Marketing operations are the back-office processes that support and optimize marketing teams and campaigns. These processes are less glamorous than the award-winning television ads or interactive digital ads that your company produces, but they’re essential to help marketers reach their goals in business.
The term “marketing operations” is often used to describe the process of creating and maintaining marketing assets like collateral, data management and reporting as well as linking all of them to the other aspects of the business. It can also cover a greater scope, for example, project management and data analytics as well as IT support and other administrative tasks.
Modern marketing teams work across a variety of disciplines, including sales, design and development. This means that a lot of different systems and processes have to be linked to ensure marketing teams are delivering relevant content at the right time to achieve the business objectives.
The job requires a significant amount of establishing and optimizing the marketing tech stacks in order to reduce complexity and help the team reach their goals more quickly. The typical tasks include managing marketing automation solutions, evaluation and approval platforms such as a content management system, AdWords technology and a CRM solution.
Having clear, well-defined procedures in place helps marketing teams to carry out their tasks more efficiently. They can share their marketing strategies with internal participants and gives everyone a clear understanding of what is expected from them. Marketing teams can set SMART goals, which are Specific, Measurable, Attainable and Realistic Time-bound (SMART), so they can design realistic timelines for campaigns and projects.