Marketing Operations
What is Marketing Operations?
The term “marketing operations” is derived from other business terminology. In business, "operations" is a term that is often used in conjunction with corporate financials as well as managing all aspects of business to grow profitably. Operations can refer to key functions within a company such as HR, IT, manufacturing, etc. and typically implies a "process focus" on productivity metrics.
In the past decade, several major trends have pushed marketing organizations to strongly consider a "Marketing Operations" function:
Proven results and adoption of technologies for automating other departments such as manufacturing, HR, call centers, and sales.
Proliferation of web technologies such as search marketing, display advertising, website management, and email marketing have enabled significantly more measurement capabilities than previously existed in marketing.
Demand from the executive ranks to measure corporate as well as department performance from dashboards and analytical reports.
Broad adoption of customer relationship management databases furthered the idea of having a single view of the company's interactions with its customers and automating the "front office."
A Definition for "Marketing Operations"
Marketing Operations is the management of analytical and operational activities that enable the marketing department to measure and monitor marketing and advertising budgets, planning, project work, and campaign results while systematically improving effectiveness and efficiency.
Marketing Operations roles have formed alongside the interest of centralizing and standardizing processes and technology across the marketing organization or within independent departments and teams.
The Marketing Operations group focuses on analytical work such as budgeting and planning, project management, execution of repetitive tasks, managing data and systems, and producing dashboards and reports.
While it is uncommon to find a pure division of labor, other "non-operational" areas of the marketing organization continue to focus on performing creative work such as graphic design, video production, advertising, and copywriting.
Marketing Operations may be centralized or decentralized within the marketing organization. Decentralization is common in today's marketing organization - this is due to the heterogeneous nature of work within marketing (e.g. PR is different from blasting emails, creating an annual report, or managing events).
In a decentralized example, a marcom services group may have its own system to manage projects consistently, a web department may manage the website and email technologies, and a direct marketing group manages the contact database.
In a purely centralized marketing operations department, all the technology and process-centric analytical work would be managed by a single team which supports each area of the marketing organization and enables executives to have a cross-department, consistent, and consolidated view of marketing investments and results. Many companies have both centralized and decentralized marketing operations functions in place today.
MarketingCentral - Marketing Operations for Marketing Management
Some form of marketing operations exists in every company - it may be a formal set of processes and technologies or not. Inside every marketing organization and in each marketing department, a large group of people manage budgets, projects, people, and schedules that ultimately produce some marketing asset (e.g. collateral, billboards, or web pages). These projects require both creative and analytical activities and typically make up the largest amount of time the marketing organization spends on work.
MarketingCentral provides on-demand technology to streamline budget, planning, and project activities to improve productivity by 10% to 30% (according to case studies and claims by our customers). Whether teams are working on web projects, direct marketing, advertising, branding, or other areas of marketing, teams who use MarketingCentral can:
Reduce their need to search the inbox for reviews.
Streamline project management work.
Do a better job reporting on the overall status of projects.
Keep tabs on the amount of work they accomplish by region, business-line, quarter, and more.
Over 300 companies are customers of MarketingCentral's marketing operations software. These companies range in size and come from all of industries. Our prospects and customers often find that the business case to implement MarketingCentral makes sense in any economy, and implementations are fast and uncomplicated. If you've never seen a demonstration of how MarketingCentral's capabilities can impact your organization, visit our demo center or contact our sales team today.
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