Benyi's Learnings on Marketing Operations - Part 1

Marketing operations - the not so shiny backbone of your Marketing department

Marketing operations is often overlooked when people think about marketing. While they may focus on the visually appealing elements of marketing, such as branding, messaging, and campaigns, they may not realize the behind-the-scenes work that goes into bringing those campaigns to life.?

You can compare marketing operations to the stage manager in a theater production. Just as the stage manager coordinates the various elements of a play - such as the actors, sets, props, and lighting - marketing operations coordinates various elements of a marketing campaign, such as marketing tools, data capturing, processes, and metrics. The stage manager ensures that everything runs smoothly and that the production is a success, and marketing operations plays a similar role in helping the organization to achieve its marketing and business goals. It helps the campaign manager, performance marketers and alike to shine and is a critical component of any successful marketing strategy.

In recent years, the marketing operations function has become increasingly important as the ability to measure and analyze marketing efforts has grown. The use of tools and technologies such as analytics and marketing automation has allowed marketers to gain deeper insights into the effectiveness of campaigns and channels, and has helped organizations to optimize their marketing efforts and achieve their business goals.

In this article, I will provide my perspective on marketing operations, including what it should encompass, what it should not include, the types of talent needed to build an effective marketing operations function, and where it should be positioned within an organization. My goal is to provide a comprehensive overview of marketing operations and to help readers understand the role it plays in supporting the marketing function.

I hope you enjoy reading! Let's dive into it:

What is marketing operations?

According to Open AI (and this summarizes it quite well in my perspective), Marketing operations refers to the processes, systems, and resources that support the planning, execution, and measurement of marketing activities. It can include a range of functions, such as campaign management, lead generation and nurturing, customer segmentation and targeting, and marketing analytics.

Marketing operations professionals are responsible for developing and implementing strategies and processes that support the marketing function, and for ensuring that marketing efforts are aligned with the overall business objectives. They work closely with other members of the marketing team, as well as with cross-functional teams to ensure that marketing campaigns are effectively executed and that their results are accurately measured and reported.

The goal of marketing operations is to optimize the efficiency and effectiveness of marketing activities, and to help the organization achieve its marketing and business objectives. To do this, marketing operations professionals may use a variety of tools, such as marketing automation, data analytics, and project management software.

Why do you need marketing operations?

Here are some of the most important reasons why you need marketing operations:

• The skills and personalities of creative marketers differ from those of technical marketing operations managers. Creative marketers should prioritize their strengths in creativity, while technical marketing operations managers should excel in building processes and operations to support them.
• Marketing operations is necessary due to the complexity of working with a diverse tech stack.
• Documentation of marketing activities is crucial, especially in environments with high turnover. Marketing operations helps to ensure that all necessary documentation is in place.
• In order to make data-driven decisions, it is important to have high-quality data. Marketing operations helps to ensure that the data being used is accurate and reliable.
• The pressure to maximize marketing ROI requires efficiency and automation of tasks. Marketing operations helps to streamline processes and eliminate unnecessary manual work, allowing marketers to focus on more strategic tasks.

Marketing operations: vision & mission

The marketing operations team should have a clear vision and mission for the role of marketing operations within your organization. It is advisable to create an internal vision and mission statement to guide the marketing operations function.

During our marketing offsite I asked my team to define a vision and mission for marketing operations. This is what we came up with (I like it quite a lot):

Vision: Enable and strategically push our marketing team to do their best work and to learn & grow as a team.

Let's break it down:

Enable is a key word in this vision. Marketing operations should help the marketing team focus on their core responsibilities and make their life easier (and by the way not create additional work for them). In the best case, field marketers, performance marketers, designers and Co. should not need to worry about internal processes, data extraction and connection, or building analytics dashboards. Marketing operations should provide the structure and support for the marketing team to work together and access critical marketing insights.

Strategically push: Marketing operations is not only about enabling, it should also push and shape the strategic direction of your marketing efforts. As the owner of marketing data, insights and processes, the marketing operations team has the power to advance your marketing efforts with data and aid in making better strategic decisions.

Their best work: All the work that marketing ops does, including implementing the right processes and tools etc., should ultimately bring marketing closer to the best version of itself. This should be the guiding principle for marketing operations.

To learn & grow as a team: In order to get to the best version of a marketing team you have to learn and grow as a team. Therefore, documenting, sharing learnings, and fostering team member growth should be key priorities of a marketing operations function.

Mission: Facilitate what’s needed to achieve the best marketing results as well as operational excellence for the marketing team by…

• Capturing, structuring and analyzing critical marketing (& sales) data
• Providing analysis, insights and reports to learn and make better decisions
• Conceptualizing, introducing and documenting processes to work together
• Defining lead prioritization & handover processes together with Sales (Ops)
• Selecting and implementing the right tools;?
• Supporting daily campaign execution operations
• Segmenting our database in the right way to supply our target audience with the right content at the right time

Which vision & mission do you see for marketing operations? Did we forget something? I′m happy to hear your thoughts on it!

The five pillars of marketing operations

A mission and vision is great but what are the concrete responsibilities of a marketing operations function? Well, here's my answer to this question: These were the five main pillars of marketing operations we defined.?

Let's dive into each of them a bit more:

(Define & facilitate) Internal marketing processes

One of the major responsibilities of marketing operations is to facilitate and define how the marketing team works together. The following tasks fall under this point:

• OKRs/ goal setting & review
• Budget planning
• Customer Acq. planning
• Sprint & meeting cadences?
• Facilitate feedback culture
• Documentation & team member onboarding

OKRs / Goal setting & review:?

