Time to Get Serious about Marketing Operations

Marketers struggling to remain competitive, keep costs down, and deliver value to stakeholders usually turn to their campaigns, messaging, and tools for solutions. But improving processes by investing in better marketing operations is a crucial step most teams miss.

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Better Marketing Begins with
Better Processes

Marketers face a wide range of challenges. What unites nearly all of them is that they can be tackled with better processes. By reducing waste, improving time to market, and even just removing frustrating roadblocks, you can make everything else marketing does more effective.

All of that begins with understanding marketing operations management on a deeper level.

Tackling the Essentials of Better
Marketing Operations

If you’re not already investing in marketing operations, you’re missing out on the unsung hero of modern marketing. Operations has the potential to dramatically improve the efficiency and effectiveness of everything else your marketing function does.

: At its core, marketing operations is the management of all the processes that a marketing function runs on. That might mean finding the right tools, determining the steps of a content production process, optimizing meetings, and much more.

In other words, marketing operations is like the engine that moves your marketing function towards its goals. You can put together a brilliant and innovative marketing strategy (i.e. a destination), but without that marketing operations engine you may never actually arrive.

The unfortunate reality is that far too many marketing teams neglect operations because it’s too easy to focus on campaigns, channels, messaging, . But the benefit of investing in better marketing operations management is the ability to improve every single aspect of how your marketing teams function. When work gets done faster and more efficiently, you can test ideas more quickly, make marketers feel more empowered, and generally improve your KPIs across the board.

So if you’re looking for new ways to tackle an increasingly competitive marketing landscape, investing in better marketing operations is a no brainer.

Gain a Better Understanding of Marketing Ops
: In most organizations, marketing is a big tent containing a wide range of roles. Its composition and activities vary widely depending on who the organization sells to and what their product or service is. But within every big marketing tent sits marketing operations. Their focus is on supporting the rest of marketing by optimizing processes, procedures, and the technology that drives both.

For example, marketing operations may help manage a suite of software tools, integrate tools more effectively, or analyze content production processes to enhance efficiency. In this way, they are often less visible than many of their counterparts in marketing; they often work on behind-the-scenes aspects of the function. However, their role is absolutely critical, because they support the processes that marketing runs on every day.

In smaller marketing functions, there may be a single person responsible for operations. Or, they may not have any marketing operations function at all. In larger organizations, you will have a marketing operations manager leading a team consisting of people, like data analytics managers, revenue operations managers, marketing technology specialists, integration specialists, website developers, etc.
: Once you understand what marketing operations is, actually investing in it requires understanding the key roles and activities involved. The first is in strategic planning. Marketing operations shouldn’t run this on their own, but their involvement is critical because they need to understand marketing’s overall strategic goals. This enables operations to orient their work around achieving those goals.

The next major role of marketing operations is obvious but vital: process improvement. Here, regular attention is so important, because all processes are victims of entropy: they will eventually stop working well. Embracing the fact that updating and improving processes is a continuous process helps ensure marketing operations can perform this role effectively. Often that requires creating a structured cadence of retrospectives and experiments.

Marketing operations should also work closely with project managers to help identify and improve the processes they rely on. Operations might also work with market research to find better ways to share their findings wider. The same logic applies to professionals working in data management, analysis, and reporting. Operations can work to increase the impact of all these functions.

Explore Marketing Operations Roles
: While marketing operations professionals can use a wide range of metrics depending on their specialty, there are a few core Agile metrics that can really help drive process improvements. Whether you have an existing marketing operations team or are looking for ways to unlock the process improvements they drive, tracking these metrics is extremely important.

The first is efficiency, not as a general concept but a specific calculation. For marketing operations, efficiency is defined as the ratio between the time tasks spend waiting to be worked on and the time they are actively worked on. That single number tells you how much waste exists in your processes by quantifying the time valuable work spends waiting.

Next is cycle time, the average number of days between when work begins on a task and when that task is fully completed. This is another way of understanding how efficiently work is moving through your teams. It can help raise awareness of potential bottlenecks or unnecessary steps in processes.

Throughput covers the number of tasks (regardless of size) a team is able to complete in a fixed amount of time (usually a week or a sprint). This Agile metric gives you a rough idea of how much work you’re able to complete and can therefore be used to estimate when work in the backlog will be completed.

