How to Digitally Transform Your Marketing Operations

Marketing operations teams are responsible for keeping the marketing engine running. They help build and support marketing reporting, ongoing nurture campaigns, lead scoring and routing, and more. Marketing operations goals should be tailored around email marketing and nurture, testing, procedures, and more. Your marketing team will only perform well if you have solid marketing operations in place. In this article, you’ll find the most useful expert tips on implementing marketing operations to improve your company’s overall marketing effectiveness. We’ll cover how you can use marketing operations to analyze and improve upon your current marketing strategy.

Essential Steps in Digitally Transforming Your Marketing Operations and Your Business

Learning about and focusing on improving marketing operations is becoming more critical for digital marketing teams trying to get ahead. Understanding your customers, implementing customer data properly, and measuring campaign performance are all key steps in building out your marketing ops.In addition, marketing ops focuses on managing the technologies that the marketing team purchases and measuring marketing effectiveness across the board. It’s not just your marketing techniques, but rather, it’s what goes on behind the scenes to make sure your campaigns reach their goals.

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No one knows successful marketing operations better than the experienced marketers and business owners of today. Here are the essential steps for digitally transforming your marketing operations:

Assess the Company's Capabilities

Firstly, you need to effectively communicate and involve your stakeholder(s) when trying to create your marketing operations strategy. By doing so, you can better align the team and work toward solving high-level needs and priorities that may not be explicitly clear beforehand. This is where the importance of internal service level agreements (SLAs) comes in. These contracts establish a set of deliverables to another party that sets clear expectations and mitigates issues that may arise.

For instance, key stakeholders might want to make email marketing a more valuable process. The marketing ops team would then be responsible for the processes and systems that support this endeavor, ensuring that:

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The organization has effective email marketing technology

The marketing team is enabled to send emails and create improved content offers

The sales team is enabled and empowered to source quality leads

All parties have what they need and are communicating effectively during each step of the process

Identify your Goals

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As you set up your content marketing goals, it's great to build them around initiatives such as:

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Implementation of marketing platforms

Landing page testing and optimization

Creation of documentation and procedures

Implementation of lead scoring

Driving efficiencies and improvements toward revenue goals

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With your metrics identified, the next step in defining a marketing ops strategy is outlining significant SMART goals. This format is important because it gives your team a better sense of direction and organization in strategy execution.

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An example of an effective SMART goal is, "We will increase total clicks from email by 25% in one year." because it's:

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Specific: It's not a broad goal; it's focused on email marketing.

Measurable: It can be measured by a concrete metric (total clicks).

Attainable: It's possible to see this level of change in the business.

Realistic: The team is capable of working toward 25% of improvement.

Time-bound: This goal has a set duration of one year.

Understand Your Customers

One issue with marketing, especially digital, is the noise. There are so many companies saying the exact same thing, and companies don't really do the proper research to figure out who they are, what their message is, who needs to hear that message, and how to get that message out.

Start from the top down. Take the time to explore your analytics and the data, interview your customers, pay attention to social media conversations & get involved, then create content that aligns your goals with your audience's goals, speak to your audience in a unique way, and constantly review & tweak.

The vast majority of the time, people make bad marketing decisions because they don't have the right information about their target audience. To remedy that, it's important to tie your CRM to your email marketing, which ties web traffic to the lead generated, so when you're reaching out to someone, you have a complete understanding of them.

Provide A Great Customer Experience

Customer experience refers to how a customer feels about each interaction they have with a company across all touchpoints. Since the marketing team is typically responsible for creating buyer personas, collecting data, and engaging with prospects, it's critical marketing works with sales and service to ensure the entire organization is delivering an exceptional customer experience.

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Delivering experiences that delight customers take a planned, proactive, and holistic strategy that spans the customer journey and lifecycle. A Walker study on customer experience identified personalization, ease, and speed as the critical elements of a winning customer experience. Customer experience does not stop after the sale — in fact, some of the most powerful opportunities to create loyalty and drive repurchasing and referrals are experiences with service and support after the sale is made.

