Marketing Operations: The What, Why and How

In this article, we talk about:

• The purpose of marketing operations 

• The basic cornerstones of a marketing operations strategy

• Why data-driven marketing is, financially, the safest option for businesses

• The connection between marketing operations and B2B revenue attribution

We’re lucky to be living in an age where marketing teams have, literally, dozens of tools to rely on. 

Think of your product as the sun: each channel, each way your marketing department uses to communicate its many defining qualities, is like a separate ray of sunshine, lighting up different parts of your market.

But what if you want to heat things up? Who (or what) is it in your marketing team that keeps track of the rays that burn most intensely? The ones you should prioritize above all others? The ones that warm up your target audience fastest, and those you should scale down and keep only for “lighting” purposes?

This is where the glorious function of marketing operations comes into play. Whether a single person or an entire team (depending on the scale of your organisation), marketing ops professionals are the ones making sure everything in your marketing team runs efficiently: projects, processes, strategic alignment, technological support... You name it, they’re on it. 

More Than Marketing?

But why? Shouldn’t everyone in a marketing team be concerned with things running as smoothly, and having as large an impact, as possible? 

Our realistic answer to this is: not exactly. Just as your paid marketing manager is (hopefully) the god of Google ads, and your marketing copywriter a politically correct Don Draper, you also need people whose primary focus is keeping track of (and optimising!) your team’s performance. Making sure all activities are consistent, efficient, successful, and scalable. 

“But what about CMOs?”, you might be asking. Surely the captain of your marketing ship should be the one concerned with its overall performance? Well, yes and no. 

A few years ago, marketing operations may well have fallen under the jurisdiction of a well-rounded global marketing executive. However, the connection between marketing teams and revenue generation has tightened significantly over the past few years, leading to an increased focus on streamlining marketing operations. Which in turn, has led to this function growing into a full-time occupation: one that works best alongside a CMO, not as part of their own duties.

A Marketing Operations Blueprint

So now that we’ve established the “why” and the “what” of marketing operations, let’s turn towards the ever-elusive “how”. How do marketing ops professionals set about achieving this goal of tracking, optimising and scaling their entire team’s performance? And how do they notice those particular pain points that might be holding their teams back from operating as well as possible?

1. Management and resources

Remember that (alleged) quote from Abraham Lincoln that goes, “Give me six hours to chop down a tree, and I’ll spend four of them sharpening my axe?” Well, the same sentiment is directly applicable to Marketing Ops. Proper prep work for marketing operations is crucial and will cut back on unnecessary time and effort tremendously. 

The first step in that process? Providing the necessary resources and setting up team objectives. In other words, preparing for exactly how all that planning and strategizing work will commence.

Given the diversity of each organisation’s marketing setup, it’s hard to tell you exactly how many people to hire for your marketing operations team. But if you’re in the SMB segment, one person in an agile marketing team may be sufficient. For larger enterprises, an entire marketing ops team might be more adequate – ultimately, of course, the choice is yours. 

Similarly, the precise skill set your Marketing Ops person/team brings to the table depends on your unique setup. But broadly, a Marketing Ops person/team will have a sound background in the tools sitting on the tech stack and the data flowing from (and between) them. Of course, the Marketing Ops manager or specialist needs to be at home applying the data and reporting strategically. More on this in a bit.

Once you have your people in place, it’s time to align objectives and set up the framework for how your new function will manage itself, which – incidentally – also lays the groundwork for the next important step: your marketing operations strategy.

2. Strategic approach

When we say this is the most crucial aspect of marketing operations, we’re not joking around. This is the nexus of all that happens before (i.e. resources and team objectives) and after (KPIs and evaluation); the sticky tissue that holds it all together. 

A well-defined marketing operations strategy will save you valuable time and money by clarifying exactly what it is you should be paying attention to, as well as already highlighting problem areas that might be worth paying more attention to.

Here are some key elements of a robust marketing operations strategy:

• A personalised approach

  Don’t copy and paste what you see (or assume) from other companies. Your business is unique, so keep your objectives relevant. Pinpoint the issues you really want to solve, stick to them, and leave the rest.

• Skew towards hard metrics

  Marketing operations is definitely the more “techy” area of marketing, as opposed to, say, creative work – one benefit stemming from this is definitely the reliance on hard metrics, as opposed to “softer” ones that are harder to quantify (e.g. brand engagement, awareness or advocacy). Take advantage of this in your strategy!

