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As a business owner, you want your business to thrive in its niche. But all businesses face competition, and each year the market only seems to get more congested. As this happens, it becomes trickier to stand out from the crowd. You need to take every measure you can to run your company efficiently and work every angle possible to reach new customers.
A large part of this responsibility lies on the shoulders of your marketing. Marketing content is what you send out into the world to tell people what you offer. But marketing content does more than that. It can also establish your business as an authority in your field. It helps develop leads, spread your branding message, and serve as content customers turned advocates can share with their friends.
That said, marketing operating effectively is essential to your business's success. Are you sure you're making the most of your marketing assets and strategies? The key to maximizing the effectiveness of your marketing and growing your business is called marketing operations management.
But first of all, what is marketing operations and marketing operations management? How can it help your business, big or small, stand out from your competition? Can better marketing operations improve your business's efficiency? The answer to that last question is yes, but we'll get into why down below.
What Is Marketing Operations?
Marketing operations are also called MOps. This is a term that describes all the working of the marketing processes. This includes the people, content, technology, strategies, and other unique aspects of your marketing efforts. MOps management is about finding how to effectively utilize each part of your marketing strategy to improve the chance of having increasingly successful days.
Depending on the kind of business you have, what exactly falls under the umbrella of your MOps will change. People may include marketing managers, analysts, and strategists if you have a large company. However, all marketing teams should at least include a content expert who facilitates your marketing content. Social media experts would also fall under this category.
Processes may include how you plan new projects and do marketing research. This should also include how you plan to implement new marketing strategies and how you analyze their performance after implementation. Other kinds of marketing planning processes would include how you manage marketing assets and other data management concerns.
Technology that falls under the MOps includes whatever programs or services you use to support the previously outlined operations. This includes whatever management program you currently use, where you make advertising content, and where you digitally post it.
The Growing Importance of Marketing Operations
More and more, commerce is heading to the online market. It's key for all businesses to do all they can to maximize their opportunities to market themselves online. Then they need to use all resources available to prove that they stand out from the vast amounts of competition out there. This means ensuring that all the processes, people, and technology you use actually work.
Helps Optimize Technology
The most common issue businesses face trying to digitize their processes is bad technology investments. Depending on the company, you may currently have several pieces of technology you use to facilitate your marketing strategies.
Can you be sure that each of these programs is working well? Do you know if some of these technological solutions are redundant? Do they make more work for your marketers instead of less? Are you effectively using social media platforms? You may find out you've been dedicating resources to programs that are weighing down your business instead of boosting efficiency. Or that your social media campaigns have been largely ineffective.
When you take marketing operations seriously, you take the time to look at current workflows and decide how they can be optimized. This helps to enable marketing to use technology effectively while eliminating tech debt.
Find Better Processes
For every part of your business, you want to decrease the amount of time it takes to execute a plan. In the fast-moving digital world, timeliness becomes even more vital. That means you need to consistently look at your processes to find out where kinks are. MOps managers work to review processes and system data. They harness reports to figure out better systems that enable teams to work better at all stages of the work cycle.
Marketing also deals in data that is important for your entire business. This includes customer engagement rates, feedback, product development, and more. So getting those pieces of data and metrics product development or sales is incredibly important. MOps processes make strategies better, from the planning phase to data analysis.
Understanding the Role of Marketing Operations
That means marketing operations extend past simple marketing processes. A good marketing operations management system should help your entire business run smoothly. This is because marketing is a fundamental aspect of running a business. Digital marketing can be especially important. It is often what makes one business stand out from another and helps generate more valuable leads for sales.
The roles of marketing operations really include project management and strategic planning phases of marketing. On top of that, MOps should make better workflows for marketing teams and create consistent documentation systems. Marketing operations should also complete market research and understand your customers with intelligent analyses.
After that, MOps should track marketing performance for all people in the marketing department. Once campaigns are created and deployed, marketing operations are in charge of analyzing these strategies. Then they report on these successes and where improvements can be made. Then it will work on the next campaign.
The final most prominent roles of a MOps are the data management duties that also fall under the responsibility of marketing. All the content that you can store on a computer and use for marketing is a digital asset that needs to be managed. This includes videos, images, texts, demos, guides, whitepapers, ebooks, email templates, social media branding voice content, and anything else you can think of.
Altogether, that means marketing operations are essential to ensuring your business operates smoothly. And that it's always working towards improvement.
Marketing Operations Are Not Just for Large Businesses
More and more very large technology companies have been acquiring formal marketing operations managers to take hold of their MOps functions. This allows them to constantly look for best practices, make rapid decisions, and have faster marketing plan execution times. A high-performance culture also enables them to review their performance to find areas for improvement constantly.
