Why Marketing Operations Matters
As more and more companies focus on revenue efficiency, a simple question comes up that has real implications:
Simply put: Why does marketing operations (MOPs) matter?
Because they enable you to tie everything to revenue, yet still maintain creative flexibility.
The ones who can make revenue-related questions have answers, answers stem from actions, actions require concrete data, and data must come from your technology + use of it.
And your MOPs team makes it happen.
As written in Dr. Debbie Qaqish’s From Backroom To Boardroom (pg. 150), “…the strategic MO has four distinct capabilities:
- Tech/data/analytics DNA
- Marketing experience
- Business acumen
- Customer knowledge and insights”
Think about it:
Revenue / Business acumen. Financial accountability continues to be a (healthy) trend marketing teams embrace with their work, but somebody has to ensure that’s feasible.
Tracking marketing-source revenue requires an in-depth attribution model (last-touch and first-touch advocated need not read on), and somebody needs to design, test, implement, and optimize that model. This is especially true as your organization adopts a revenue marketing mindset.
But then you also have marketing-influenced revenue, which is a challenge all unto itself. And how does the data flow from your marketing automation platform into your CRM, and then into the correct campaigns / reports that give marketing the proper attribution?
Your marketing operations team controls so many levers that impact these processes, making it natural to build strong relationships with not just sales, but also finance (and the CFO), IT, and other key departments.
Marketing experience. As tech stacks continue to get more complex, and Scott Brinker’s MarTech supergraphic becomes more and more insane, you need people who can run the complex tech / underlying processes while still tying it together with the rest of your ecosystem.
A Marketo or Eloqua instance is complex enough on its own. But then it also:
· integrates with your CRM
· triggers other campaign activites
· has underlying lead scoring models
· pushes audiences to marketing channels such as LinkedIn and Facebook for advertising and audience segmentation
· syncs with intent data platforms for increased insight
· etc. (there’s MANY more processes it facilitates and connects to!)
So, you need people who can deep-dive into this platform, while also using it to strategically build repeatable, scalable processes that impact many parts of the business.
Customer knowledge. Who keeps the customer at the forefront? The ones sitting on the treasure trove of customer data!
Executives always want data, but accuracy and speed are vital — and this is quite possibly the best area where MOPs shines!
Qaqish has a maturity model:
Note that becoming customer-centric is stage 4, after having a thorough understanding of how you get, keep, and grow revenue. That’s because if you don’t fully understand your customer’s buying behaviors (and how to leverage that data), you aren’t truly customer-centric anyway!
And the only way to move forwards in these stages is with a strong marketing operations team that can blend revenue, technology, and processes into a cohesive strategy that’s able to be built upon.
So, why’s marketing operations important?
Because without it, you’ve set yourself up to be far less successful.
As Gartner wrote: “…research shows 81% of marketing organizations without a marketing operations leader report they felt they could not fully maximize the impact of their initiatives when also striving for efficiency.”
Want more? Dive into marketing operations in this blog with Chief Strategy Officer Dr. Debbie Qaqish.
