Marketing leaders can’t rely on intuition and experience to quantify marketing ROI meaningful to financial management, including CFOs.
If your organization struggles to demonstrate marketing ROI, part of the challenge may be a deficiency in marketing operations capability.
A recent B2B Marketing benchmark survey confirms that only 36% of marketing leaders characterize their team’s ability to demonstrate ROI for content marketing initiatives as excellent or very good.
What Is Marketing Operations?
Marketing Operations is the backbone of a marketing team that focuses on optimizing the efficiency and effectiveness of marketing efforts. It involves managing the processes, technology, data, and metrics that support marketing campaigns and programs.
In essence, marketing operations are the backbone of a marketing team, providing the structure and support needed to run successful marketing programs that align with sales goals and prove marketing ROI.
Where Do Marketing Operations Reside?
Many of the skills needed for the function reside in sales operations since the CRM and sales enablement functions align closely with sales operations.
Marketing operations skills are entirely different from traditional marketing skills, and yet they are critical as marketing becomes more operational, metrics oriented, and held accountable for ROI.
We recommend integrating the sales operations and marketing operations functions under one leader based on the following:
- Marketing teams naturally strive to take credit for every sales opportunity, while sales teams pride themselves on generating their own sales opportunities to prove their value. Positioning under one leader harmonizes potential friction and provides a more objective view of marketing ROI, sales operations, and sales enablement impact.
- Marketing and sales operations rely on strong CRM use, adoption, data quality, and reliable processes.
What Are Marketing Operations Responsibilities?
Marketing Operations should be responsible for the following:
1. Planning and executing marketing campaigns: Marketing Operations teams work closely with sales, sales enablement, and sales operations. They develop processes and workflows to ensure smooth campaign execution and optimal lead management.
2. Managing marketing technology: Marketing Operations teams manage the technology supporting marketing campaigns, including tools for email marketing, social media management, advertising, analytics, and more. Marketing automation tools integrate with CRM today, so a strong relationship with sales operations is necessary.
3. Managing data: Marketing Operations teams must ensure that CRM and marketing data are accurate, consistent, and current. They work with sales operations to develop processes to collect, clean, and analyze data and use it to inform marketing and sales strategy and tactics.
4. Measuring marketing effectiveness: Marketing Operations teams use metrics and analytics to measure the effectiveness of marketing campaigns. They develop dashboards and reports that provide insights into campaign performance and use this information to optimize future campaigns.
If your organization does not have a formal marketing operations function, you likely struggle to prove marketing ROI. If you have a marketing operations function and are still working to prove marketing ROI, you may not have the right skill sets within the team or lack alignment with sales operations.