The high level of organization that marketing operations values help ensure that the data marketers need to make good strategies is always available when it is needed. Data management tools also help facilitate this on-demand need for data. Each team member is held accountable for their work, and teams can be more flexible. With the best data to guide them, marketers can make quick changes to ensure that marketing materials are constantly becoming more effective.
These companies prioritize:
- Proper data management
- Budgeting and planning
- Implementing automation, using technology effectively, and managing pipeline flow
- Strategic planning, benchmarking, and organization-wide assessments
- Talent development, workflow improvement, and performance measurement
- Post-campaign analysis and general market research
These should be important to all businesses, not just large firms. The only difference between that large company and a small company is the fact that a smaller business likely can't afford to employ a new manager. However, to get the benefits of utilizing the core ideas that make marketing operations great, you don't need to hire a formal MOps consultant.
Create a Successful MOps Based Company Culture
Instead, you need to build a mindset into the business that focuses on creating these core values. Have a company culture that emphasizes accountability in the marketing department and encourages employees to build streamlined work processes. This creates a foundation that expects content to be delivered on time and to the highest quality possible.
Find the right talent and encourage employees to communicate how they feel about certain kinds of technological solutions. This can help ensure you don't invest in tech solutions that only cause more work. Plus, it keeps employees accountable for their working systems.
In this way, every member of the marketing team becomes a mini marketing operations manager, who keeps the roles of one in mind each day. It becomes your way of doing business instead of a dedicated position. Make sure this mindset bleeds into all aspects of your business and isn't' localized in marketing. To make a successful marketing operations system, you need open communication between marketing, finance, sales, IT, and other operational parts of your business.
How To Craft a Successful Marketing Operations Strategy
Marketing is a growing and evolving area of business that is finding its importance in the digital selling world. Ensure that your company uses technological innovations like automation and data analytics tools to break down communication silos and ensure the business is united towards better sales. When your business executes accurate market forecasting, reviews its marketing performance, and consistently follows best practices. This will ensure marketing processes are continually improving.
To successfully create this kind of company culture and quality expectation, you need to form a marketing operations strategy.
1. Orient Your Strategy to Align with High-Level Needs
When you decide it's time to start optimizing your MOps, you need to communicate this decision with any share or stakeholders that you may be responsible for. This way, you know that your new team goals are also aligned with higher-level needs. This includes things like increased revenue or unique stakeholder concerns. What these goals are may not be entirely clear at first, which is why communication is necessary.
Also, consider the importance of service level agreements in this pre-planning stage. Also called an SLA, these contracts establish what your business expectations for these new practices will be. It sets up clear goals or deliverables and can mitigate communication issues with stakeholders in the future.
Let's paint an example. You may put a lot of effort into reaching out to past customers with special offers in hopes of getting their return business. This is a process that can be made simpler by using FuseBox One's easy-to-use commercial printing tools. In this example, your stakeholders may be specifically interested in ensuring that these campaigns have a higher ROI.
In response to this, the MOps initiative would focus on finding ways to create these mailing materials more efficiently. Mailing content should focus on trying to secure leads more effectively or consider targeting higher quality leads with this marketing. In all, having a clear goal gives marketers the ability to identify the problem, communicate at different phases of the marketing process, and create possible solutions.
2. Formulate a Measurable Metric to Track Your Strategy
The next step will be about metrics. You need to find ways you can measure progress towards your goal. Without the ability to track progress towards the goal, it will be impossible to tell if marketing operations have helped achieve it. The metrics will also help you keep the end goal in mind, even while other work processes go on. This ensures stakeholder expectations are always on the mind of marketers.
Depending on your goal, the method you'll use to track progress will reflect that goal. Consider creating unique KPIs or key performance indicators that can be tracked over a few weeks, months, or even years. Understanding how your new tactics affect engagement numbers and revenue will help you see if marketing operations management tactics are successful. On the other hand, they may need further adjustments to ensure goals are met. Use a business intelligence tool to keep track of these metrics and to see how your business and asset use evolves over time.
3. Create Well-Defined and Achievable Goals
You now know what your long-term goals are. You also know what metrics you will use to identify progress towards those goals. Now, you have to find smaller goals your team can work towards. While big goals are important, it's the well-defined and achievable goals you create to attain long-term goals which motivate your team. Plus, they ensure you're making daily progress towards annual targets.
A good goal has a few key characteristics.
First of all, it has to be specific. Create a specific percentage of increase and ensure that the goal is focused on a particular aspect of marketing operations. These are easier to follow because they are under the direct control of the team trying to achieve it. While it's good to be specific, the goal should also be concrete and measurable.
A specific and measurable goal should also be attainable. A realistic goal may seem less motivational than a goal that may be higher than your team is capable of producing. However, at the end of the day, what you're looking for is real progress and fulfillable results you can report back to your stakeholders. On top of that, the goals should be achievable in a limited time frame. This provides some urgency and keeps goals from being endless.
