Throughout history, it’s usually the soldiers and commanders who get the glory but none of their success is possible without logistics. Marketing operations is a bit like all those truck drivers, loaders, and managers working behind the scenes to make sure everyone else has the things they need to succeed.
In other words, much like Napoleon marching into Russia, ignore marketing operations at your peril (there’s a sentence I bet you thought you’d never read).
Frankly, the importance of marketing operations has never been greater. Today, marketers need to operate in an environment that’s constantly changing, they need to make things happen with scarce resources. Operations is what makes all that possible.
But if you’re a marketing operations professional then you already know all of that. The challenge is getting your colleagues to understand and appreciate what your role is, how better marketing operations can empower the entire organization to succeed.
After finishing this piece you’ll be ready to easily and effectively explain to anyone why your role is absolutely essential. After all, it’s long past time everyone started giving marketing operations their due.
At the most basic level, marketing operations professionals are the managers who work to improve processes, tie marketing to senior leaders, and generally find ways for marketing to reach its full potential as a function.
That might mean focusing more on managing people, processes, or just finding the right tools. Depending on whether your marketing team is just a few people or hundreds, the scope and focus of the role can change dramatically, but at its core, it always comes down to empowering marketers.
Getting back to the logistics analogy, the impact of marketing operations increases with the size of the organization. Much in the same way the importance of logistics increases when you’re supporting a hundred thousand people on the other side of the world compared to ten people in the next town.
So while marketing operations is always important, it’s particularly important when your marketing efforts are happening on a large scale and with great complexity. Keep in mind when trying to explain the value it brings, particularly if your organization is looking to scale its marketing efforts.
But at its core, the value of marketing operations rests on having the right objectives tied to strategic goals, efficient processes, and marketers who feel good about their work. These elements are often shared with HR, senior leadership, and other managers, but operations has a part to play in each.
If you ask around you’ll find a lot of different marketing operations frameworks in use from the Campaign-to-Cash (C2C) to the classic waterfall method. But for modern marketing operations to really succeed in its core mission of empowering marketers, it needs to operate alongside those marketers. That means employing the same Agile frameworks that successful marketers use.
Here are the four most popular Agile frameworks that marketing operations professionals should consider. Just bear in mind that if your regular marketing teams are using a particular framework, it will probably be easiest to adopt that same framework. So you can use that as a good starting point.
Lean is all about eliminating waste, maximizing value for customers, and continuously improving workflows (certainly all things marketing operations can get behind). That can be broken down into a few main principles. The first is eliminating waste in the form of processes, practices, tools, etc. In particular, this requires understanding what outcomes you want and identifying what doesn’t contribute to those outcomes.
Scrum is all about breaking work into sprints (periods of work usually lasting 1-4 weeks) so that work can be ruthlessly optimized. Each sprint begins with sprint planning, each day has a scrum meeting to check in on progress, and is followed by a spring review and retrospective. Scrum is all about structure and consistency, which makes it easier to gather data on your work, experiment, and improve.
While Scrum is all about breaking work into sprints and optimizing around those sprints, Kanban is designed for a continuous flow of work. That makes sense when you look at its origins in automotive assembly lines. Here, teams work from a Kanban board, which has cards representing tasks. Those cards move along the board to represent stages like in progress or review. Kanban’s visualized workflow also employs techniques like Work In Progress (WIP) limits to further improve efficiency.
Scrumban is all about getting the best of Scrum and Kanban together. Typically that means working off a Kanban board but still breaking work up into sprints. Typically teams here will use Scrum events like daily standups, sprint planning, retrospectives, etc. That best of both worlds approach is what has made this consistently popular among Agile marketers.
Marketing operations professionals can serve a wide range of roles, which actually can (and should) evolve as marketing changes. So it’s worth looking at each one individually and thinking about how your own role might need to change.
No, marketing operations shouldn’t be the ones creating strategic plans. But they do have an important part to play in that process. This role ties back to the fundamental goal of great marketing: providing stakeholder value.
All the work operations does in every other role on this list requires understanding who its stakeholders are and what they need. Additionally, that information should be shared between operations and everyone else involved with marketing to ensure they’re on the same page and working towards the same goals.