Marketing operations should assist the marketing leadership and marketing sub teams in defining their targets while considering the overall business targets. This does not mean that marketing operations should set the targets for the performance or brand marketing teams, but rather facilitate the process of setting, tracking, and reporting on targets and bringing everything together.?

At Xentral, we were working with quarterly OKRs. For each objective we defined 1-2 key results and a scale for the target achievement (what does it mean to achieve 20, 50, 70 and 100 percent). We then conducted a mid-term and an end of quarter OKR review to see where we ended up.

Budget planning:?

Once your marketing team surpasses a certain size and has sub teams as well as a larger budget, it makes sense for the marketing operations team to oversee the budget planning. Again, this does not mean that marketing operations allocates the budget to the individual teams, but rather helps to facilitate the planning and monitoring of the budget.?

Especially as the leader of the marketing team, it is important for you to be aware of and have control over the budget planning for each campaign, initiative, channel, and team, as well as how much has already been committed and spent.

At Xentral, we allocated budget by team and spend category while breaking down the spend for demand generation in channels (and campaigns).

Customer acquisition planning

As a marketing lead you oftentimes own part of the company's growth targets. The management expects to deliver a certain number of new (marketing qualified) leads, opportunities and customers from your marketing team. Not seldomly will they set a (unrealistic) top down target based on some sort of excel sheet. A customer acquisition plan helps you to plan how to achieve the growth targets, which experiments to run, how much money is required for which channel etc. The marketing operations team should work together with the Demand Generation/ Growth marketing team to come up with an acquisition plan.

Are you interested in how you can come up with such a customer acquisition plan like shown here? Send me a DM on LinkedIn.

Sprint & meeting cadences

How does the team work together? How do you plan internal resources and how should you prioritize tasks and incoming requests and make your workload transparent? These are key questions marketing operations should take care of. I have had very good experiences with working in sprints and using a project management tool like Asana. Again, if you are interested in seeing how we have set up our marketing sprints, please send me a DM.

Facilitate feedback culture

Regular feedback and reviews of which experiments have been conducted, what has worked/ not worked and what has been achieved is critical to learn and grow. One of the key priorities of the marketing ops team should be to facilitate this feedback culture within the marketing (and sales) team.

Documentation & team member onboarding

As a company grows and expands its team, documenting and sharing knowledge becomes increasingly crucial to ensure efficient onboarding of new employees. The marketing operations team should play a key role in organizing this information for easy access by all team members. This often overlooked aspect can save time and streamline processes if done effectively.

One important remark for the internal processes: Do not over engineer your processes if it does not make sense. The bigger the team gets the more important are internal processes so everybody understands how to work together. In the early stages of a company, when the team is small, having too many processes and meetings can be more of a hindrance than a help.

Tooling / marketing tech stack

In today's marketing world tools become increasingly important. They help to make your life easier, to save time, to automate tasks etc. etc. But tools need to be chosen and implemented in the right way, otherwise you risk ending up with a wild forest of expensive tools that no one uses. A holistic plan and overview is required. Therefore, Marketing Ops should be the owner of your marketing tech stack. This means that they should work together with the rest of the team to choose the tools that fit your marketing team′s needs best while looking at overall budget constraints and how the tools best fit together. The process of choosing and implementing a new tool should involve?

• defining requirements & budget for the respective tool
• evaluating and comparing (several) solutions?
• negotiating the best price.

Furthermore, the Marketing Ops team should have an intrinsic interest to stay up to date with the latest technologies and develop a vision for how the ideal tech stack could look like.

This is how a marketing tech stack at could look like during the series B stage:

Enablement & documentation:

Tools are there to be used but that requires enablement (you would not think so but it happens pretty regurlarly that tools are being requested and implemented but then not being used). The enablement and documentation on how to (best) use the tools is a super important task that cannot be forgotten. Make this task a priority for your marketing operations team!?

Website - infrastructure & tracking

The website is a beast on its own and oftentimes one of the most important vehicles to communicate to your customers. What does marketing ops have to do with your website? Well, in my eyes they should choose the CMS and put pixels etc. in place for a correct and connected tracking.

Marketing ops also needs to connect other tools to the website (CMS, tag manager & Co.) and it might make sense that the team coordinates technical website resources (such as web developers).?

What about content changes on the website? In my opinion, marketing operations should provide the infrastructure and processes for the respective team members to make changes on their own and put guidelines in place so it does not go out of hand. If help is needed, marketing ops can jump in, but it should be the team to make all changes or to implement content (this would be a waste of the time and skillset).

Benyi′s learning on marketing operations - Part 2

Marketing operations - includes defining internal marketing processes and owning the marketing tech stack. The details are outlined in this article. But there is much more to it. As this blog post already got a bit long I decided to split it into two articles. In part 2 of the article I will talk about the heart of marketing operations: Data, Analytics & Insights. And about marketing automation + the collaboration between marketing and sales operations, about the right talent and where marketing ops should sit in your organization.

Stay tuned!?

I hope you enjoyed reading this article. Reach out to me if you have questions!

By the way: I will be offering consulting services for SaaS companies in the areas of B2B marketing strategy, marketing operations, demand generation and from April on. Drop me a DM if this might be of interest for your company. Looking forward to chatting with you!