If you’re reading this, odds are that you’re already a fan of marketing operations. Chances are also good that if you aren’t yet familiar with marketing operations, you’ll soon be able to experience them firsthand. In fact, according to DemandGen Report’s 2019 State of Marketing Operations Survey:
• 97% of organizations intend to increase the number of employees on their marketing operations team in 2019 (up from 85% in 2018)
• 63% have increased their budget for marketing operations since last year
• 55% plan to add more staff by 2020
The growth of the marketing ops team means we’ll all be seeing a lot more from this unsung hero as we continue into 2020 and beyond! To help make sense of what it means for marketers—and what it means for those who will be working with them—we’ve put together some basic information about what makes up a typical team and how its members work together.
In this blog post, we’ll take a look at why these teams are so important and why your business should consider adding one (or more!) members to its roster. Then we’ll dive deeper into how they operate day-to-day: who does what (and how), why your company needs data scientists, etcetera. By the end of this article, you’ll know how to hire your own full-time staff member or contractors depending on your needs!
What is marketing operations?
Marketing operations is a job function, not a department. It’s the work that makes marketing possible—it’s the coordination, planning, and execution of all activities related to marketing campaigns. Most importantly, it’s the glue that holds everything together and ensures your team has everything they need to hit their goals.
Marketing operations include tasks like customer relationship management (CRM), campaign tracking and reporting, budget management, and resource allocation across digital channels like websites and social media accounts.
Why is marketing operations important?
Marketing operations is a term that’s been around for some time, but it’s still not very well understood. In short, it means ensuring that your marketing initiatives run smoothly and efficiently—and thus, your entire organization can thrive.
Marketing operations isn’t just about data and technology; it’s also about making sure you’re hitting all of your goals with the right message at the right time, in a way that resonates with customers. And if those things aren’t happening? You could be in for some serious trouble. With so many moving parts in today’s digital world—and so little room for error—it’s critical to have strong marketing operations to keep everything running smoothly from top to bottom.
The importance of cross-organizational alignment
Marketing Operations is the glue that holds together all of the disparate parts of a marketing organization. It’s the key to aligning your digital strategy and tactics with revenue goals, which is why it’s so important for marketers today to understand how Marketing Operations can help them succeed.
Marketing Operations doesn’t work in a silo; it’s embedded across an entire company, working with other departments such as product development, sales, and engineering. Since its role is cross-organizational, you’ll want to make sure you’re familiar with how each department contributes to achieving business goals through data analysis/reporting capabilities (i.e., Sales), infrastructure management (i.e., IT), automation toolsets (i.e., Product Development), and more!
Data, data, everywhere.
As we’ve discussed in previous posts, data is the lifeblood of marketing. It’s what powers all of your activities and allows you to make informed decisions.
Marketing ops handles data at a high level by providing a place where all the different sources of data can be stored and utilized. This includes:
- External data like market trends; competitive information; consumer insights; customer behavior; etc.
- Internal data such as product performance metrics (e.g., revenue generated per campaign), employee performance metrics (e.g., email open rates), etc.
The goal here is to have one central repository where all of these sources can be accessed in order to inform decision-making across departments like sales, product development/management, digital marketing teams, etc..
Is Marketing Operations Technical?
As a marketing operations professional, you are responsible for making sure that all of the various parts of your company’s marketing efforts are coordinated, on schedule, and working together. It can be difficult to understand exactly how this works if you don’t know what goes into it. After all, marketing operations isn’t really an official job title; it’s more like a description of a role that may not even exist at your company yet.
So what does it mean when someone says they’re doing “marketing operations?” In simple terms: they’re combining their knowledge of technology with their intuition about people and companies to create campaigns that work in real life—and doing so with data analytics as their compass. Marketing Operations professionals have technical skills because they need them in order to get things done quickly without wasting time or resources. They also have analytical skills because these professionals don’t just create new ideas for campaigns—they test those same ideas by running A/B tests and seeing which ones perform best before implementing them at scale across multiple channels (including paid ads).
Finally, Marketing Operations professionals must possess excellent communication skills because they may have many different stakeholders who need regular updates on each project’s progress or unexpected changes due to external factors beyond any one person’s control—including salespeople calling back customers after losing leads through poor timing; social media managers coordinating messaging between different platforms like Twitter versus Facebook; team members working remotely on content creation projects across continents…the list goes on!
What does a marketing operations team do?
Marketing operations teams are responsible for the day-to-day running of a company’s marketing department. They are the workhorses behind marketing, ensuring its success through planning, execution, and measurement.
The marketing operations team is responsible for a wide range of activities including:
- Planning and executing campaigns
- Managing budgets, analytics, and data
Marketing operations is the unsung hero of digital marketing
Marketing operations is the unsung hero of digital marketing.
This cross-functional team supports the digital marketing strategy, responsible for the data and technology that drives results. They’re also in charge of making sure all your campaigns are running smoothly, from start to finish.
Conclusion
Marketing operations is a crucial tool for digital marketing and one that should be used by every company. It helps you understand your customers better and allows you to make data-driven decisions, which are key to success in any industry today.
