest, and passing along qualified leads to sales teams.
- Performance Measurement – Tracking KPIs and metrics along the entire customer journey, enabling higher and faster conversion rates.
Marketing Operations Stakeholders
The science of marketing and the digital tools to support its operations has grown exponentially over the last few years. This has increased the operational complexity of day-to-day activities.
Marketing Operations is under the same kind of scrutiny as other parts of the business to increase efficiency, improve processes, and execute at higher speeds. The figure below depicts what the various stakeholders expect out of the Marketing Operations function.
It is the role of Marketing Operations to function in a variety of capacities to serve and support each of these stakeholders and their specific goals.
Marketing Operations Best Practices
In the first quarter of 2016 alone, our Marketing Operations team of more than 150 professionals processed more than 2,000 campaigns across different enterprise environments utilizing multiple leading-edge Marketing Automation tools. Those campaigns included more than 50 billion customer touches for our clients in more than 22 countries and 14 languages.
While the numbers are impressive, we go beyond the numbers and partners with clients to understand their business and help them market effectively, as well as efficiently.
Along the way, we’ve learned a few things about Marketing Operations. Some brief words of advice below:
- Marketing Operations Cuts Across Existing Departmental Boundaries – Marketing must learn to fluidly lead in a cross-functional, cross-departmental manner.
- Marketing Needs To Own And Be The Champion of the Customer Journey – Marketing needs to drive the customer experience. A 360-degree view of the customer is required drawing from all enterprise touch points (sales, IT, customer service, etc.).
- Additional Skills Will Be Needed – Agile team leadership, analytics, technology and technology integration skills are all required.
- Both Data And Content Are Key – Customer data and content from across the enterprise should be used to enable the most relevant customer experiences. Maximizing the usage of data and content will allow increased customer journey interactions and increase marketing ROI.
- Establish Operational Metrics – Operational metrics for campaign execution, as well as the campaign itself, are important. These metrics will help you understand and refine the campaign development process resulting in more predictable execution times and increased campaign throughput.
Our best practices are based on marketing operations experience, empirical evidence, and platform knowledge. Our experience across clients, platforms, and campaign types provide us with a unique perspective on what really works.