Related metrics marketing operations may use would be Work In Progress (WIP) or Velocity (the work a Scrum team completes in a sprint). But the three metrics mentioned above can serve as a strong basis for understanding how your marketing teams are performing and whether process changes are needed.

Start Using Agile Metrics
: Zooming in how marketing operations can facilitate more effective marketing campaigns lets us see it in action. In fact, marketing operations can dramatically improve campaign performance by effectively showing Return on Investment (ROI).

This happens by integrating a marketing operations professional or entire team into your campaign processes, beginning with market research and strategy development. Their insights into the data, tools, and processes that will drive your strategies can be invaluable.

Next, marketing operations can assist in campaign implementation and execution by ensuring the steps in your campaigns function properly. For example, they may ensure teams are tracking and utilizing data from their campaigns to implement improvements at a regular cadence.

Throughout this process, by working closely with the execution side of marketing, operations can get a better understanding of how tools and automation are used in their processes. Armed with this knowledge, marketing operations is better able to suggest new tools, automations, and integrations to boost performance.

The takeaway from all these points is simply that integrating marketing operations with the teams executing campaigns makes sense. It enables both functions to optimize how they operate and simply deliver more value in the long-run.

Improve Campaigns with Marketing Ops

Using Marketing Operations to
Reduce Waste

Perhaps the biggest goal of marketing operations is to simply reduce waste by optimizing processes. But it makes sense to begin by understanding the true cost of process waste in your marketing. This cost is often hidden in small increments spread throughout processes. For example, if a process takes just 10 extra minutes per day multiplied by 10 employees, carried over a year, you have nearly 90 hours of wasted time.

The truth is, most marketing processes are full of things that waste far more than 10 minutes. It’s hardly a surprise then that organizations that embrace Agile ways of process management and improvement often save millions of dollars a year as a result. But how exactly does marketing operations find such savings?

Firstly, by avoiding rework. Getting stakeholder alignment early on to ensure the things marketing produces actually match what those stakeholders need helps avoid costly rework. Another common process improvement is reducing hand-offs. Strategies like value stream mapping can help operations understand the value various hand-offs provide relative to their costs.

Marketing ops can also help use their mastery of marketing metrics to assist in experiments that can test ideas to produce valuable insights. They can also help develop limits on Work In Progress (WIP) to help focus marketers on work that will provide value sooner. Taken together, these and other lean techniques enable marketing operations to dramatically improve the efficiency and effectiveness of marketing efforts.

Uncover the Value of Lean Marketing Ops

: One way marketing operations can help amplify the impact of its own efforts is by cultivating a culture of continuous improvement within the organization. This wider mindset ensures that operations won’t be the only ones looking for processes to improve. With everyone on board, it becomes far easier to brainstorm process changes that can really move the needle on your KPIs.

Building such a culture begins with understanding your status quo. That comes from value stream mapping to appreciate your current process and where waste might exist. From there, tracking your team’s overall performance via key Agile metrics can create a baseline from which you can track your progress.

However those two initial steps only serve to teach you where you are now. The next step is scheduling retrospectives to review those metrics, brainstorm ideas for improvement, and run experiments to test those ideas. Throughout these steps, it’s essential to create an environment where people feel open to discuss and analyze team performance. Here, it can help to celebrate successful ideas, experiments, etc. to reinforce the behaviors behind them.

Once you’ve established a cadence of examination and experimentation, building a robust culture of continuous improvement is largely a matter of time. As your teams get used to thinking of their practices and processes as things which continuously evolve, their mindset will follow.

Create a Culture of Continuous Improvement
: One of the most valuable tools modern marketing operations professionals have at their disposal is integrations. By enabling software to communicate and share data with other software systems, integrations can automate processes, enhance software functionality, break down data silos, and more.

All of this value stems from one basic fact: modern marketing lives and dies according to data. The problem comes when all that data is trapped in various different pieces of software because much of its value comes from analyzing it together. After all, if you take virtually any basic graph with an X and Y axis and remove one, the data immediately becomes nearly useless.

So if data becomes more valuable when synthesized together, integrations enable that accumulation. The result is data that’s suddenly worth more than the sum of its parts. But besides combining data, integrations are also about sharing it more widely. For example, marketing and sales likely each have access to ample data about your customers, but that data may not be shared efficiently.

