How to Make Marketing Operations the Backbone of Your Team

Marketing teams have a series of moving parts that must work together to be successful.  

Expectations are higher than ever for marketers to drive sales and provide direct value to businesses. Since there are many teams and goals within marketing departments, there has to be someone who focuses on aligning these parts behind the scenes. They must make sure everyone is working efficiently and effectively toward a common goal.

This certain someone is the entire marketing operations team. 

Together, the marketing operations team juggles many tasks to ensure things run smoothly in marketing departments. People within this team hold different titles and have a wide range of responsibilities. Dive into the details below to learn more about this crucial part of marketing. 

What do marketing operations managers do? 

As budgets continue to be cut, marketers need to keep proving their value. While marketing is still a creative industry, more so than ever, marketing is metric-oriented with a greater focus on driving revenue. 

This shift has caused a need for more marketers that can enforce the process and track data and metrics, which traditionally was not a marketer’s main role. To fill this need, the role of the marketing operations manager was created to keep the creative-minded marketers on track. 

Marketing operations managers are crucial to their department as they prove marketing value to stakeholders. Other responsibilities of a marketing operations manager include:

• Hiring talent 
• Training employees 
• Developing career paths
• Planning campaigns 
• Tracking projects 
• Enforcing deadlines 
• Communicating metrics with upper management
• Creating processes 
• Managing workflow 

The marketing operations manager has to collaborate with many different individuals when carrying out any of the above responsibilities.

What is a marketing operations specialist? 

A marketing operations specialist works below the marketing operations manager to assist with keeping the day-to-day functions of marketing running smoothly and efficiently. In this role, the specialist will be responsible for documenting all of the metrics and become an analytics expert for the marketing team. 

Additionally, this role supports the sales funnel by creating processes and getting approvals from the marketing operations manager. Other responsibilities of a marketing operations specialist include: 

• Analyzing marketing campaigns 
• Partnering with customer teams to create processes 
• Automating processes 
• Recording data and metrics 
• Supporting the marketing operations manager 
• Providing insights based on data 
• Handling requests for reports, sales tracking information, and data

Together the marketing operations manager and specialist work closely to ensure the marketing team is productive and successful. 

Marketing operations stakeholders  

There are four main stakeholders that the marketing operations team serves in order to prove that their team is efficient and working at a productive level. 

• Chief Executive Officer (CEO): The CEO expects that the marketing operations team grows revenue, measures the marketing ROIs, and aligns marketing with the rest of the organization’s goals and initiatives.
• Chief Information Officer (CIO): The CIO expects that the marketing operations team is using software tools to the best of their ability, controlling costs, and evolving strategies to keep up with technology.  
• Chief Marketing Officer (CMO): The CMO expects that the marketing operations team aligns with sales, builds a marketing funnel, and creates a scalable process for the greater marketing team by using best in class technology.
• Director of Marketing: The director of marketing expects that the marketing operations team works closely with the creative team to inform campaigns and then track the data and analytics of the campaign once it’s live. 

These stakeholders hold the marketing operations team accountable and have a high-level understanding of the greater company initiatives and goals. 

Must-have marketing operations processes  

It’s a good idea to break down the best practices and processes of marketing operations to get the full picture of what they really manage. 

“Teams are often reluctant to update their day-to-day management tools and processes. This challenge can be tackled by marketing operations teams.”

Georges Benoliel
Founder of NestApple

These nine processes break down the responsibilities of the marketing operations team and can help guide your team in determining the areas of the marketing team that need oversight and alignment.  

Data and analytics management 

The creative team within marketing may not want to create reports based on data and analytics, but they rely upon these reports to inform their strategy.

Marketing operations is responsible for ingesting data and analytics and then creating reports for their teams. Oftentimes, the marketing manager creates the process for these reports to be created and then others can participate in the making of the reports as well. 

Data and analytics are crucial in this day and age for marketers. It helps provide the reasons why they created the campaign that they did. 

Asset management  

There are many different assets on a marketing team. These assets include things like logos, creative designs, copy documents, blog posts, photography, and videos. And as you guessed it, this is another necessary process of the marketing operations team. They help to create, license, and store these assets. 

In order to save time, consider using marketing resource management software as it helps collect and share assets to ensure brand and messaging consistency. 

