How To Evaluate Marketing Operations Using The Maturity Assessment Model.

At its core, the responsibility of Marketing Operations is to help oversee the organization of marketing programs within Marketing. The Marketing Operations department plays a big role in aligning marketing stakeholders, delivering campaign activities, and measuring marketing effectiveness. Since Marketing Operations works cross-functionally with other marketers, its success can't be measured independently without referencing other stakeholders. This can be a problem because they don't have metrics of their own to compare. Because of this, MOPs will use 'AQLs' as a sole KPI for their department to justify and track Marketing Operations' performance and contribution to Marketing. However, this measurement can be misrepresentative. Marketing Operations isn't just a supportive measure; it's also strategic, a planner, technology-driven, administrative, it manages, helps design processes, and leverages business intelligence data. The Maturity Assessment Model can be used in Marketing Operations to map categories, which can then be split and evaluated as functional areas to check for improvement or functions not currently being performed. When combining the Maturity Assessment Model with Marketing Operations, we get the following five categories, each with specific functions.

1. Strategy & Planning

The strategy and planning category in the maturity assessment model ensures that marketing is able to "track marketing impact" by identifying the following functions:

• Market Analytics: Ensures that the marketing analytics collected are trusted, accurate, and governed before moving up to the next market stage. (For example, transition from a mid-size corporation to a large-size corporation.
• Business Objectives: It looks at how business objectives are measured and defines the successful and progression of the business need.
• Marketing Operations Influence: Identifies how efficiently Marketing Operations collaborates with other groups across marketing and sales to operationalize the marketing strategy.
• Budgeting: Measures how much marketing budget is being spent within the Marketing Operations functions.

2. Technology

The technology category in the maturity assessment model ensures marketing focuses on "how well it manages its technology stack" by identifying the following functions:

• Vendor Management: Measures how Marketing Operations handles its relationship with technology vendors and its contracts.
• Tech Strategy: Looks into how technology aligns with the marketing organization's current goals and if it will allow for future scale to support growth in the future.
• Tech Management: Analyzes how well-selected tools are managed within marketing/sales/revenue organizations and if best practices are being followed, and if tools are being used to their potential to maximize ROI.

3. Support & Administration

The support and administration category in the maturity assessment model ensures that marketing focuses on "how well it tracks tasks required when launching marketing campaigns" by identifying the following functions:

• Data Governance: It evaluates the priority Marketing Operations has on data cleansed and appended.
• Data Cleansing - The process of fixing or removing incorrect, corrupted, incorrectly formatted, duplicate, or incomplete data within a dataset.
• Data Appending - The process of combining marketing platform data to add missing or updated existing data points in an organization's database.
• End Of Quarter Reviews: Measures how well the Marketing Operations department conducts end-of-quarter activities like attribution measurement, quarterly business reviews, and data governance.
• Ticketing: This rates the level of efficiency in which marketing operations manages work and whether it can support the needs of the marketing organization.

4. Process Design & Management

The process design and management category in the maturity assessment model ensures that marketing focuses on "how well the Marketing Operations department is run" by identifying the following functions:

• Process Architecture: It evaluates how well Marketing Operations build processes that support the marketing organization's objectives, like templates.
• Process Design: Measures how well processes designed by Marketing Operations interlock with processes made by other key stakeholders in the marketing/sales organization and if processes align.

5. Business Intelligence and Data

The business intelligence and data category in the maturity assessment model ensures that marketing focuses on "how well the Marketing Operations department uses data to make decisions" by identifying the following functions:

Closed-Loop Reporting: Measures the ability of marketing operations to leverage the systems in which data and information collected are made available to marketing.

Minimum Marketable Feature: Evaluates how well Marketing Operations is able to build effective reports and dashboards that can be used by all levels in the marketing department in order to guide them to decision-making.

Data Strategy: Assesses the process of gathering and using data to inform marketing decisions and personalize the customer experience and how consistent it is.

Forecasting: Estimates how well Marketing Operations is able to forecast all KPI aspects of marketing across the pipeline through its different channels.

KEY TAKEAWAY

The 5 Marketing Operations categories assessed in the Maturity Model, although not a traditional KPI metric, can best evaluate how marketing operations are currently performing for the marketing team. These categories should cover any present conversation raised by your marketing team in any direction it may take. Additionally, the maturity model helps identify what areas of improvement need to be implemented in the Marketing Operations department for each individual category so that they can better serve the Marketing Organization. [It is recommended that for each category, you use a ranking score, and use it to rank each function within the category to get a total average for the category, and use the result as a reference checkpoint for if you are close to efficiency or need improvement.]

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