• Assign and update regularly

  One big stumbling block of marketing operations strategies is that they easily become outdated, seeing as there are so many stakeholders (team members, managers etc.) and tools involved. Sidestep this landmine by scheduling regular update sessions to make sure everything’s still in place.

  3. Performance indicators

Ah yes, KPIs. Love them or hate them, they do what they do undeniably well: they show us where our business stands (or soars!). If we’ve chosen them well to begin with, that is. And when it comes to marketing operations, finding the right KPIs is not as straightforward a task as it seems. 

Because even though marketing ops is in the happy position of having an abundance of hard metrics to choose from when it comes to defining measurables (from email marketing results to PPC advertising, social media click-through rates, website conversion rates etc.), identifying each and every one of them and consistently tracking them will eat up your manpower and yet yield significantly fewer insights than any marketing professional would want. 

Instead, you need to be choosing performance indicators that are most relevant to your business will lead you to actionable insights, not just for your marketing team but to your business as a whole! Put simply, you need to be looking at revenue and pipeline generation.

Say, for instance, your marketing ops team identifies newsletter click-through rates as a KPI that drives revenue and pipeline. They will then know that this channel is an ideal candidate for scaling.

All Data < The Right Data

But what’s the foundation for this treasure-trove of insights? Data, of course. 

Data is any marketing operation professional’s bread-and-butter. The term “data-driven marketing” has been a buzzword for 5-6 years now, with businesses everywhere catching on to the importance of personally relevant marketing tactics in their strategies. And with COVID-19 accelerating the digital transformation its importance has become all that more real.

But it’s not “just” data that marketing operations need: it’s the RIGHT data. And this means clean, actionable revenue-focused data. 

The alternative is basing your strategy on a foundation of stale data, which is like building on sand: it just won’t hold. Or, using too much (or extraneous) data. Which is akin to building on soil filled with weeds and trash: unnecessary, and leading to a much more tiresome construction process! Why not opt instead for soil that’s rich, dense, and proven to be the best for your particular foundation – in other words, data that pertains particularly to your revenue and customers?

As mentioned above, revenue needs to be the driving force of any marketing operations setup. As such, revenue-focused data, or end-to-end customer journey data, needs to be the nexus.

Show Me The Money

In practice, what this means is that marketing operations professionals need to have a powerful, adaptable tool in their repertoire that retrieves the right data for them to build their strategies on and, of course, monitor and optimise their marketing team’s performance. 

Now, we know that a marketer’s tech stack (especially B2B marketers!) can be a delicate subject: with the aforementioned dozens of tools to choose from, it’s no easy job finding the perfect combination for you and your business. And while there are tech tools that everyone seems to agree are necessary – CRMs and CMSs being the most obvious examples, although one could argue that social media management systems are becoming similarly ubiquitous – there are those that seem to be less of an industry standard (like CRO software or community building tools). 

Add to this a hefty amount of pandemic-related marketing budget cuts, and you might just be wondering if all this to-do about data is really worth the investment? 

Our short answer is, of course, yes – coupled with a slightly more blunt “it’ll hurt you more if you don’t”. (Sorry!) Already in pre-COVID times, research showed that “[b]usinesses who use data-driven strategies drive five to eight times as much ROI as businesses who don’t”, while a roadmap to post-pandemic growth published by McKinsey states that data-driven approaches “can often yield great returns in the shortest amount of time”. Which is to say, if you are going to think twice about where to put your pennies when it comes to your marketing tech stack, powerful customer data or attribution platforms are about the safest bet you can make.

Marketing Operations & B2B Attribution: Friend or Foe?

If you’ve made it this far, you’ve probably already noticed that there’s overlap between marketing operations and B2B attribution. Yet the link between the two is often overlooked.

Attribution has been a hot topic for some while now among sales and marketing professionals. The ever-increasing technological sophistication of tools at our disposal has naturally led to both a heightened sense of curiosity about the customer journey, the touchpoints in that journey and how they all relate to the overall ROI, etc, and a need to have that data readily available.

In essence, both Marketing Ops and B2B attribution work the same data. B2B attribution (as we explain in more detail here) collects and models the data from across the entire customer journey, while marketing operations focuses on applying the data; through the lens of your marketing team’s performance.

(Call us biased, but this is one of the reasons why we believe Dreamdata can support marketing operations so well too. As an off-the-shelf B2B revenue attribution platform with integrations to most major marketing technologies, all of them easily adaptable to your specific setup, it’s a simple and fast way of retrieving just the data your marketing ops professionals need. All while keeping the information about the entire customer journey at their fingertips too – should they want to use it!