Marketing operations, sometimes called MOps or MarkOps, refers holistically to the personnel, processes and technologies that help execute a marketing strategy. In other words, marketing operations links marketing strategy to how an organization creates marketing materials and drives outcomes. A marketing plan without the operations to put it all together means you’ve got an idea, not a campaign.
Marketing operations helps teams take advantage of opportunities that become much more complicated as the team scales. Effective marketing ops also helps teams develop answers to questions like “How are you going to make the right marketing materials that align with the plan?” or “How do we ensure we’re improving?” — all in service of keeping the team aligned.
Depending on the company’s size, marketing operations may be the responsibility of an operations manager, revenue operations team or a dedicated marketing operations team. In cases where MOps falls under the marketing department, it is usually led by a marketing director or chief marketing officer (CMO).
Types of Marketing Operations
- Data Management
- Campaign Management
- Content Development
- Lead Generation
- Reporting and Analytics
Why Is Marketing Operations Important?
When a team creates a marketing strategy, there’s often a diagnosis of the product’s challenges, some opportunities leadership wants to capitalize on and long-standing values the marketing organization strives to maintain. Marketing operations allows the team to manage all of these moving parts.
With strong marketing operations, teams can take the strategy and break it down into bite-sized actions the team will take to ensure they’re still aligned with the strategy. When good marketing operations are in play, the next steps are clear to those working in marketing.
For example, let’s say there’s a campaign leveraging some of the marketing team’s past work. Usually, we would rely on someone from the past with knowledge of the campaign but institutional knowledge doesn’t scale. More than likely, that person has misplaced assets, forgotten key learnings or even left the company.
That is where marketing ops comes into play as the record holder for the marketing team. Marketing ops makes sure that we catalog our assets and follow a naming standard that helps the team track what assets were used and when. In turn, operationalizing in this way gives the campaign the correct information without wasting time.
Types of Marketing Operations
Data Management
Where is data held? Like the example above, having naming standards help keep track of the data for many uses, from onboarding new employees to reusing assets to save time. More than that, marketing ops professionals need to be able to leverage data analytics, infrastructure and ops best practices to support and execute an effective marketing strategy.
Campaign Management
How are campaigns driving success? Without someone measuring campaigns’ success and failure using key marketing metrics, it’s difficult to understand how the overall strategy is working (or not).
Content Development
What is “good” content? How do we ensure our content is on brand? Marketing ops keeps content in line with how the team sees itself, ensuring it meets brand voice guidelines and hits performance targets. Robust data and marketing analysis to understand traffic to that content is also crucially important.
Lead Generation
Are the leads we’re generating driving the strategy or are they a poor fit? Marketing ops keeps an eye on these numbers and makes suggestions on how to improve them.
Reporting and Analytics
How are the marketing analytics connecting to our marketing and business strategies? Marketing operations keeps an eye on this relationship and reports on major changes in the data to help the team understand — and act upon — trends. Teams may rely on marketing technology like email platforms, social listening tools and customer data platforms to compile and store essential information.
How to Develop a Marketing Operations Strategy
To start connecting strategy to tasks, ask yourself these questions:
- What Are Our Marketing Objectives? What are we ultimately trying to achieve? What problem are we trying to solve with this strategy? These questions will drive the strongest objectives that help a team maintain alignment.
- Who Needs to Stay Briefed to Keep Our Objectives Up-to-Date? Communication is an important part of marketing operations. Sometimes, marketers and leaders can find themselves engaged in a campaign and lose themselves in the work. Ops are there to make sure the right people are briefed in the right way at the right time.
- What Are Our Next Steps? Understanding next steps and who needs to be involved helps maintain momentum. Sometimes it’s hard to figure out what comes next when you’re head-down but marketing ops help keep the whole team on track.
- How Will We Know We’re Succeeding? Success and failure can look the same sometimes. Someone needs to watch the pot as the water boils. Marketing ops does this by asking questions and focusing on leading indicators to assist objective management.
Some good resources to get you started include:
- Rethinking Marketing Organization and Operations Excellence: This guide from Gartner is helpful for understanding how to improve marketing operations and centralize marketing functions.
- Everything You Need to Know About Marketing Operations in One Place: Hubspot has a fantastic guide for those who are ready to get started.
Marketing Operations Best Practices
Marketing operations focus on making marketing decisions and systems better over time. By developing processes, teams can judge the quality of their decisions against how close the marketing team is to reaching their objectives each month, quarter and year.
If marketing operations aren’t driving these opportunities and improving the processes of teams around them, they are (more than likely) not thinking about iteration. Without iteration and strategy gut checks, you’ll end up with a team that just slows down everyone’s work.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is marketing operations?
Marketing operations refers to the personnel, processes and technologies that convert marketing strategies into actions. Together, these factors allow marketing teams to optimize their workflows, working efficiently and scaling their efforts as needed.
Why is marketing operations important?
Marketing operations takes a marketing plan and breaks it down into specific tasks that are measurable. This way, marketing teams can track their progress and make sure their actions stay in line with the overall marketing strategy.
Who is responsible for marketing operations?
It depends on the company. Larger organizations may assign marketing operations responsibilities to an operations manager or revenue operations team. However, MOps is often handled by a dedicated marketing operations team and marketing leaders like the chief marketing officer.
