Marketing operations, a subject that very recently garnered its much-deserved attention, is a hot topic among businesses. Living in this age of technology which is driven by data, every player in the market is trying to harness new software and tools and have an insight into what the buyers actually need. 

The need for marketing operations arose when organizations felt the need to improve their campaign results in this time of hyper-competition. And where there is a demand, there is supply! 

The question though remains, is there a need for marketing operations? If yes, what is the role of marketing operations?

Source: Dimple Ahuja Blog

What is marketing operations? 

In short, marketing operations focus on the backend of marketing, getting everything right so that the campaigns run smoothly and successfully. 

Marketing operations include: 

• Development and implementation of key marketing processes
• Tools and skills to drive marketing performance which helps in the growth of the business
• Strategic planning and decision-making related to consumers, market conditions, products/services, investments, etc. based on actual consumer data. 

Role of marketing operations

The role of the marketing operations director includes evaluating marketing campaigns, strategic planning, identifying the latest marketing technologies, and optimizing the overall marketing process. 

The role of marketing operations includes:

• Marketing performance measurement
• Campaign analysis
• Strategic planning
• Identifying, evaluating, and implementing useful marketing technologies
• Financial governance of marketing 
• Data management
• Development and documentation of workflow process
• Organization benchmarking
• Predictive modeling of markets, buyer behavior, competitive insights, and analytics
• Project management
• Talent/Skill development

Marketing operations strategies

In the world of marketing, the only thing that defines the outcome of marketing campaigns is understanding consumer behavior and analyzing consumer data. To counter this by strategic decisions is the role of marketing operations. 

Although the future of most business processes is bound to be automated, including marketing, the key ingredient for success is identifying patterns, behavior, and trends, and applying predictive modeling while crunching through piles of data. 

Successful marketing analysts use data-driven insights to back up marketing decisions for customer engagements and relationships. In a crux, the role of marketing operations is to amalgamate processes, metrics, and technology to complement the marketing department of the organization. 

Source: G2

Some key marketing operations organizational roles include:

• Director of marketing operations
• Marketing Operation specialists
• Marketing Operations Associate
• Special events and marketing programmer
• Marketing administrative assistant

For more info on marketing operation success, the marketing department has to adhere to some essential guidelines which could prove to be the difference for highly successful marketing campaigns. 

How to create marketing operations strategies?

Marketing operations strategies focus on the main areas of the marketing department that need to be solved. These include identifying and resolving the needs of customers, stakeholders, and employees within the organization. 

• What is the aim of your operations strategy that you need to accomplish for your stakeholders?
• Determine the actionable step-by-step plan to accomplish that goal
• Identify a metric to measure and evaluate progress
• Encourage team participation to refine processes
• Assigning specific tasks to team members to optimize organizational performance 

Popular marketing operation tools

As it grew in popularity, marketing operations oversaw a rise in marketing ops tools to make life easier for marketers digitally. Choosing the right marketing tool is a task not easily done, with thousands of tools out there in the online realm promising varying results, conveniences, and outreach. 

Selecting the right tool depends on the objective of the marketing team and how they want to fulfil them using technology. 

However, some tools become more popular than others as they offer niche solutions to key marketing operations. Here are a few popular software tools for marketing operations:

Hubspot

Hubspot analyzes and optimizes landing pages and forms to collect relevant consumer data and channel them into appropriate action tasks. 

Kissmetrics

Kissmetrics is a customer engagement automation tool that can be used to build customer funnels and categorize your website traffic into groups depending on their actions and triggers. This helps businesses to engage potential customers at one site.

Unbounce

Unbounce uses A/B testing to identify features, web elements, and marketing messages which are meant to invoke an action or response from the end users or consumers. 

Clicktale

Clicktale analyzes customer actions while surfing websites like clicks and scrolls. It also helps businesses to identify which sections of the website users surf the most and which ones are least visited.

SEM rush

Using SEM rush, marketing personnel can identify organic keywords, their ranking, and search volume to drive organic traffic to your website. 

Marketing Operations management

The prime role of marketing operations is to improve the efficiency of the whole marketing process and management of the marketing operations team. 

The marketing operations manager strives to constantly improve marketing campaigns and strategize content planning and campaign analysis using tools and software to handle marketing and business processes. 

Source: Maurizziopittau

Marketing operations decide how to strategize and implement marketing processes and campaigns, and marketing operation management decides how to achieve it. 

Future of marketing operations

The role of marketing operations is still at a nascent stage when considering how the practice can improve in the future. More and more businesses are focusing on marketing operations to improve their effectiveness and efficiency. 

Marketing operations revolve around one single goal: creating value-based relationships with customers, employees, and clients. This focus is bound to improve with the advent of newer technologies and tools that can help to streamline marketing objectives and automate marketing campaigns. Marketing operations also leverage different analytical tools to improve their campaigns. 

As per the importance and need for such strategies and their implementation, marketing operations are bound to grow as the core focus of top marketing professionals within the organization. 

Source: Accenture

The ever-evolving role of marketing operations

The role of marketing operations is continuously evolving, leveraging new skills, technologies, and know-how to create strategies that can modify the marketing process. Marketing operations now occupy a central role in the overall marketing discipline as the prime factor that can streamline marketing processes, appeal to the user base, drive conversions, and build the best industry practices for marketing campaigns.

As more and more businesses look to increase the use of predictive analytics in marketing, marketing operations is the one area where data-driven, analytical decisions can pave the way for better ROIs in marketing campaigns.