Three Basic Functions for Every Marketing Ops Function

To meet the rising expectations of the leadership team, marketing is undergoing a transformation to enable it to improve its operational and business performance.  As the need for a more transparent, efficient, and accountable view of marketing became increasingly more important, the marketing operations function emerged.  The marketing operations function enables the marketing organization to operate more like a business, with formalized processes, infrastructure, and reporting. The bare essentials Marketing Operations function should perform at least three functions:

1. Drive the processes for budgeting and investment decisions and more effective strategic planning.
2. Lead the charge for marketing performance measurement processes.
3. Identify and implement the required infrastructure to maintain the consistent implementation of processes.

The role of Marketing Ops is expanding beyond these basics, especially within Marketing organizations serving as value creators. Within Best-in-Class organizations, the marketing ops function is moving beyond campaign automation and financial governance to facilitate alignment, accountability, and agility.

Marketing Ops has the opportunity to enable Marketing to become more effective by developing and managing the processes for setting performance expectations, monitoring progress, and measuring results. By creating or expanding the marketing ops role and skill set to include performance targeting skills and process and technology optimization, as well as strategic capabilities to drive change, Marketing can reach the next step on its performance management journey.

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5 Steps to Create A Well-Designed Strategy Roadmap

This level of proficiency requires a strategic roadmap. Strategic roadmaps help to determine future outcomes and whether the organization is heading in the right direction and staying on course. A well constructed strategic roadmap helps establish consensus around priorities and align investments and resources around these priorities.

Your Marketing Ops strategic roadmap should serve as a guide toward long-term results in keeping with the organization’s overall mission plan.  An effective strategic roadmap incorporates realistic and actionable steps to carry out the overall mission.  Your Marketing Ops strategic roadmap should document want you want the Marketing Ops function to achieve for Marketing and the rest of the organization (the desired state), the current state and outline how you you will reach the desired state.

The following 5 steps will help you begin to shape your Marketing Ops roadmap:

1. Describe how your Marketing Ops function will help the Marketing team and the rest of the organizations succeed. What will be better as a result of the function?
2. Determine the requirements needed to realize this vision. High performance Marketing Operations strategy roadmaps address the processes, data, resources, talent/skills, systems,
3. Identify the timing frame in which you need the outcome to occur. Break the time frame into individual milestones in chronological order. Determine how long each milestone will require and who owns its completion.
4. Clarify at the outset how incremental and long-term success of the Marketing Ops function will be measured.  This is where you need to establish the measures and metrics for both the function and the roadmap.
5. Establish how performance of the roadmap will be reported and communicated.

To create the road map you will need to complete a strategic assessment that most likely includes the following:

• conducting an executive stakeholder analysis
• creating a business case
• identifying the business outcomes Marketing is expected to impact

Once this step is complete you will be able to assess your skills, systems, process and tools gaps, and develop your plan to close these gaps. The road map will need to identify what infrastructure, data, analytics capabilities, performance setting and measurement, data collection and analysis, and reporting processes will be needed.

Your Marketing Ops roadmap serves as an important vehicle for highlighting skills and training requirements and culture and change management. As part of the road map, you should establish and secure agreement on the Marketing operations charter, scope, role and responsibilities. Remember, while Marketing operations will set up metrics to measure Marketing’s performance, there will also need to be metrics to measure the Marketing operations’ impact and contribution too.

As marketers we need to focus on developing and enhancing the science-side of our skill set and leveraging marketing operations either as a function or a discipline to create a culture based more on facts than intuition. Even with a marketing operations function, a marketing organization cannot be successful without embracing a performance-driven culture.

Download the Marketing Operations: Enabling Marketing Centers Of Excellence white paper to learn more about how to establish or enhance a marketing ops function in our organization. Contact us for help with creating an effective and high performance roadmap that focuses on those areas that will have the maximum value and contribution to your business. 

FAQ:

• Driving budgeting, investment decisions, and strategic planning processes
• Leading marketing performance measurement and reporting
• Implementing infrastructure to ensure consistent process execution

1. Define how Marketing Ops will enable Marketing and the broader organization to succeed.
2. Identify requirements—processes, data, skills, systems—needed to realize the vision.
3. Establish a timeline with milestones, durations, and ownership.
4. Set measures and metrics to evaluate incremental and long-term success.
5. Determine how roadmap progress will be reported and communicated.

• Executive stakeholder analysis
• Business case development
• Identification of business outcomes Marketing must impact
• Skills, system, process, and tool gap analysis
• Infrastructure, data, analytics, and reporting needs assessment

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