The Importance of Strong Marketing Foundations

Over the last 5 years businesses have started to understand that having somebody dedicated to building and improving marketing foundations can have an incredible impact on the team’s success. “Marketing operations” is the term used freely across global corporations for these responsibilities, but the importance is only just being realised in the majority of UK businesses, which means we’re set for an exciting 5-10 years.

Let’s start with the basics, what is marketing operations?

Marketing operations, marketing ops, markops, or MOPs is a team that’s responsible for marketing’s data, processes, people and technology. It builds the foundations of success for any marketing team and then optimises them, constantly.

If you think of any business interaction with a brand, there will be operations involved (not necessarily marketing) but, the logic of why operations exist is to make someone’s life easier - so why would that not apply to marketing? Here’s a very simple example:

Interaction: A customer requests a demo and pricing for a product.

Operations: 

• The request is sent directly to an inbound sales team [process].

• A salesperson adds it to their list of requests [people + process].

• The salesperson uses a system to check the customer’s details against activity and company information such as size and turnover [technology + data].

• The salesperson responds to the request and sends a selection of times to talk [technology].

• A consultant is identified, alerted to the request, and invited to the call [people + process].

This example could become incredibly detailed as you start asking “how” questions. 

• How is a request identified?

• How is it sent directly to the team - automations?

• How is the company data connected with the CRM?

• How does the salesperson know which consultant to engage?

All of these questions can - and should - be answered through the operational process.

Here are the four core ways you build strong foundations within marketing:

Data

All marketing data should be centrally managed by the marketing operations team. This means making sure CRM data is up-to-date, usable and ready for use elsewhere. If a team member asks for segmentation, data or reporting then it should go through this team for consistency. Data tracking, attribution and reporting all sits under this data pot. 

Usually marketing won’t be the data owner for the business, there will be a master data team. It’s important that the marketing operations team work closely with any other teams where there’s a data crossover or a requirement to understand definitions, that typically means sales, customer, and revenue operations.

If you build your data foundations correctly you shouldn’t have any issues answering the following questions:

• What’s our ROI?

• Which accounts are digitally engaged?

• Which channels drive direct and indirect conversions?

• How many individuals are in the middle of the funnel/showing buyer intent?

• How many individuals do we have in x industry with y job title and z activity?

• Where are the opportunities for cross/up sell?

Processes

A strong understanding and curiosity of how people are engaging with marketing internally and externally is so important. This team should be always thinking about improvements and hypotheses to test and trial. Getting some basic processes in place that makes it easy for the customer/client and your internal stakeholders to get the information they need quickly and accurately will have a direct impact on the success of marketing overall. 

To start, here’s some questions or curiosities that should be asked and solved for regularly:

• Are customers getting a response quick enough? How can we make it faster?

• Are queries going to the right people first time? How can we get them there? 

• Can sales qualify quickly and effectively? How can we send more relevant information?

• Are we prioritising the right work? How can we automate requests?

• Are people finding the right info? How do we improve the website conversion rate?

• Are we driving quality over quantity? How do we counter a reduction in lead conversion? 

Questions like these, curiosity, and any process also needs to reduce admin for everyone involved. If the new process makes it twice as difficult for the end user (whether internal or external) then it’s time to go back to the drawing board. Efficiency and effectiveness is what marketing operations should be striving for through processes.

Technology

Making sure you’ve got the right technology in place can support strong growth, if used properly. Don’t fall into the trap of buying anything and everything, but equally, don’t favour investment in activity if you haven’t got the technology to know what’s happening or what to do with leads. This is a delicate balancing act so make sure there’s someone on your team who understands what you have, what your opportunities are, and what else is available. With the right tech you should be able to:

• Integrate your marketing technology and processes.

• Automatically share data with other business technologies.

• Report on online and offline activities.

• Automate manual activities.

• Build enhanced and sophisticated campaigns.

People

We’re not talking about the management or hiring and firing, we’re talking about the team’s capabilities, knowledge and overall resourcing. The marketing operations team will make sure that the wider team is skilled with the technology and they understand how to get the best out of the tools they have. Understanding who to engage with, what they need in terms of support and how to make the wider teams’ lives easier is also part of the role of marketing operations. Building relationships and strong stakeholder management will win a lot of favours across the business.

Marketing operations is usually responsible for budget management and how this is split across the team and its needs. Their job is to make sure there’s enough for technology as well as campaign activities. They should remain agnostic and make decisions based on return, performance, and goal/business requirements.

So how do you build strong foundations?

Unsurprisingly, a lot of businesses who have experienced rapid growth, or have stagnated and need to eek out that little bit more, don’t have great foundations. They’ve been busy focusing on other things but, at some point, that’s going to catch up.

The absolute basics your marketing operations team should be supporting is the ability to introduce reporting and attribution. Being able to tell the wider business the impact of your activities will open a lot of doors - potentially even budget and headcount related. 

Whoever manages your operations, needs three things: strategic mindset, curiosity and incredible project management skills. 

Not got the skills in-house? Send us a message and we can chat through what you need and see if we can help.