What is Marketing Operations?
Jan 28, 2019
How Do You Define Marketing Operations?
“Marketing Operations is a broad term that collectively describes the function of the marketing organization, including process, technology, and human resources, that allow marketing to efficiently scale with quality and consistency.”
– Centric Consulting
“Marketing Operations (MO) is a next-level concept engaged in the actual process of creating, manufacturing and promoting products. A marketing operations department is likely to be a wild blend of creative left-brain thinkers and buttoned up right-brain statistic ninjas, all working in harmony towards a common goal.”
– Tenfold
“Marketing operations (MO) as a capability has exploded onto the scene because of fast-changing technology, the need for a more transparent, efficient, and accountable view of marketing and big-time pressure from the C-suite for marketing to contribute to the bottom line.”
“Marketing Operations is meant to be the operational yang to the creative yin of marketing, a bastion of quantitative rigor and left-brained discipline in a world of right-brained marketers.”
– Marketo
Beckmann Collaborative's Approach to Marketing Operations
For years, we have delivered content marketing and marketing strategy support to small business owners. Since our team loves to write and be creative, it was a fun challenge to step into the shoes of another brand and write on their behalf. One day it was like a flashing sign pointed us towards the future of Beckmann Collaborative. While working with a client on a marketing strategy, Candice realized how incredibly creative this person was and how she didn’t need us to come up with creative ideas. Her pain point, like so many others, was making all of the marketing parts work.
To us, marketing operations is a function that brings order within a business' marketing.
Like the engineer who enjoys marketing, we create systems, processes, and workflows to make sure those cool marketing ideas come to fruition.
Content Calendar:
Our team creates detailed content calendars with deadlines, campaign information, and the activities within each marketing channel. This is a tool we use to manage ongoing and new marketing campaigns, and it is how we coordinate with a client’s team to implement ideas. You can check out our content calendar template here.
Process:
Creating a "fancy spreadsheet" for a content calendar isn't quite enough to achieve success. The next step is to define and follow a process. Our team has a pretty smooth process that we adjust to each client - based on the team roles, timelines, and preferences. The process is key to your teams success, so treat it as a "living process" that is open to change. For example, just because you were writing social media posts 1 week out at a time when things started, doesn't mean it will work 6 months from now. Be open to adjusting things based on how the business is growing and changing.
Training:
Our goal is to give clients the tools so that they can run things on their own. We do not seek to be around as a vendor forever. Unlike so many other consulting films, we have a heavy focus on training our clients. To train our client team members, we offer the step by step training through the content marketing management processes.
Some clients ask us to train team members on how to follow the processes we co-create for marketing operations such as scheduling social posts at the right frequency and how to use hashtags or blogging best practices. These sound basic, but once you have creating brand rules and a process it's important for the whole team to consistently follow it.
Other clients are focused on software help such as Zoho CRM training or Social Media scheduling tools.
Reporting and Testing:
Content marketing is just brand noise without setting goals and KPIs to measure your success or failure. Built into your marketing operations flow should be the frequency of reporting, what you're specifically looking for, and potential paths to shift your strategy based on what you find.
If your goal for the website was to get 100 form submissions per month, then that is your KPI. Perhaps your goal is 300 submissions per quarter. Since we know things can take a little while to pick up with a new campaign, you may wait until the end of the quarter to take an action - but it's still wise to simply be aware at the end of each month as to where you stand.
When you aren't achieving goals and you're unsure what needs to change, testing becomes integral to improving things. A/B testing your webpages, opt-in forms, emails, and even social media posts can help improve your marketing strategy. However, there should be a logical planned way to approach A/B Testing and that is part of your marketing operations.
Marketing Operations is Kind of Awesome
What we love most about marketing operations is how it ultimately supports customer service and the customer experience. Content marketing is not about shouting your message out into the world. Rather, it is all about making the customer journey awesome so that the marketing department doesn’t have to work so hard to support the sales team.