4. Communicate with Your Team and Refine the Strategy
After you've communicated with stakeholders and formulated measurable and attainable goals, you need to communicate with your team about new expectations. Ask the people who will have to execute these goals about how the strategy may be implemented or refined. This does two things. One, it makes your team feel heard, and two, it allows you to refine your expectations and create more successful plans.
Your team may have difficulties executing marketing plans on time because you use outdated or redundant technologies. Consider how a marketing management platform can help streamline marketing functions, from asset creation to distribution.
5. Then Create and Execute Actionable Steps to Meet Your Goals
With several levels of clearly outlined goals that should mark improvements in the marketing numbers, you also need to outline real actionable steps the marketing team can take to meet those targets. Here, you should also identify what resources will be required to complete these goals, how to stay organized, and how the team's work processes with change.
After these things are decided, these in-depth plans will need to be communicated to the stakeholders. This may be done by a team representative or a dedicated marketing operations manager. If you've created achievable goals that support the longer-term goal decided by your investors, you need to return to them with your plans. This meeting will tell them how you'll be taking these steps and how they work towards the long-term goal.
Any decision you've made to change current technology, the KPI indicators, marketing enablement strategies, and all other relevant tactics. Maybe your marketing team will start using better templates to create content. Once this is brought to the shareholder, they can offer more insight, make more suggestions, or approve the current plan. This gets your team one step closer to meeting annual goals.
6. Assign Responsibilities to Your Team
Now, it's time to start taking these plans and turn them into actions. You will need to weave new tactics into existing workflows, so responsibilities must be distributed to the right workers. Handing out the responsibilities ensures no one person is fully responsible for making changes.
By dividing the responsibilities, the burden of success is distributed equally, and everyone has their role to play. As these tasks are completed, there should be a centralized area for employees to report their progress. Then the entire team can track the status of the project and understand how far they are from achieving the goals.
When To Get a Dedicated Marketing Operations Manager
Now, it's time to start taking these plans and turn them into actions. You will need to weave new tactics into existing workflows, so responsibilities must be distributed to the right workers. Handing out the responsibilities ensures no one person is fully responsible for making changes.
By dividing the responsibilities, the burden of success is distributed equally, and everyone has their role to play. As these tasks are completed, there should be a centralized area for employees to report their progress. Then the entire team can track the status of the project and understand how far they are from achieving the goals.
When To Get a Dedicated Marketing Operations Manager
Building up a company culture that empowers employees to take day-to-day operations seriously and to find solutions to current marketing problems will help inspire employees to follow the MOps mindset. If your business grows, eventually there will be too many roles and tasks for everyone to keep track of. While individuals may work well on their individual projects, teams may no longer operate in unity.
At this point, this is a good problem! It means you have more staff and are doing more business. However, it may be time for you to get your hands on a dedicated marketing operations manager. This person can start keeping track of MOps while ensuring all marketing efforts remain productive.
If your business is reaching the $10 million revenue threshold and has several teams dedicated to marketing, a marketing operations manager may become useful. Above the $50 million thresholds, MOps management positions become more important. Especially if you have team members solely dedicated to marketing operations already.
Technology, software, and B2B companies often find a lot of value in getting a marketing operations manager. This is often because they look at growth from a data-centric point of view, and streamlining processes is a core part of the business. If you own a B2C company, however, you can still benefit from a MOps manager who will help your business scale and create higher rates of lead generation.
Find Success, Embrace Marketing Operations Management
The key to gaining traction in your industry and standing out from market competition lies in how effectively your marketing operations function. Good marketing operations can increase interest in your business, improve customer satisfaction, and enhance customer retention.
To measure how well your marketing is currently working, you need to use marketing operations management techniques. This can ensure that customers are responding to your marketing strategies and help you figure out where improvements can be made. By using a marketing asset management program, you can streamline your marketing operations and make it easy to employ new marketing tactics.
Consider how a MAM program that's convenient and easy-to-use, like the system provided by FuseBox One, can help jump-start this process. As your business grows, you'll need more asset storage space and a program that can scale with you.
Make the best choice for the growth of your business, no matter its size. Focus on studying and managing your marketing operations. This will ensure that your business is doing the most it can to create new customers and make your business operations more efficient.
Free Resources:
Fragmentation Affecting Your Marketing Operations
Marketing Operations Checklist
Marketing Asset Management eBook
Sources:
https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/marketing-operations
https://blog.marketo.com/2007/01/why_you_need_ma.html
https://smallbusiness.chron.com/must-operations-strategy-integrate-marketing-accounting-81479.html
https://visionedgemarketing.com/the-evolving-role-of-marketing-operations/
https://www.blueskyeto.com/marketing-operations-management-software/