What is Marketing Operations?

I was recently asked to clarify what I meant by “Marketing Operations.”?The person who asked was knowledgeable about sales, business development, and marketing but hadn’t heard the term before.?

As I did in that meeting, let me define Marketing Operations.

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Definition: Marketing Operations

The marketing operations (marketing ops or MOps) function nerds out about how marketing gets done. It aligns people, technology, effort, and time to the right processes to efficiently build pipeline, brand awareness, and revenue.?

Marketing operations tie people systems and technology systems together to increase the pipeline and the value marketing provides the organization. There are 3 ways to positively impact net-new pipeline: (1) increase lead volume, (2) increase the quality or size of leads, and (3) increase the speed to pass the lead or close the sale. MOps directly impacts those three pipeline levers.

Successful marketing ops teams are data-driven and creative. They understand that marketing is an art as well as a science. Focus areas for marketing operations include:?

• Strategic planning.?Examples: defining target audiences, content planning, establishing goals for funnel and channel results, distribution of work amongst personnel, etc.
• Financial and budget and management.?Examples: building and maintaining the annual budget, report building, ROI analysis, building forecast models, etc.
• Optimizing lead management workflows.?Examples: managing marketing automation systems (MAS) and CRM integrations, lead scoring, segmentation, retargeting strategies, etc.
• Create company alignment.?Examples: work with sales and customer success teams to align messaging, campaigns, and workflows, create internal SLAs, etc.
• Manage the marketing technology stack (technical and vendor relations).?Examples: MAS, CMS, Google Analytics, ABX platforms, 3rd?party data providers, etc.

Operations often grow organically as daily work gets executed month over month, year over year. A dedicated focus on MOps reverses — or affirms — doing things because “that’s the way they’ve always been done.” Marketing operations is a strategic approach to what you are likely already doing. And a consistent push in the right direction.

Marketing operations is about alignment and giving marketers the tools they need to succeed. Gartner buckets marketing ops into five main areas of responsibility: (1) Strategic Processes, (2) Financials, (3) Performance, (4) Martech, and (5) Resources.

Does your company have a dedicated marketing operations role?

You might not need one.

Consider the benefits of an affordable marketing operations contractor. Let’s get growing.

I'm interested in hearing about your challenges. Contact me via my website or DM me on LinkedIn to get started.

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