Today's role is becoming more and more complex due to the evolving dynamics of digital marketing. This makes it necessary for the marketing team to coordinate with multiple channels and run integrated campaigns for both online and offline modes. There may also be the case of increased dependency on external partners and lack of the latest management tools, which can prove to be a roadblock in streamlining all marketing resources into a single productive output.

Source: McNairyCountySchools

This problem can be successfully tackled by efficient marketing operations management, which would focus on optimizing the planning and management processes.  

Why is marketing operations important?

In the race to outwit your competitor, it is essential to learn, focus, and improve marketing operations to the core. Understanding buyers, implementing data, and measuring campaigns are vital components of effective marketing operation management.

Marketing operation focuses on saving time and reducing waste, thus making this process successful. If you are in a fix as to what strategies and steps to take for successful marketing operations, consider the below-mentioned points for identifying, formulating, and implementing sound practices.

Source: Gartner

8 Steps for a better marketing operations management

Streamlining workflow across departments 

The first step is to create goals for marketing campaigns and chalking out actions that will directly impact such goals. This calls for establishing a workflow across the whole organisation. Such a project workflow should connect marketing with the rest of the organization. Doing so would imbibe a practice of understanding between the rest of the organization and how projects are to be managed and delivered. 

Once you have successfully streamlined workflow, the next step is to assign tasks to teams, set deadlines, follow-up, and regularly monitor each department's progress. It is important to define individual roles within the organization to prevent over wrapping and wastage of time and resources. Once everybody in the organization is in sync with their responsibilities and accountability, the whole team can work towards reaching their goals. It is also important to define if there would be a centralised decision-making authority or if each team can have the flexibility to make decisions. 

Source: Content Marketing Institute

Keep the desired target audience in mind

One of the most important aspects of marketing operation management is understanding your brand audience right down to their bones. As a business in today's hyper-competitive market, you need to analyze who you are, what’s your message, who needs to hear the message, and how that message should be disseminated. And once you have successfully identified all this, you need to figure out how your message is unique or different from that of your competitors. 

To achieve this, you need to explore all your analytics and data, which can be created from customer interviews, questionnaires, surveys, social media conversations, and trends, etc. Once the data is collected, your marketing team should break them down and create advertising content that aligns with the brand values, buyer's needs, and appeals to your audience in a unique way. 

Source: Sproutsocial

Data-driven marketing allows you to measure performance and adjust strategies continuously to reach marketing goals.

Prioritize content development

Not only is there a need to develop a content strategy, but it is equally pivotal to map out the content supply chain; or sources from where content is derived. In this regard, some key indicators include ways to create a content, internal or external source of content, and how to get that information out on the market to your buyers. 

Establish key marketing metrics

Don't just mark your metrics around lead generation and sales; there are many more metrics to measure your ad campaigns' market effectiveness. Marketing operation management seeks to enforce 4-5 key metrics that serve as a benchmark for a business's market performance. 

Source: Datapine

It also allows making data-driven decisions to measure performance continuously and adjust strategy accordingly. Your marketing department has to chip in as a whole for defining performance indicators that closely align with the sales and business strategies of the brand. One way to make data-driven marketing is to leverage automation tools and automate reports for actions. 

Identify which campaigns are working

One of the main focuses of marketing operations is identifying which campaigns are yielding the desired ROIs and which ones are not performing as per expectations. A marketing operations manager then looks to eliminate practices that are leading to such campaigns underperforming. If the campaign is a dud per se, then the whole campaign can be scraped off to develop an upgraded strategy by eliminating the causes of failures. 

One way to achieve this is to implement the Lean methodology by developing hypotheses during the planning stage and prioritizing them based on expected results. The hypotheses are then tested individually to get data-driven feedback, which will help you to segregate high-yielding marketing campaigns and disappointing ones. 

Leverage the latest marketing techniques

Initiating new programs and campaigns is another key component of marketing operations management. It should be the overall marketing team's ethos to come together to discuss new ideas, apply and measure them effectively. This practice would upend your revenue curve as your business would start to gain a competitive advantage by leveraging the latest marketing tools and techniques, such as marketing analytics tools. 

Source: SproutSocial

Additionally, you may also conduct annual reviews of the existing software technologies in your organization for filtering out the old, redundant tools that no longer retain their efficiency due to being outdated in the market. 

Customer data management

Getting customer data in order, making it real-time, and managing it at the attribute level is necessary to create a centralized marketing profile at the customer level and use it to drive marketing campaigns. This causes the marketing team to control the important profiles in a product and achieve a single, efficient view of the organization's marketing activities. 

Marketing teams should also look to align customer insights and regular interactions with all departments within the organization that deals with customer technology. Developing a holistic view of consumer interests paves the way for a robust marketing operations strategy. 

Source: Smart Insights

Long-term marketing planning

Planning for marketing campaigns generally lasts an entire year, as brands ideate what marketing techniques can help their business throughout the year. However, they can go a step ahead by planning an actionable strategy for the next 5 years (say). This clarity in short-term and long-term planning by the organization would ensure that all employees and departments are aligned in their objectives, strategies, methodologies, and processes with the brand identity and value. 

Conclusion

Marketing operations management is all about analysis, identification, refinement, and execution. It is not a one-dimensional discipline with adherence to a single line of philosophy; it is an interwoven field that requires coordination with the whole organization from top to bottom. In lieu of this, communication across teams is eminent to identify marketing weaknesses and strengths.

Marketing operations also adopts a more centralized approach to decision-making and management to grant more freedom to the marketing managers. This enables them to manage their teams and activities more strategically and creatively for acting upon the strategies formulated by the organization's top marketing brass. Marketing operations management can be effectively performed by defining goals and monitoring performance with a data-driven approach.

Marketing operations grant a more creative playfield to the organization's marketing department to try and test different phenomena before understanding what works best for the business for both the short-term and long.