This required operations participating in strategic planning, both lending their knowledge of processes, data, etc. and ensuring the resulting strategic vision doesn’t get lost in a game of telephone. This enables operations to ensure it’s working towards broader organizational goals instead of working in isolation and hoping the results add up to something greater.
After all, our 8th Annual State of Agile Marketing Report found that 55% of marketers felt that improving the alignment between organizational goals and marketing objectives as a high priority. It’s clear that marketers increasingly need not just better strategic planning, but better systems for ensuring that information filters down to everyday activities.
We mentioned before that without process improvement, marketing stagnates. Frankly, this should be posted up on the wall of every marketing department like the “Believe” sign in Ted Lasso. Even the best, most cutting-edge, and efficient marketing processes won’t stay that way forever.
Imagine if you suddenly discovered you’d need to do all your marketing using what was “cutting-edge” back in 2005. If you shuddered a little, let that be a reminder of why process improvement is so vital. It’s also why you should never just say “well we did some process improvement so that’s done, now we can focus on other things.”
Process improvement is a continuous process. You can’t take your eye off the ball.
But what does process improvement actually look like from a marketing operations perspective?
In practice, it begins with feedback both in the form of data and talking to your marketers. Regularly scheduled retrospectives should be a chance to listen and discuss what processes need improvement. It’s also a good time to brainstorm ideas to test.
Operations is often in charge of those tests, ensuring they’re well structured and the results are significant enough to act on. Then, it’s time to repeat the process.
Like with strategic planning, marketing project management is often handled by dedicated project managers. But when handled by marketing operations, their role is to tie together all the other elements, ensuring that the right processes get applied to ensure that work gets done to achieve the right objectives.
This is why operations can so effectively work alongside project managers to lend their expertise as needed. This experience can also help operations identify what processes need improvement as well as what tools teams might need to do their work more effectively.
Another area that may be handled by marketing operations is research. This can include market, customer, or competitor research depending on what’s needed in the marketing function.
But why would marketing operations be doing research? In short, it’s because they’re uniquely placed to ensure the results of that research get filtered back into project management, process improvement, strategic planning, etc. They also bring the ability to leverage their knowledge of data and strategic goals.
All the other roles mentioned so far rely on data. From choosing the right metrics to applying them to processes and ensuring everyone else on the team has access to the data, marketing operations can have a massive impact by handling data management.
Again, why marketing operations? Because data management is as much about processes as it is about the data itself. Ensuring that data is accessible in theory and used in practice both come back to the processes marketing relies on to do its work.
Finally, because they are often the ones handling the data, marketing operations will also analyze and report on that data, ensuring both marketing teams and senior leaders can use it to make better decisions. This analysis also brings together all of the wider perspectives operations has to find better ways to use data insights.
It should be clear by now that all these various roles essentially boil down to carving out a unique position within the marketing function and using that position to improve processes via all the roles mentioned. But how do you decide how to use marketing operations in your organization? That begins with developing a strategy.
Understanding the varied roles of marketing operations is one thing, but the way those roles get translated into action is through marketing operations strategies. You can break these strategies down into 5 essential steps.
Every marketing operations strategy needs to begin with stakeholders. This can mean your customers, senior leaders in the company, and any other functions within the company who rely on marketing like sales.
You can begin by looking at what challenges these stakeholders are facing, what they’re trying to accomplish, and what they think is valuable. Neglecting this step can easily result in strategies that make life easier for one stakeholder but frustrate another.
For example, marketing might point out that a series of articles they’ve been writing aren’t getting great feedback from customers. They might therefore think they should stop making them. However, it’s possible that sales finds these articles immensely useful in one-on-one interactions with prospects.
Once you understand what value you want to create for your stakeholders, it’s time to translate that into concrete goals. A helpful shorthand for creating better marketing goals is SMART:
Following the SMART guidelines will ensure your goals are targeted, achievable, and actually move the needle.
An integral part of choosing goals is selecting the metrics that can act as a north star, guiding everyone in the right direction together. The wrong metric can make even the best marketing goals pointless because it can easily trick you into thinking you’re achieving your goals when you’re not.
