What Is Marketing Operations & What Are Its Benefits? (2024)

Your company’s marketing creatives are responsible for producing campaigns that captivate your target audience and bring in new leads. But how are those leads monitored and shared with your sales team? Who compiles the performance reports and ensures every campaign contributes to the team’s key performance indicators (KPIs)? 

This is the domain of the marketing operations team, the backbone of marketing success. Without marketing operations, businesses may lack a clear path to effectively reach their intended audiences and acquire new customers. Learn how your company can use marketing operations to scale your business.

What is marketing operations?

The term marketing operations encompasses the people, technology, and processes that support a marketing team’s activities. 

• People. In smaller businesses, operations might be a shared responsibility among generalists on the marketing team. Larger teams might have marketing operations managers, dedicated project managers, specialists, and analysts. 

• Processes. Marketing operations processes include market research, campaign planning, execution, and performance analysis. 

Marketing operations, or MOps, aims to optimize and scale marketing efforts, move potential customers through the marketing funnel, and grow revenue. With a bird’s-eye view of every component of the marketing department, marketing operations can streamline processes, set macro-level goals, and effectively achieve those goals.

Those who work in marketing operations need excellent management skills to handle all the moving parts. They should be able to think analytically and communicate effectively with those on their team and external teams. Successful marketing operations professionals should be technologically savvy and comfortable working with analytics and data tools. Moreover, marketing ops professionals should also be able to use this data to inform strategic decisions. 

Marketing vs. marketing ops teams

While the broader marketing team’s responsibilities include creative work like ideation and content creation, marketing operations is responsible for enabling that work. That includes conducting research to inform campaigns, tracking progress, securing support from other departments like IT and sales, and compiling performance analytics and sharing those results cross-functionally. 

Benefits of marketing operations

The goal of marketing ops is to empower your marketing team to do more effective work, therefore improving your marketing return on investment (ROI) in these specific ways:

Improve initiatives with analytics

Without data, marketers make decisions based on personal experience, anecdotal evidence, industry-wide data, and gut instinct. This might be OK in the early stages of a business, when there isn’t ample data to draw on, but using data is imperative as you mature. 

Marketing ops is responsible for ensuring that your valuable data is put to good use—bringing it to the table to inform marketing efforts from the earliest stages of development. Incorporating historical data gained from marketing analytics into decision-making leads to better business outcomes. 

Make real-time improvements

Constantly monitoring performance and analyzing performance data is time-consuming, and marketers often don’t have time to dedicate to this work. But when you don’t keep a close eye on performance, things can fall through the cracks. 

Marketing operations can track how customers are responding to your marketing efforts, and use that data to improve digital marketing campaigns. For example, let’s say you spend half of your marketing budget on social media ads. The ads are successful, and the click-through rate to your website is high. But most of the people who arrive on your site bounce very quickly, without making a purchase. Marketing ops is responsible for identifying problems like this quickly so that the person or team responsible for the website can take action—and get you more value for the money you spent on ads.

Improve efficiency with technology

Digital marketing tools abound—so much so that teams can quickly end up with so many that they hinder, rather than improve, efficiency. Marketing ops is responsible for ensuring that technology usage on your team is seamless. They can help your business choose a CMR or content management system (CMS) with both your present and future needs in mind, and they can ensure that everyone knows how to use the tool properly. Finally, they can ensure everyone is actually using tools properly, so that your business is capturing thorough and accurate data. 

How to develop a marketing operations strategy

1. Set concrete goals
2. Designate the key players
3. Make a plan
4. Bring everyone in

Even if you don’t have the budget to hire a dedicated marketing operations manager or team, you still need a marketing ops strategy. Here are five steps your business should consider when creating it:

1. Set concrete goals

First, decide what you want to achieve in terms of marketing operations this year, half-year, or quarter. Aim to make your goals SMART—specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound. That could look like:

• Selecting and implementing a new CRM, ensuring that all team members are using it by [date]

• Implementing an analytics tools and reporting process, with a first marketing performance report being delivered by [date]

• Improving campaign delivery time by X%

• Ensure campaigns have a minimum ROI of X%

2. Designate the key players

Your marketing operations team can be as big or small as you deem fit. If a dedicated team isn’t in your budget, you can assign operations responsibilities to other marketers on your team (for example, channel owners). Just make sure you’re clear about who is responsible for which tasks. 

Remember, operations is a different skill set from creativity. Make sure those you hire or task with operational responsibilities have skills such as: 

• Project management

• Data management

• Data analysis

3. Make a plan

Once goals are set and key players are designated, it’s time to outline a marketing strategy to achieve those goals. This is your roadmap to marketing operations success. For each goal, you’ll need to understand your baseline (where you are today), align on the steps to be taken to achieve the goal, and set milestones for assessing progress. Your plan should also be clear about how progress, and ultimately success, will be measured (meaning: which metrics will be used). 

4. Bring everyone in

Your marketing operations strategy will likely impact how many people do their work. Make sure that anyone who will be working with marketing ops is brought into the process early and given a voice. From there, align on how changes to marketing processes or technology will be communicated and implemented. Finally, create a plan for documentation, so that everyone can reference the valuable work your marketing ops manager or team is doing.