Marketing Operations pinpoints the efficiency of systems within the company's operations with an emphasis on integrating marketing technology, best known in the marketing industry as MarTech, into the company's operations to achieve immediate results.
Marketing operations leave behind the image of marketing as just another department that is focused on promoting the brand, products, or services and makes it the operational partner of business operations where every stakeholder, in sync, plays for the same team.
The objective of marketing operations is to achieve results in the short, medium, and long term by executing commercial actions to increase sales and get new customers. This is a general and broad definition of this concept. Its ramifications are varied and depend on the business objectives.
How do you set up a marketing operations strategy in your organization or business?
Marketing Operations as the concept used in the industry would focus more on researching, deploying, implementing, executing, measuring, and optimizing the marketing technology. One of the main challenges of businesses is the lack of synchronicity throughout the organization. I do not oppose MarTech processes, I just believe it shouldn’t be separated from the business operations.
I rather work with the business operations team to complete the integration of the marketing technology and the entire organization can benefit from using it, not just marketing. Why? Because the marketing technology is inserted into the entire operation. Integrating both will connect the workflow seamlessly, and efficiently impacting marketing and sales efforts positively.
The following five (5) steps can serve as a guide when thinking about inserting marketing operations into your business or organization:
1. Analysis and evaluation. The analysis and evaluation of the organization or business looks at the current situation in terms of profit margins, return on investment, pricing, sales volume, customer profile, business and marketing operations including brand projection and image, brand assets such as prospect lists, graphics, current tactics, content, digital presence, etc. and technology. A complete assessment of digital assets is crucial to have a complete scope of what we have, what we might toss, and what we finally need.
2. Planning and development. Once the analysis is done, the findings are discussed, the objectives are established, and the ideation of a strategic plan begins. Workflow diagrams are developed to implement funnels, and eventually, start testing the marketing technology (A/B Testing).
It is also important to start documenting these processes or Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) to achieve the successful integration of all the operations, allowing you to train employees, finally, a key point is to optimize the technology while testing. It will help you assess your line of products or services. Once in place, the workflows could be adjusted, and specific in-depth processes can be established.
3. People and processes. Once the specific Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) have been developed and implemented, the roles and responsibilities of the stakeholders in charge of executing them are established. At this level of the project, you’re supposed to feel comfortable that an efficient system and workspaces for your business operations are running and you can move forward with the marketing plans and strategies established.
4. Execution. After technology and processes are established, they run in a coordinated and synchronized manner between business operations and marketing operations. The adjustment of each never ends. Be aware of this when committing to this upgrade in your business. You will need an Information Technology (IT) professional to support this throughout the process and once the project finishes. Optimization, troubleshooting, and updates will continue.
5. Measurement, reporting, and monitoring. The measurement, reporting, and monitoring all seek to make the distinction between the trial and execution periods and to measure every touchpoint of the audience. These three (3) are extremely important because they provide us with the necessary data to make decisions to adjust, change, expand, diversify, grow, and scale.
The tip of the iceberg
These five (5) steps synthesize marketing operations. However, each step requires several secondary steps. Marketing operations in synchronization with business operations seek to optimize the organization’s systems from within to the outside. It aims to bring efficiency and increase performance and accountability. Therefore, during this process, there can be conversations about investing in technology that contributes to achieving this. These conversations should lead to the use of technology to implement efficiencies moving away from obsolete and inefficient processes that delay the growth and scaling of the business.