In many organisations, when leads are coming in thick and fast and the business booming, the marketing department is congratulated, but performance becomes less of a focus.
Gone are the days when marketing was seen as only necessary to manage general advertising, ‘do what competitors are doing’, shout about the company, and to generally just ‘make things look great’.
Thankfully this will be an alien concept to most marketer’s working today. This shift to providing a far broader business influence does bring different challenges for ‘those that hold the crayons’. With fierce competition, an ever-changing marketplace, increasingly savvy customers and technology reinventing best proactive on a yearly basis, marketing departments are a vital part of any organisation.
With an increasing need to focus on revenue, marketers need to be passionate about growth and delivering results.
Any organisation can do all of this, but the mechanism to make it all work needs supervision and expertise. That is where marketing operations become a vital part of the marketing department.
Why invest in marketing operations?
Moving beyond a traditional marketing department and incorporating marketing operations into the team means that rolling out complex campaigns and initiatives will be faster and more tightly controlled, while still involving oversight and creative control.
- Build effective relationships across departments
Deliver and even oversee co-ordination and functionality around the whole business, driving communications and reporting to take full control of marketing plans.
- Be more focused on business deliverables
By looking at the bigger picture and identifying the desired, positive outcomes, they’re in a better place to provide the right solution at the right time.
- Directly contribute to revenue
They’re no longer just a small piece of the puzzle, but an essential part of the machine. A marketing operations team help the marketing department to showcase their financial worth and demonstrate strong ROI.
- Get a seat at the table.
They have the acumen and the abilities to deliver strategy and insight that impacts the company’s bottom line, helping sales to convert more leads.
So how do you turn your marketing department into a marketing operations team?
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Focus on efficiency (and effectiveness)
To be a successful marketing operations team – one that’s constantly committed to high performance – you need a blend of staff who have top-quality skills in marketing, coordination & management, data collection & analysis, and technology.
As well as a solid overall strategy, your marketing ops team should be focused on regularly planning activities, program management and taking the lead on large campaigns.
They should also be focused on merging IT functions into their fold, as technology plays a key role in today’s marketing. It’s extremely important for the effective execution of marketing campaigns and the coordination of digital suppliers.
And it’s vital for campaign management, performance reporting and data collection – another key area your marketing ops team should be focused on.
2. Measure and track (by using data!)
With data and figures at your fingertips, marketing can be run with a purely business focus.
You can monitor profit-and-loss, assess current and potential revenue, forecast growth and project/report on the return on investment of marketing spend.
The key is to focus on the data:
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- Information learnt from customers and leads should be analysed for vital consumer insight and assessed for potential trends
- Performance reporting and analytics should contribute to a better understanding of how effective marketing materials are in the pipeline
- Acquisition and retention rates should help refine how and where marketing can better reach potential customers
- The combined data sets should help decision-makers make those important decisions without guesswork, bringing about more effective selling throughout the whole organisation
3. Support the sales team
Perhaps most importantly, an effective marketing operations team is better equipped to support the sales team.
They can provide the solid foundations and the precision planning to promote a more streamlined, targeted pipeline.
They can assign more time, more effort and more budget to those areas of marketing that are the most useful and the most powerful for the sales team.
They can supply insight and improve conversion rates, by sharing competition and industry research with sales reps.
And they can transform the overall performance of the business by:
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- connecting marketing, sales and product departments
- providing the key information the executive team need
- increasing agility and communication between all teams
By de-segregating departments and synchronising planning, language and data, a marketing operations team can eliminate both political and functional issues in a business.
With those out of the way, marketing ops can help the whole company focus on sales and success.
DataDwell can help marketing operations better support sales, with effective sales enablement software.Try it out for free today.
