Marketing Operations Defined
Marketing Operations is a broad term that collectively describes the people, processes, and technologies that enable marketing to operate efficiently and to scale with quality and consistency. Marketing operations is more encompassing than the conventional definition of marketing because it adds technical and analytical approaches in addition to creative ones.
This combination of analytical, technical, and creative approaches is essential in today’s ever-growing data and technology environment to maximize the benefits for companies as well as their customers. It offers opportunities to develop better customer relationships based on the data available and deliver personalized experiences across an increasing number of marketing channels while increasing marketing efficiency and effectiveness.
As a result, marketing managers that want their teams to include marketing operations functions must expand their team’s skill set to include technical and analytical skills as well as creativity.
Marketing operations professionals often are not who would have previously been thought of as “marketers” or associated with the marketing function. The professionals that serve in marketing operations (MOPs) roles frequently come from analytical or process-oriented backgrounds. It’s now not uncommon for a Chief Marketing Officer’s (CMO’s) staff to include analysts, programmers/developers, project managers, data experts, and market researchers performing marketing operations functions.
the absence of a Chief Customer (Experience) Officer, marketing needs to own the customer experience. This will require customer journey maps and (ideally) a 360-degree view of the customer, drawn from all organizational touch points (sales, IT, customer service, etc.) and the associated data. Don’t be intimidated. You can start developing the knowledge and data you already have readily available; the major factor is making the decision to undertake this as a priority.
Marketing teams (or IT teams) often do not possess people with all of the skills required for a marketing operations team; for example, they often don’t have marketing data analysts or platform/technology-specific experts. Existing team members may need to acquire these skills, or new team members may need to be added to the team to fill these roles. Additionally, with the ever-changing marketing technology environment, these individuals will need to continue to learn and develop their skills.
Customer data and content from across the enterprise should be utilized to enable the most valuable customer experiences and drive the most business value, and analytics are the key to unlocking this. Marketing operations is a natural place in the organization for customer data and content to exist, but often they don’t have the analytics expertise necessary to realize and deliver the full value possible. Data and content without analytics will hinder success.
In order to understand the value of the marketing work being done, as well as that of marketing operations, operational metrics are essential. For example, for a marketing campaign, you not only want to understand the success of the campaign itself (e.g., engagement, conversion, etc.) but also metrics around the campaign execution to help you understand and refine the campaign development process resulting in more predictable execution times, increased campaign throughput, and better quality.