In short, you want to ask yourself whether achieving this metric will definitely equate to achieving your goal. This means avoiding vanity metrics that sound great but don’t actually lead to anything substantial.
You can improve how you are at setting metrics over time by reviewing them in your retrospective meetings. This is a time to run through all the SMART criteria and see if the metrics you chose actually worked. If not, you can look at what went wrong and select a better metric next time.
Perhaps the biggest single mistake marketers of all kinds make when it comes to planning is being rigid about it. Marketing is a fast paced world and refusing to adapt when circumstances change just because you decided to do something a month ago doesn’t make sense. That’s why instead of simply executing, we recommend flexibly executing your marketing operations strategies.
For example, you might decide to try improving the process of creating and sending outbound emails. You decide this will help sales a lot and you assign a metric before you start. However, halfway through this plan the sales team decides to pivot its strategy to rely less on outbound emails. There’s nothing wrong with changing your goals at this point!
All that said, avoiding marketing operations strategies that stretch out over months is a great way to avoid needing to adjust them quite so much. Focused plans that take just a few weeks reduce the risk that circumstances will change while you’re midway through.
We’ve mentioned retrospectives a few times and for good reason. If you’re not taking time at the end of each plan to talk about what went well, what went poorly, and what you can do differently, you’re missing out on a ton of opportunities.
Every time a team member thinks “that process really didn’t work well, I wish we did it another way” before moving on and ultimately forgetting about it is a missed chance for marketing operations to make an improvement. So stop, gather all those thoughts, and turn them into action before everyone rushes to the next task.
Before proceeding to see several examples of great marketing operations in action, why don't you take a minute to check if bad processes are eating up your marketing budget?
While it’s easy for marketing operations professionals to reflexively dive into the process and tool weeds, it’s important to consider organizational structure as well. For example, silos that prevent information from moving freely can inhibit teams from using that information to operate more effectively. This is another reason why marketing operations should look at the marketing function holistically and not optimize each team in a vacuum.
Another way in which structure can promote efficiency is through cross-functionality. This is when each team has all the people and skills they need to accomplish all of their tasks. That means everyone is on a single team full time. This makes it much easier for people to focus, but also makes a lot of marketing operations possible.
This is because having teams that need external people, or teams filled with part time members, or even just teams that are ad hoc and created just for individual projects, creates a chaotic environment. Running experiments, collecting data, and understanding what’s working becomes far more difficult when teams are constantly in a state of flux.
So while marketing operations can’t ignore processes, they should also consider how the structure of their teams affects their work.
All of this might sound somewhat abstract, so let’s run through some examples of what this looks like in practice.
Let’s say your marketing team produces a podcast to position your company founder as a thought leader. However, the process of planning, recording, editing, and posting these podcasts takes weeks. As a result, marketing wants to find a way to streamline the process.
In this case, marketing operations will look at the processes and find ways to streamline them. For example, maybe the team is always working on 4-5 episodes at once and all that Work In Progress is slowing them down. Or they may simply be using the wrong tools like editing or project management software.
To take another example, let’s say senior leadership increases the budget of the marketing team by 20% YoY. However, after 6 months, none of marketing’s KPIs have moved substantially. Leadership is frustrated that they’re investing more but not getting returns, so marketing operations decides to look at what’s causing the disconnect.
By digging into the data about where resources are being spent and how value is being created, it becomes clear that the marketing teams are simply investing the additional resources into campaigns they were already running. The result is that the teams are getting diminishing returns even faster, but haven’t increased their cadence to find new opportunities to efficiently spend those extra resources.
So marketing operations works with team leaders to create new processes for speeding up the process of creating new campaigns.
At Charles River Laboratories, the marketing department already had operations professionals working to improve processes. The problem was their focus. By focusing on efficiencies within individual campaigns instead of thinking about the marketing function as a whole, they were launching campaigns quickly but missing out on bigger efficiencies.
