A few years back, when marketing’s only job was to “promote” a product, marketing operations were tied to project managers’ essence—individuals in charge of coordinating extensive campaigns.
Today, things are different. According to Marketo, 60% of companies now have formal Marketing Operations roles. Marketing Ops is becoming a crucial need for enterprises to keep their complex technologies and processes up and running.
When we talk about modern B2B marketing, marketing operations play an essential role in bridging the gap between “qualitative” marketing such as strategy and creativity; and “quantitative” marketing such as data and processes.
“Marketing Operations is meant to be the operational yang to the creative yin of marketing, a bastion of quantitative rigor and left-brained discipline in a world of right-brained marketers.” – Jon Miller, Marketo.
According to Hubspot, MarOps doesn’t have a precise definition. It serves as a pillar that steers the foundation of marketing automation while strategically utilizing data-driven metrics, processes, and best practices to enable every marketing activity to run efficiently and consistently.
There are several roles that marketing operations play within an organization. So what exactly is the marketing operations team responsible for in your organization?
Marketing operations is responsible for crafting compelling content—copy, images, videos, and more circulated everywhere. Moreover, it includes tracking analytics around the performance of content and how the visitors engage with it.
From identifying prospects, accounts, campaigns, and relationship through email marketing and nurture campaigns; marketing operations is vital to strengthen the buyer’s journey through the marketing funnel. Its primary responsibility is to ensure that the buyer’s interest throughout the sales cycle leads to sales teams.
Marketing operations utilize key performance indicators (KPIs) measuring from every contact in the activities. This includes all metrics for the entire buyer’s journey and all marketing investments to produce effectiveness, efficiency, and attribution associated with the efforts.
More customer journey happens online, making sales and marketing inseparable. Sales and marketing now work together in delivering a cohesive messaging strategy across multiple channels. With the help of marketing operations, it helps create that cohesiveness between sales and marketing. They ensure that both teams have access to the same playbook and are working toward the same goal.
It is also a marketing operations role in planning product launches, events, and brand promotions to generate interest. For example, while the creative team deals with the content side of things and comes up with the aspects of the campaign, marketing operations ensure that every process will contribute to each phase’s success.
Regardless of size, marketing ops will always be the backbone of every marketing activity you have in your organization, especially if you have a sophisticated and complicated marketing strategy with multiple moving parts. Having a dedicated individual or third-party firm who handles your marketing operations activities will give you these advantages:
From planning, execution, and analysis, marketing operations focus on driving results. It builds a foundation by reinforcing your marketing strategy with data, metrics, infrastructure, processes, and reporting.
Marketing operations create a culture of accountability. It encourages streamlined processes to be under a discipline; to get the right skills, people, and ability to drive technology support investments. It breaks traditional barriers between cross-functional relationships needed to accomplish your end goal—gain quality leads that convert to sales.
Overall, marketing operations is quickly becoming a trend. Marketing Operations gives organizations a clear picture of their current marketing investments. Suppose you want to see if your tech stack and multi-channel marketing program closely align with your sales. Then a marketing operations role is probably something you want to consider sooner rather than later. But jumping to conclusions may steer you away from your end goal. Get a free assessment to discover how marketing operations can influence your organization.
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