One of my favorite films is “School of Rock”Which also happens to be one of the best films of 2003. In the film, Jack Black poses as a substitute teacher at a private school, and after realizing that the students are musically gifted, he turns the 10-year-old into a full-fledged rock band.
When assigning roles to students, he turns to the class representative, mistaking her for their band manager because she has the organizational skills necessary to keep the band running smoothly. “Summer,” he says, “you are responsible for the whole thing.”
When I think of marketing activities, I think of this quote – without a team, companies that rely on technology would have a less than seamless experience getting their jobs done. In this post, you will learn more about marketing operations and why these teams are essential to a business.
What are Marketing Activities?
Marketing operations allow the larger marketing team to work efficiently. They can also scale their operations as the business grows.
Marketing activities
Marketing Operations is an umbrella term that describes the people, processes and technologies that drive a company’s entire marketing strategy and increase the chances of success.
The people involved in marketing operations fine-tune and streamline all processes, from data reporting to strategy implementation, to create a foundation that reinforces and supports marketing efforts and makes it easier to achieve goals by implementing systems that ensure marketers are on Jobs are best equipped for success.
Marketing operations can be seen as a crucial element of your business and below we explain why.
Why is Marketing Important?
Without marketing activities, it would be difficult for marketing teams to complete essential activities effectively.
For example, because technology is required to perform most marketing tasks, it also requires a team to manage the complexities of that technology and make sure it works properly. that is exactly what marketing operations are for.
Here are some examples of situations that a Marketing Operations team can resolve:
- Your investment in Marketing technology Don’t offer the solutions you thought would.
- You want to streamline data reporting and metrics tracking to understand ROI.
- Strategy execution is a timely process and you want to cut the time from start to finish.
At HubSpot, the Marketing Ops team is responsible for supporting the systems and processes that enable the marketing team to optimally fulfill their roles. This includes everything from permissions, conversational marketing, user data, forms, and email operations.
Proper management is an essential part of how well a Marketing Ops team works. So in the next section we’re going to talk about Marketing Ops Management and its implications.
Marketing Operations Management
Marketing operations management creates the framework for how marketing departments and teams do their jobs. This management will make strategic decisions about marketing activities and develop an optimized strategy that will contribute to success from start to finish.
The marketing activity is the reference point process of strategy and optimization, while marketing defines ops management How that strategies and optimizations take place.
Since marketing operations management aims to increase efficiency, operations teams are often involved in content planning and campaign analysis. Now that we understand what Marketing Ops are and what they do, let’s talk about the details of a Marketing Ops Strategy.
Marketing operations strategy
The members of the Marketing Ops team must have extensive skills. Some of the typical activities this department deals with are email operations, systems analysis, customer data and marketing, user operations, and lead rotation.
All of these roles come together to align the process and platforms required to carry out marketing tasks for the larger marketing team.
When thinking about a marketing strategy, think about the problems the marketing team needs to solve. For example, it is common for marketing operations strategies to meet the needs of your company’s customers, stakeholders, and employees.
Below is how to create a marketing strategy for your own business.
How to Create a Marketing Operations Strategy
- Identify what your operational strategy should achieve for the stakeholders.
- Include actionable steps in your plan to help you achieve your goals.
- Find a measurable metric to determine the success of your strategy.
- If necessary, communicate how colleagues can participate in the further development of your strategy.
- Assign team members specific tasks that will help achieve your goals.
To understand what a marketing strategy is, let’s start with an example: Suppose a marketing team wants to make email marketing a more valuable process for both parties (customers and marketers).
1. Identify what your operational strategy aims to achieve for the stakeholders.
The first step in defining a marketing strategy is to outline key goals. For example, your Marketing Ops team might decide to send out marketing emails, allowing sales to find high quality leads, and identifying key marketers to carry out this process are three goals they have for the have first quarter.
As you identify these main goals, make sure you also determine which stakeholders you are targeting. You can target one or more groups, but if you are clear about who you are planning for, your plan will be actionable and valuable.
2. Identify actionable steps in your plan to help you achieve your goals.
Then the team would consider how these tasks would help them achieve their goals. For example, the team would ask “How does it help us achieve our goals when we can effectively send email marketing to teams?” and appreciate with an answer like, “We should see a drop in email churn rates.”
Establishing these steps will help your marketing team stay organized as they get their jobs done. In addition, by describing these steps, your team can figure out what needs to be done and what resources are required to be successful.
3. Find a measurable metric to determine the success of your strategy.
The next step in strategizing is figuring out how the team would measure the success of the project. In this example, the team could conclude “We calculate churn by dividing the number of contacts who unsubscribed from email in a month by the number of unique email recipients in a month.”
Having a measurable metric will help you track the success of the strategy as your team works through the plan. The metric reminds your team of the goal you want to achieve and what the stakeholders want to see as a result of your plan.
4. If necessary, communicate how colleagues can participate in the further development of your strategy.
Now that the goal and measurement metric are identified, your next step is to outline what this change would mean for affected colleagues; For example, the team members who create and distribute marketing email messages.
The team might conclude that “Marketers can expect a simpler email policy process, more effective format, and form to provide input on how this can be done.”
5. Assign team members specific tasks that will help you achieve your goals.
With this established, the next thing the Marketing Ops team needs to do is assign team members specific tasks to help them achieve their goals. For example, a team member might be responsible for redefining email marketing contact lists. Another could be in charge of reviewing current email marketing workflows.
When team members complete these tasks, they review them in one place so the entire team can keep track of the project’s status.
Marketing operations teams are just as effective in their strategies and management skills as Summer’s character in School of Rock. With their methods, the group was able to get its own rehearsal room and offer music lessons.
Marketing departments can find ways to increase customer satisfaction and make the job of marketers easier. Their strategies make marketing activities and tasks accessible to all and are therefore an integral part of any business.