Understanding the importance of integrations is one thing, but who should develop and maintain them? Asking regular marketers to handle integrations can prove difficult, as they require some technical skills to execute well. This is why the task is usually assigned to a marketing operations team that may also handle things like website optimization or marketing technology more broadly.

Unlock the Power of Marketing Ops Integrations
: Perhaps the most basic way of understanding the role of marketing operations is maximizing the value production capabilities of marketing as a whole. However, doing that effectively requires understanding who is adding value where and when. Fortunately, value stream mapping enables you to do precisely that.

So what exactly is value stream mapping? It’s a process of visualizing the flow of goods (physical or otherwise) through an organization to the end customer. While its origins are in early 20th century factories, modern companies can apply the same principles to the way they produce anything from marketing campaigns to slide decks.

The idea is to do a few key things. First, identify steps that add value, those that don’t, and use flow metrics to understand the process efficiency. For example, if the content you produce is regularly reviewed without making any changes, that review step may be doing more harm than good. When steps like this accumulate you build up waste in your processes that can significantly hurt the ability of marketing to deliver value efficiently.

Value stream mapping also enables you to think more deeply about questions like: where does our work originate? What types of tasks do we typically do? How do we know a task is complete? Answering such questions can help teams and marketing operations itself better understand how work actually gets done and what can be improved about those processes.

Learn How to Map Your Value Stream
: It’s difficult to optimize something you can’t easily see. That sounds obvious, but when it comes to marketing operations it’s a lesson that can easily be forgotten. Visualizing work improves prioritization and overall project management, sure, but it also makes it far easier for marketing operations to optimize processes.

For modern Agile marketing teams, that visualization usually begins with a tool like a digital Kanban board. Operations is often integral to choosing the right tools for this kind of work visualization. But for marketing operations to really benefit from visualization, it needs to begin at the strategic planning stage. Quarterly planning sessions can give operations the opportunity to give input on strategic priorities. It’s also a chance to build alignment across marketing.

Those strategic goals then filter down to tactical level visualizations to aid in team planning. Here, smaller tasks and subtasks can be tracked, providing valuable metrics that marketing operations can use to understand how marketing is performing.

So marketing operations can both help find an ideal visualization tool and use that tool to improve their process optimization. That’s why building visualization into how your marketing teams operate is an essential step to getting the most out of operations.

Unlock the Power of Visualization for Marketing Ops
: A final way marketing leaders can best empower both everyday marketers and operations is by differentiating between the “what” and “how” of their work. This derives from an Agile principle designed to keep leaders focused on what should be achieved while empowering marketers to find the best approach for actually executing.

That same principle applies to marketing operations. They should focus on taking feedback from leaders, individual marketers, and other internal stakeholders before deciding what to focus on. Instead of setting their own strategic direction, marketing operations needs to focus on how to execute based on the direction set by leaders. That said, they should also be active participants in planning, sharing their perspectives to help shape those strategic decisions.

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Marketing Operations
Consulting & Training

By now the value and importance of marketing operations should be clear. The question is how to unlock those benefits within your organization. One place to start is by using Agile training to develop the continuous improvement mindset that really drives effective marketing operations.

Here, you can equip operations itself with the knowledge they need to understand their role within an Agile organization. But you can also build a shared Agile mindset for the operations, leadership, and execution sides of marketing. This shared mindset helps build alignment, ease collaboration, and make marketing as a whole more effective.

Once you’ve established that foundation in training, you need to help operations actually put those principles into practice. That’s where marketing operations consulting and coaching comes in. Here, experienced Agile practitioners can help operations understand how to practically apply the principles they’ve learned to their real world challenges.

Importantly, you need a balanced approach when it comes to training. Here at AgileSherpas, we’ve found the 70-20-10 model works best. It suggests that 10% of learning be structured, 20% involve informal learning, coaching, mentoring, etc. that’s closer to the actual work, and the final 70% is applying all that learning on the job.

For marketing operations, this entire process is crucial. It’s how you can ensure that the processes your marketing teams rely on every day are never neglected again. It’s how you build a sustainable set of cycles to enable operations to consistently deliver value to the rest of the marketing function.

Unlock the Benefits of Marketing Ops