Budget management   

Marketing can comprise of up to 24 percent of company budgets. That is a huge portion of a budget, so managing the money is a crucial role that the marketing operations team plays. The marketing operations manager will split the budget as they deem necessary. Within a marketing team, there are usually different departments such as demand generation, content marketing, and the branding team. Budgets are split between departments as such. 

Compliance and risk management  

Compliance and risk management are especially important within the healthcare and tech industries. There are many rules and regulations that marketing teams must follow, such as prohibiting misleading advertisements.

There are also contracts that companies are bonded to with software companies, so you must be sure you’re compliant with their standards as well when using their software solution. 

Creative project management  

Creatives and marketing operations must work together on every project to ensure everything goes smoothly. The marketing operations team has to be brought into the project at the beginning so that they can have oversight and control over the process from start to finish. 

The only way a creative project can be successful and go smoothly is if there is a set process in place that’s designed by the marketing operations team. 

Marketing technology management  

The marketing operations team must assist in selecting, integrating, and optimizing the technology used by the marketing team. Then they must ensure that the technology is being used effectively. There should be documentation of the onboarding process of the technology as well. Since someone on the marketing operations team must be the admin for the technology, they must set up a system for requesting access and getting trained. 

Aside from those responsibilities, marketing operations also manages the relationship with the vendor and audits the system efficacy at the time of renewal. 

Quality assurance management  

In order to ensure the marketing team is working efficiently, they must gather feedback from their team members about things that are and aren’t working within the department. From there they must make changes to address the widely acknowledged issues. 

Lead management and demand generation  

People use the terms lead management and demand generation interchangeably. While there should be an entire team dedicated to driving leads, the marketing operations team plays a role in evaluating conversion rates and ensuring that the team is working as effectively as possible. 

Consider integrating an attribution software tool so that everyone can keep track of which touchpoints during the sales process are most effective and how the marketing funnel is working (or not working) to drive sales. 

Content management  

As mentioned before, content is an asset for the marketing team, so the marketing operations team is responsible for tracking and housing the content. 

Additionally, marketing operations is in charge of creating editorial calendars and overseeing the content creation process along with the content managers on the team. 

How to implement a marketing operations strategy

Now you know all of the working parts and processes of a marketing operations team, but if you’ve never had this discipline on your team it can be tough to get started.

Follow these five steps to ensure you successfully implement your marketing operations strategy. 

1. Align marketing strategy with company goals 

Never create a project or role that doesn’t align with company goals. It’s easy to get swallowed up in the world of marketing and forget about the greater company goals.

Make your north star the company objective, and from there, ideate on a marketing plan. That way you can always back up your case by pointing out that it directly relates to the company initiatives. 

From there, start to outline the responsibilities of the marketing operations team within the strategy. 

2. Create a plan based on actionable steps  

A detailed plan is necessary for a marketing operations strategy to be successful. Include timelines, project and task ownership, and tools needed for the plan. Marketing operations managers should be able to easily design a solid strategy because they have insight into the inner workings of the marketing team. 

3. Define success 

You cannot hit goals if you don’t make them. Make quantifiable, measurable goals that you can compare your work against.

That way, you can report progress to stakeholders to prove the value of marketing, and more so marketing operations. It’s always important to come with detailed metrics that tell a story of success rather than just listing off things you and your team did. 

4. Inform the marketing team of your team’s purpose 

This sounds obvious, but be sure the marketing team is aware of what the marketing operations team actually does and what is and is not their responsibilities. They are a crucial part of the team, but it’s essential to protect that marketing operations team from becoming overwhelmed by requests that aren’t their responsibilities.  

“My team is aware that it needs to constantly evolve our marketing operations to develop and evolve their understanding of the marketing landscape.”

Rae Oliver
Content Marketing Manager at Truly Experiences

5. Monitor performance 

Lastly, monitor performance across the marketing team. Go back to those goals that you defined earlier in the process and determine if you hit them or came up short. Then, adjust your plan so that the marketing operations team can remain a valuable part of your organization. 

Set yourself up for smooth sailings 

Marketing operations connects all of the dots within the marketing team and reports success up to the primary stakeholders. This department is necessary for marketing departments to be efficient and effective marketers.

With marketing operations, you can be sure your project deadlines are hit and your campaigns drive more sales. 

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