Digital Interactive Services

Marketing operations: At the core of all marketing executions

What is marketing operations?

Marketing has become an increasingly complex process and tightening budgets are adding to its intricacies. In an effort to successfully manoeuvre the marketing conundrum, leaders are placing great emphasis on marketing operations (MarkOps). MarkOps broadly describes the end-to-end management and optimisation of marketing processes. It involves leveraging available tools and best practices, business processes and infrastructure to effectively execute and support an organisation’s marketing strategy, making it more agile.*

A strong marketing operations team is critical for business growth and serves as the backbone of a marketing team. It delivers planning, governance, and support functions, allowing the marketing team to focus on core marketing functions. Organisations with strong marketing operations teams can implement efficient marketing campaigns and deliver measurable results at the same time. Market research, vendor management, and MarTech management are now the most important responsibilities of MarkOps leaders.

It is believed in some circles that MarkOps is left-brain thinking extended into right-brained marketing functions. To do that successfully, marketers need to include advanced analytical and technical expertise in their skill set since the marketing environment today is highly dependent on data.

Critical importance of marketing operations

Innovative marketing techniques, clever ad copy and impressive content can all fail if these efforts are not supported by an agile strategy. Investing in marketing operations enables organisations to maximise their creative investments and identify the marketing programmes worth pursuing.

The primary reasons for establishing a MarksOps team include:

• Boosting marketing efforts:

  MarkOps can reach beyond the basics and draw insightful conclusions from the data available. With this information, leaders can make better marketing decisions and focus on activities that boost growth and revenue. MarkOps teams support marketers with strategy making and execution, budget setting and performance reviewing.

• Reducing marketing risks:

  The data and process-driven approach adapted by MarkOps provides an organisation a glimpse of the future. Launching a new marketing strategy is not as risky when the organisation has ensured that the strategies, processes, and programmes are scalable, repeatable and, often, quite predictable. MarkOps teams provide the necessary support to ensure all marketing programmes run without a hitch.

• Ensuring maximum returns:

  MarkOps defines marketing KPIs, plans how they will be measured and ensures all tools required to ensure maximum returns on investment are in place. It can track and measure almost any metric, for example, leads, cost of leads, marketing channels, click-through rate and engagement. MarkOps teams manage leads all through the customer journey and all conversions are attributed to different marketing efforts. They continuously monitor performance metrics and, if needed, adjust processes to meet marketing goals.

• Implementing a customer-first mindset:

  To ensure customers are retained, MarkOps helps organisations implement a customer-first mindset. It also works as a conduit between customer-facing departments and marketing so that customers can have an enriched and personalised experience. MarkOps teams work on identifying targets, creating interest and awareness, establishing relationships and sustaining customer interest over time.

• Managing MarTech:

  MarkOps teams also design the marketing department’s technology vision. They manage the marketing strategy and ensure it always remains aligned with the organisation’s business goals.

• Managing content and brand compliance:

  MarkOps teams design, collect and manage metadata and content assets to ensure that all marketing messages are consistent and comply with industry regulations and brand standards.

Business units supported by marketing operations teams

MarkOps teams promote sound collaborative endeavours that are established to achieve the cross-departmental goals of an organisation. Using data-driven insights and carefully selected technology, successful teams can help traditionally separate departments to join hands and pursue common goals.

MarkOps largely works with two business units:

• Revenue operations (RevOps):

  The primary goal of RevOps is to maximise an organisation’s overall revenue potential. MarkOps teams provide support to RevOps and ensure all marketing programmes and processes are efficient, effective, and aligned. Using the data and insights provided by MarkOps teams, RevOps can provide stakeholders with revenue transparency, predictability, and accountability.

• Sales operations (SalesOps):

  The primary goal of SalesOps is to drive sales by aligning with the organisation’s marketing strategy. MarkOps teams support this business unit by boosting communication and collaboration between teams and integrating marketing automation software with CRM.

Create a successful marketing operations strategy

Building an efficient MarkOps strategy hinges on five factors:

• Defining goals:

  MarkOps strategy and marketing strategy differ in terms of goals. Any flaws or failures in the existing marketing strategy need to be identified and understood so that the organisation can clearly define the goals that are hoped to be achieved by a new operational strategy.

• Identifying areas for improvement:

  After identifying the goals, it is important to identify all the areas for improvement.

• Setting up a plan:

  The next step is to identify the technology needed and set up clear communication channels within the team. Data standards and KPIs need to be clearly outlined too.

• Integrating into processes and teams:

  Once a plan is established, it’s time to implement MarkOps as part of the organisation.

• Automate and keep track of campaigns:

  Finally, it is important to use the right tools to automate and track the progress of marketing strategies. 

Next steps

Marketing operations has managed to establish itself as a deciding factor in driving a brand’s success. A well-thought-out MarkOps strategy and a skilled team can create innovative ways to attract, engage and retain customers. Further, MarkOps professionals must be agile in terms of change, collaborative between teams and impactful while creating campaigns and content. Organisations must be willing to leverage technology to both attract and retain customers.

* For organizations on the digital transformation journey, agility is key in responding to a rapidly changing technology and business landscape. Now more than ever, it is crucial to deliver and exceed on organizational expectations with a robust digital mindset backed by innovation. Enabling businesses to sense, learn, respond, and evolve like a living organism, will be imperative for business excellence going forward. A comprehensive, yet modular suite of services is doing exactly that. Equipping organizations with intuitive decision-making automatically at scale, actionable insights based on real-time solutions, anytime/anywhere experience, and in-depth data visibility across functions leading to hyper-productivity, Live Enterprise is building connected organizations that are innovating collaboratively for the future.