Why You Need Marketing Operations

Looking for leverage? Need to go faster and further with less? That’s why organizations need marketing operations. Are you wondering if this might be the right path for your business? Then read on.

Listen to Season 3: Episode 5

It’s no secret that the days of members in a marketing team are filled with endless demands on time, attention, and resources. It’s a blur of strategy, creativity, reviews, meetings, responding quickly, understanding the numbers, and servicing other parts of the organization. Oh, and email…so much email. On top of all that, priorities can shift quickly. And yet there are still numbers to hit, leads to generate, campaigns to launch and, oh yeah, emails to respond to.

The Pitfalls of Lack of Marketing Operations

Inefficient operations steal critical resources and burden skilled staff with, let’s face it, stupid shit. The highest and best return on our efforts is a result of everyone on the team staying in their zone of genius. It’s the goal, and it isn’t always practical. Each role has a bit of project management that has to happen and there needs to be communication and engagement with other departments. But the more we can keep people in their lane and doing the things they are best at, the better our overall results.

The transformative part of properly employing marketing operations is that the gains of each process that is improved is multiplied as it affects other processes. This results in exponential gains of effectiveness, efficiency, and impact.

Why You Need Marketing Operations

Marketing operations allows teams to shift the work so the right resources are focused in the right places, which accelerates progress, impact, and results. Instead of pushing the race car, we have functioning tires aired up and fuel in the tank so we can actually race the car. The purpose of identifying, defining, and servicing marketing operations roles is to

• accelerate the work
• drive more visibility of internal efforts and external results
• control what’s going on
• increase the ability to be nimble
• make intelligent decisions on the fly

Marketing operations not only grease the internal workings of a team, keeping people doing what they’re best at, but it also surfaces the information needed to gain insights and make better decisions. This happens because there is visibility and availability of overall metrics. Marketing operations ensures metrics are being collected and presented in a way that is easy to consume.

Is This the Right Solution for Your Business?

To determine if you need marketing operations, identify the tensions in your current marketing execution. We’d all love to be firing on all cylinders all the time, but that’s not realistic. However, every team is all too familiar with the usual suspects of breakdown. Where are those in your team? Once you identify where the tensions are, you can determine if those can be resolved with internal resources or if it’s time to get an external marketing operations resource.

The other challenge with handling this internally is that typically the marketing team is already maxed out. There’s no room for one more thing. Because of this, many teams benefit from having an external marketing operations resource come in to assess the tensions, understand the capabilities, examine the capacity, and recommend a course of action to begin implementing marketing operations so that the team can experience more effective ways of working, find more efficiencies, and free up their cycles.

The Benefits of Implementing Marketing Operations

The payoff when you need marketing operations is that teams get to spend more resources on strategy, big-picture thinking, and creativity. They also get more data to fuel that strategy, creativity, and big-picture thinking. Plus, there’s more mental space to dedicate to the thinking. And then they can apply that to a more well-oiled machine, built for the race that they’re trying to run.

Continuing to burden existing teams with demands that are outside their areas of expertise leads to burnout. We get lower quality and results from marketing because nobody has the bandwidth for the creative thinking it takes to compete and win in the modern marketplace. Avoid the burnout and languishing by supporting your organization when you need marketing operations.

Need Help?

Now that you know why you might need marketing operations, in the next episode, get the lowdown on the common symptoms teams experience when they don’t have the right marketing operations resources.

And if you’re not sure where to start with improved efficiency for your marketing team, we’re here to help. It can be as simple as assembling information so tasks can be delegated and completed faster. I’ve created the Website Quick Reference template to help teams like yours pull together the technical details for your website to avoid delays and whoopsies when dealing with the website. Grab your free template today!