Or, as the Executive Director of Global Marketing Operations put it: "We were running so fast launching campaign after campaign, that we weren’t slowing down to dive into the analytics and let that impact the next campaign. We saw an opportunity to gain efficiencies in our processes so we could avoid burnout in the team, but also to use data to drive more strategic decision-making. We wanted to do less, better."
By taking this holistic approach as a part of a wider Agile transformation (during the Covid-19 pandemic no less), Charles River increased their speed to market by 50%. This points to the value of the Agile approach to marketing operations: stepping back and thinking about holistic and sustainable improvement.
From a marketing operations perspective, dealing with an organization that sees marketers as order takers is deeply frustrating. After all, how can you improve processes when you have no control over your workload or timeline? The Marketing Operations Director at this organization described the situation this way:
“Everybody was taking in work from every direction and anybody within the organization. There was no structured way to be able to see the full scope of work that this division was taking on, at any point in time. So we understood pretty quickly that one of the first things we would need to do is develop some processes and tools to be able to have an intake process.”
Like with Charles River, taking a holistic approach to optimizing the entire marketing function alongside empowering marketers to have a say in how work was assigned and approached made an enormous difference. The capacity and priorities of marketing were now considered alongside the wishlist of their stakeholders.
This enabled marketing operations to improve how marketing functioned far more effectively because they now had some level of visibility and control over their processes. This ultimately enabled the marketing function to shift from simply checking boxes to actually innovating and adapting.
This case study shows an insurance and financial services company implementing a hybrid Scrumban Agile framework. This enabled them to track their velocity and really see precisely how their operational changes were affecting their ability to deliver value.
This example shows how and why it’s so important for marketing operations to have access to quality data. This means marketing operations could justify the investment made in these changes by demonstrating clear ROI to leaders and marketers themselves.
Of course this wasn’t the only operational change made. Things like quarterly big room planning enabled operations to gain a broader perspective on priorities, challenges, and opportunities for process and tool improvements. It was useful to occasionally step out of the trenches and take some time to see the big picture.
Besides following the steps we’ve outlined, there are a few other techniques you can employ to improve the efficiency of your marketing operations.
Begin with fostering a customer-centric culture and mindset. Closely tied to the focus on stakeholders we’ve already mentioned, this involves using the delivery of value to your customers as a kind of north star.
So even when operations is focusing on something seemingly unrelated to customers, like process improvements, they should be asking themselves how these improvements will ultimately serve customers.
For example, if the marketing department is debating whether to invest in more advertising or better SEO software they might get caught up in all the criteria they could use to evaluate each choice. Focusing on which option delivers greater value to customers simplifies the decision making process immensely.
Then, you can apply this customer-centric approach to the process of continuous improvement mentioned above. Combining a laser-focus on delivering value to your most important stakeholders with a reliable process for improving processes is a winning formula for marketing operations success. These two together both ensure you’re moving in the right direction and always finding the best way to get there.
Traditionally, the four pillars of marketing operations have been: platform operations, campaign operations, marketing intelligence, and marketing operations development. This is one way to divide the work marketing operations performs and identify specific areas that may require improvement.
While marketers do the actual work of understanding customers, building campaigns, testing messages, etc. marketing operations focuses on the tools and processes behind that work. For example, operations might help find the right project management tool or may identify and test a new way to streamline the production of articles.
Marketing operations includes all the processes and tools used by marketers to accomplish their goals. To do that, these professionals will collect data, test improvements, and generally figure out ways to optimize how the marketing function performs.
In general, marketing operations professionals work alongside marketers themselves to improve processes and tools. For example, they might help spearhead the integration of AI into a marketing team or help find the best new marketing intelligence and analytics tools.
Marketing operations management is about managing the entire marketing function and the work it does, whether that’s producing campaigns, running ads, or writing content. Operations managers will primarily focus on optimizing the processes and tools marketers use to do their work.
By now it should be clear that marketing operations is both vitally important and relies heavily on concepts like continuous improvement and customer-centricity. But learning and mastering those concepts requires more than a passing understanding.
If you’re ready to master the skills needed to improve your marketing operations, you should look closer at Agile marketing training options. From self-paced online learning to certification courses and coaching, there are many ways to hone the skills mentioned above and supercharge your marketing teams.