Marketing Operations is the strategic weapon of successful organizations
Although I graduated from Business School with a Masters degree in Marketing, little did I know about marketing then! I kept navigating between sales and marketing roles. It took me years of practice to appreciate marketing and understand its core functions. When I moved into general management and spent more time with engineering, operations, finance, I realized how misunderstood marketing was. Disregarded by some as a necessary evil or reduced to the function of MarCom (remember I work in Tech!).
So, it’s no surprise that the longevity of CMO’s (Chief Marketing Officers) in their role is short compared to other executives. A 2019 survey from Spencer Stuart showed the average tenure of CMO’s was about 42 months and declining. It compares with 88 months for CEO’s and 66 months for CFO’s.
Yet, the marketing executives who consistently beat the odds and outperform their peers have one thing in common. They build a rock-solid Marketing Operations foundation.
But, what is Marketing Operations (or MarkOps), and how can it make a difference for entire organizations? How does a stellar MarkOps team help product teams in particular? Here’s what I’ve observed as both a partner and leader of such groups over the years.
The anatomy of world-class Marketing Operations
There are tons of different definitions out there, but the one I like the most is the following combination:
“Marketing Operations: the engine that drives results in marketing organizations, enabling marketing performance through technology.”
In other words, MarkOps should be a super strategic function in marketing organizations. It’s at the border of Marketing and IT. This is undoubtedly why its strategic importance has grown as more companies become tech-enabled.
With that in mind, Marketing Ops can be small and tactical or as big and strategic as can be. It’s where I’ve seen a stark contrast between marketing leaders. Struggling CMO’s would consider MarkOps as a “Super-Administrator-only” function. Of course, they’d ask MarkOps to monitor marketing effectiveness. They’d also leverage MarkOps to keep everyone honest about capacity, marketing budgets, campaign performance, but would limit it to that.
These are critical dimensions, but they’re not enough. On the other end, successful CMO’s would ask MarkOps to lead best practices on business processes. Infrastructure, budgeting, brand compliance, planning, and reporting would not be exempt. MarkOps would play a significant role in organizing roles and responsibilities across functions. It would not limit this to marketing and would be the guardian of overall consistency.
Focused on business outcomes
“We had a goal of acquiring 5,000 new customers. Reaching an average transaction of $100 and a repeat purchase rate of 25% in the next three months. Did we achieve it?”
If you have the right MarkOps team in place, you’ll have an instant answer. You will understand the business outcome. To reach this level, I’ve noticed it was critical to involve MarkOps teams in most planning and performance review discussions. They would ensure consistency, working upfront to help campaign planning, cross-tactical execution, budget setting, and ensuring that performance reviews keep everyone honest.
When it came to developing the marketing data strategy, they would be the ones looking at marketing as a whole with business outcomes in mind. They would also ensure each marketing function had the necessary insights to build high–performing campaigns.
The best MarkOps teams were also the ones to manage the creative process end-to-end. Advertising teams might be rock stars at developing great creative ideas. But, MarkOps would create a best-in-class system for everyone to follow. It would include anything related to managing the review and approval process of marketing materials to ensure compliance.
The Tech enablers
As the role of technology grew, it became increasingly important for one team to manage a variety of marketing platforms. It includes websites, eCommerce or content management systems, and their respective automation. The critical role of MarkOps here has been to assess the integration of these platforms with related technologies pro-actively. They were deeply involved in evaluating and selecting the right software. They would be working hand-in-hand with IT and thinking about the whole system infrastructure, not just isolated tools.
As importantly, it’s been MarkOps’ responsibility to educate and make sure systems and enabling technology are well understood by the other teams. Even outside of marketing. On that front, Product Marketing has typically been the key interface between product teams and marketing. Yet, I’ve seen much value in developing a direct relationship between product management and MarkOps on these technology enablement aspects. The product teams would get a much better sense of what’s possible and what actual performance levels look like.
Take your Marketing Operations to the next level
Every organization will highly benefit from strong Marketing Operations. You’ll be on your path to success if you consider MarkOps as a critical strategic force. A force that truly enables every aspect of the go-to-market strategy through technology and keeps everyone accountable.
So, step back and ask yourself these few questions:
- Are all our roles and responsibilities related to go-to-market efforts clear?
- How solid are our processes and tools around marketing content management and campaign execution?
- How immediate and automated is our access to the business outcomes of our campaigns?
If the answers bring more doubt than clarity, chances are your organization needs to rethink the role of Marketing Operations.
I hope this article gave you a few clues on how to keep progressing. Make sure you share what’s been working for you too. Please write to me directly at tanguy@theproductsherpa.com or leave a comment on this post.