Marketing operations is for sure not the sexiest part of marketing, but it is becoming the most important one. With businesses unable to keep pace with evolving consumer behavior and the marketing landscape, the big question is how to put skilled people, efficient processes, and supportive technology in a position to enable brands to not just connect with customers but also shape their interactions.
A recent study from McKinsey&Company shows that marketing operations provide a 15% to 25% improvement in marketing effectiveness, as measured by return on investment and customer-engagement metrics. And all this while “84% of marketers do not have a formal content strategy or distribution process to feed their growing bevy of marketing channels, and they lack any kind of formally managed content supply chain”, shows another study developed by Association of National Advertisers (ANA) after a survey called “Marketing’s moment: Leading the disruption“. Despite this, content budgets continue to increase while the marketing operations departments are just a dream for many CMOs.
The biggest problem of such businesses is that there is no unifying strategy, governance, or system to create cohesion, reuse assets, or measure effectiveness across the company’s complex supply chain. And this where marketing operations steps in. Establishing a center-of-excellence function as marketing operations to develop and manage a consistent content operating model across divisions result in transparency, new governance, and improved processes.
Marketing operations can cut the time to generate content, stop the growth in costs and brought new discipline into managing the impact of content. As a result, marketing return on investment can be improved by more than 20%.
OK, it’s cool and helpful to have a marketing operations department, but how can i smoothly introduce it in my business? There is how marketing operations can help your business in #5 steps:
#1 Governance and and process: set protocols for piloting new technology, sharing data across the business and managing internal and external capabilities.
#2 Customer Insights: track and analyze customer behavior; deliver insights to decision makers quickly.
#3 Customer experience: design customer journeys based on insights; integrate phases and functions to deliver great experience
#4: Key performance indicators and measurement: continually track and manage marketing program; adapt based on feedback
#5: Marketing technology and infrastructure: employ flexible system, working with large platforms and ecosystem of evolving point solutions.
It’s sad but true: marketing operations has traditionally been overshadowed by sexier marketing tactics. Yet as consumers become increasingly empowered and sophisticated in the way they make purchasing decisions, it’s never been more important to use data to map customers’ DNA, understand exactly what they want, and then take those insights to develop and deliver a superior (and flawless) customer experience. As outcomes go, we think that’s pretty sexy indeed.
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