B2B marketers know the power of a solid marketing plan. But marketing plans alone can’t drive success without the people, processes, and platforms to effectively launch those plans and measure performance.
Modern marketing teams are being held accountable to revenue-based key performance indicators (KPIs) in alignment with sales goals more and more. While a lot of marketing focuses on awareness, content, and capturing demand, one critical function often stands as the unsung hero behind the scenes – marketing operations.
Often referred to as Marketing Ops, MOps, or MarOps, this function serves as the backbone of the marketing team that ensures efficiency, alignment, and optimal use of resources.
Creating killer ad copy and launching creative campaigns isn’t enough if you aren’t able to manage all resources and tools effectively, track and report on results, and make informed data-driven decisions.
In this article, we get into the role of marketing operations, why you need it, and how to optimize Marketing Ops strategies to fuel revenue growth.
Understanding strategic marketing operations
The role of Marketing Ops has evolved from simply managing tools and projects and now encompasses a spectrum of activities both within and outside the marketing department.
These activities are aimed at streamlining processes, optimizing tech stacks, and enhancing the overall effectiveness of marketing efforts.
Marketing Ops involves the cross-functional orchestration of various elements including data management, performance measurement, budget allocation, and strategic planning.
At its core, Marketing Ops is about process-driven efficiency and data-driven strategies that power marketing and is made up of these primary components:
- Processes
- Data
- Technology
- People
A solid Marketing Ops function enables companies to consistently execute efficient marketing initiatives and measure those initiatives effectively — thereby driving repeatable revenue.
Four ways marketing operations supports revenue growth
1. Integration and alignment
Marketing Ops serves as the linchpin that aligns marketing activities with other overarching business objectives and ensures seamless integration across departments.
By fostering alignment between sales, marketing, and other relevant functions, Marketing Ops eliminates silos and helps build a unified approach to generating revenue. And, when sales and marketing teams are in sync, companies are 67% better at closing deals.
In practice, one part of creating marketing and sales alignment could be through efficient lead and account management.
Marketing operations collaborates with the rest of the marketing team to implement a lead/account scoring model, establish qualification criteria, and build the automation for nurturing campaigns to ensure the sales team is equipped with high-quality, educated leads.
2. Data-driven decision making
Revenue-focused data is the foundation for the successful setup of marketing operations.
Gut feelings are great, but they aren’t enough. You need data — and more importantly, the right, clean data. But, 54% of companies say their biggest challenge to data-driven marketing success is the lack of data quality and completeness.
Marketing Ops helps define the KPIs and data needed for a company and builds the processes to effectively capture and manage quality data. They establish robust frameworks for data collection, analysis, and reporting, empowering teams to make informed decisions based on actionable insights that drive revenue, rather than intuition or guesswork.
Take demand gen campaigns for example. Marketing Ops leverages analytics and performance metrics to continually optimize campaigns for maximum impact.
By conducting A/B testing, analyzing attribution models, and iterating based on insights, Marketing Ops helps fine-tune campaigns to resonate with target audiences, improve engagement, and drive conversions.
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3. Resource and tech optimization
Most marketing teams are tasked with doing a lot with a little, so these teams must be efficient in their marketing endeavors to maximize returns.
Marketing Ops optimizes resource allocation by identifying high-impact initiatives, eliminating inefficiencies, and reallocating budget towards channels and tactics that are performing well and yield the highest ROI.
Having a bunch of tools that don’t work well together or aren’t fully adopted creates huge tech debt for a lot of organizations. Marketing Ops optimizes tech stacks by selecting, implementing, and managing tools — ensuring seamless integrations and automations throughout.
4. Scalability
As businesses scale, they’ve got to be able to adapt their tools, teams, and processes quickly.
In preparation for this, Marketing Ops lays the foundation for growth by implementing scalable processes, leveraging automation, and identifying and refining repeatable processes and programs.
The true value of marketing operations is optimizing the people, tools, and processes marketing teams need to function. When everyone's clear on the value and objectives of Marketing Ops, it makes it easier to establish responsibilities and allocate budgets efficiently.
Building a winning Marketing Ops strategy
Whether you already have a strong Marketing Ops function or just starting to build one, your strategy for scalable success must be built around the needs of employees, stakeholders, and most importantly, your customers.
Launch an effective marketing operations strategy with these steps
Conduct a thorough SWOT analysis
A thorough assessment of your current marketing and operations landscape lays the foundation for strategic planning.
Evaluate existing processes, tools, data, and resources to identify strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. Then, leverage your analysis to gain holistic insights into your operational ecosystem.
From here, you’ll need to determine how to structure your MarOps team. Can you start with one all-encompassing marketing operations manager, or do you require multiple roles based on your organization’s needs?
Define clear and measurable goals and objectives
Ask yourself: What are we looking to achieve through marketing operations? Whether it's increasing revenue, enhancing customer experience, or optimizing resource allocation, articulate your objectives to serve as a guiding beacon while formulating your strategy.
You’ll also need to communicate these goals and objectives to the broader team to get everyone on board and aligned.
Once you have your objectives established, you need to create specific goals and clarify the KPIs that will be used to track performance and success. Prioritize these goals based on what’s most important to your customers at every stage of their journey.
Establish scalable processes and workflows
As landscapes and tools constantly evolve, marketing operations must be able to pivot, adapt, and predict upcoming changes.
It’s important to build simple but effective processes and workflows that can scale with your company, and also change as needed. Keep things simple with an agile approach.
Monitor, adapt, and continuously optimize
Nothing is “set it and forget it” for Marketing Ops. To ensure consistent and continued success, your strategy must include further optimization.
After implementing your strategy for marketing operations, you’ll have new data collected that can be used to gauge performance. And since you’re already creating processes and workflows with the idea of scalability and ease in mind, be prepared to make adjustments to your strategy based on your results.
Optimize your Marketing Ops strategy for continued growth
In an era defined by relentless competition and evolving customer behavior, the role of Marketing Ops in driving revenue growth cannot be overstated.
It's the catalyst that transforms marketing from a cost center into a revenue-generating powerhouse.
Marketing operations aren’t meant to be a one-off bandaid. Investing in a robust MarOps function is a long-term strategic imperative that can ultimately be the difference between stagnation and sustainable growth.
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