Marketing operations – which you’ll sometimes hear referred to with the shortened name, MOps – is essentially the overarching term that’s used to refer to your marketing team. It usually covers three core areas, which are your people, the processes they follow and the technology that powers those processes.
And so you could easily argue that marketing operations are key to the success of your marketing strategy because they’re its backbone. It’s like asking why central nervous systems are key to the success of human beings.
But what are the basics of marketing operations, and what do you need to know about the role of marketing operations at your company?
That’s a great question. Let’s go ahead and find out.
The Role of Marketing Operations
Your marketing operations team is the internal entity that’s responsible for running all of the systems and processes that you use for your marketing efforts. With the framework that they provide in place, they can better make strategic decisions and pull together a full strategy that’s aligned towards a common goal.
If you’re hiring someone to take care of your marketing operations (or you’re promoting someone internally to the role), you’re going to want to look for someone with the following skills and experience:
- Benchmarking and reporting
- Customer and competitor research
- Hands-on marketing experience
- Marketing strategy
- Process development, roll-out and documentation
- Project management
- Strong leadership skills
It should go without saying that if a potential head of marketing operations has previous experience working for a MOps team, they’re going to be a good fit. For people working beneath them but still as part of the MOps team (as opposed to your more general marketing team), you should look for people who have a proven track record of working as part of a marketing analytics team analysis and making strategic recommendations based upon the numbers.
If you’re struggling to find the right people or you want to work with a partner that can put you in touch with an agency or a consultant to get the job done for you, reach out to us at CJAM. We’ve already vetted hundreds of partners and helped over 200 customers just like you to achieve their marketing goals.
Why Marketing Operations Are Key
Done well, your marketing operations strategy forms a foundation that will make your marketing easier, more efficient and more effective. It’s going to underline everything that you do and ensure that everyone at your company is on the same proverbial page.
A big part of how they do this is by making sure that you have the systems in place that your people need to get their jobs done. Here, we’re talking about both the processes that you use and the technological tools that sit alongside them.
This is particularly important for digital and inbound marketing, where there’s a huge amount of technology to deal with and a need for speed. The online landscape moves so quickly that if you have cumbersome processes or technological systems that aren’t up to scratch, by the time that your inbound marketing team is ready to hone in on a destination, the destination has changed.
Marketing operations helps here by streamlining your marketing activities so that you can act more nimbly, but this greater efficiency has other benefits, too. For example, it can make it easier to generate reports, track key performance indicators (KPIs) and ultimately to generate a return on investment (ROI).
In fact, these efficiencies alone are often enough to make the time investment worthwhile, as a well-defined marketing operations strategy can pay for itself. It also makes the often-confusing process of carrying out a marketing campaign much, much easier.
When it comes to building teams or making hires, there’s a lot to be said for hiring the right copywriter the first time or streamlining your interview process so that it doesn’t take you months to find the right candidate. Marketing operations can help with that too by ensuring that you know exactly who you need to hire and why you need to hire them. There’s a lot to like.
Of course, it helps if you’re able to work with a partner who already has some knowledge about what good and bad looks like, and that’s where we come in at CJAM. We’ve worked with dozens of organisations just like yours and specialise in matching agencies and consultants with the companies that need them the most. Contact us today to find out how we can help you to build your marketing operations team.
Bringing it All Together
With your marketing operations team in place to provide a backbone and your more general marketing team to carry out the day-to-day work, your organisation is perfectly-placed to turn marketing into a powerhouse for your business, rather than a cost centre.
Of course, you shouldn’t just invest this time and money without expecting some sort of return, so you’ll want to establish SMART goals that you can use to track the progress of your MOps. This will also give your MOps team a better idea of what their primary goal is at the organisation.
To recap, SMART goals are specific, measurable, attainable, realistic and time-bound. A good example of a SMART goal is “increase net income from email marketing by 70% by December 2023”.
Be sure to encourage buy-in from the C-suite and other key stakeholders. This can usually be achieved by focusing on the benefits that you can see from investing in marketing operations, and we’ve covered many of those benefits in this article.
Finally, it should go without saying that a plan isn’t any good unless you commit to taking action to bring your plan to life. Create a list of actions that you expect your team to take, starting with identifying the talent that you’re going to bring into your new MOps team and continuing through all of the actions you want them to take and how you’re going to measure their success.
Be sure to also assign these actions to specific team members to make sure that they get completed. If no one’s responsible, they won’t get done. And at the risk of repeating ourselves, don’t forget to measure, iterate and improve!
What’s Next?
Now that you know everything you need to know about marketing operations and why they’re key to the success of your marketing strategy, the next step is to put what you’ve learned into practice. Start building your marketing operations team and everything will grow out from there!
And of course, if you’re hungry for more then be sure to follow us on LinkedIn, Facebook and Instagram and to check back often for future blogs. We’d also love to keep the discussion going, so be sure to let us know your thoughts on MOps teams in the comments.
About CJAM
CJAM Marketing specialises in connecting your business to the right marketing partners, whether you’re looking for strategy, analytics, creative or development. We work with a network of vetted and trusted marketing providers and have helped customers of all shapes and sizes to improve their marketing campaigns and to make the most of their budget.
Still need help getting your marketing operations team up and running? Perhaps you just need some strategic advice on how to make the most of what you’ve already got. Whatever the case, be sure to reach out to us for more and we’ll be more than happy to help!
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