What happens when customers have a bad experience? They stop doing business with a company. And a souring of the customer experience can take place at any point, which is why getting the consumer journey right requires getting everything right. Meeting customer expectations calls for mapping out each of the steps that define the entire customer experience, highlighting not only the technologies and processes needed to enable a smooth journey but also the various functions across the organization that must coordinate to deliver it.

Marketing, sales, support, service, and operations play key roles in many customer journeys, of course. But there are other functions that are critical as well, such as order management and fulfillment. Those are not typically top of mind for marketers, but the experiences enabled by these back-end systems are instrumental to the way a customer perceives a brand's ability to deliver on expectations. Delivering omnichannel customer experiences requires marketing technology that can automate processes, personalize interactions, and coordinate actions.

Select the Right Technology

Marketing Operations is expected to manage the multiple marketing automation platforms, such as the website, eCommerce solution, review and approval software, content management system, plus the integration with related technologies. They’ll also oversee the technology for AdWords, product analytics, A/B testing, social media, and ABM marketing to ensure alignment across the business. And then there’s always going to be new marketing technology. So the marketing ops team will always be involved in the evaluation and selection of new software to streamline processes and improve performance across departments.

Business Process Management

As companies age, workflows can develop inefficiencies, and processes may suffer from stagnation and isolation. These workflows can be anything from the way mail is sorted to how interactions between salespeople and customers are managed. Even small issues can have ramifications on operations throughout the company. Business process management (BPM) is a way of improving these processes with high-level enterprise goals in mind. It melds observation, mapping, strategy, technology, and analysis into a cohesive solution that helps the company operate more effectively across multiple levels.

BPM is a dedicated strategy for improving workflows and processes throughout an organization. It isn’t haphazard, with one business unit improving a process in isolation over here while a completely separate one works on its own operations over there. BPM specifically aims to unify the optimization of company workflows because every function affects most, if not all, of the others.

Understand, though, that in the wild, the definition of business process management tools can be rather broad. That’s why it’s important to find a solution customizable to your specific BPM strategy. This starts by surveying the landscape, but with a deep understanding of the pain points you need to solve. Because business environments and realities change so quickly, every unit in the organization must be prepared to adapt and respond, even in the face of uncertainty. By practicing BPM, you can empower your teams to work more efficiently in support of each other and for the benefit of the organization as a whole.

‍Understanding the definition of business process management is a prerequisite to implementation. Business process management software — also known as BPMS, BPM software, or even BPM suite — is a solution designed to help businesses understand, monitor, and automate their business processes and execute their robust BPM strategy. Whether it’s understanding workflows, seeing the customer acquisition cycle, automating mundane processes, or incorporating artificial intelligence or chatbots, business process management software can provide holistic support.

Performance Metrics and Tracking

The last step in strategizing is to identify how the team would measure the success of the project. When you figure out a measurable metric, you'll be able to keep track of the strategy's success as your team works through the plan. The metric will remind your team of the goal you want to accomplish and what stakeholders want to see as a result of your plan.

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In this example, the team might conclude, "Click-through rate and the total number of clicks are how we want to measure the value that email marketing brings to the business. We will calculate the click-through rate by dividing the number of clicks in a month by the number of unique email recipient impressions in a month and multiplying it by 100 for the percentage."

You’ll need to monitor metrics, depending on your campaign, and they will vary from one campaign to the next. Ensure you identify the appropriate metrics for each campaign and make sure to track them diligently over time. Some examples of various campaigns could include:

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Email marketing

Social media

Content marketing

Offline marketing

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With so much data out there and so many KPIs to track, it’s easy to get distracted and become confused. The most effective marketing operations professionals are able to create custom dashboards using sophisticated reporting tools. These dashboards help them work as efficiently and effectively as possible.

Role of a Marketing Operations Strategy

Marketing ops can come up with ways to increase customer satisfaction and ease the job of marketers. Their strategies make marketing activities and duties accessible to all and, because of that, are an essential part of a business. Now you have a better understanding of how Marketing Operations improves the processes and systems in their department and provides all-round visibility to other parts of the business.

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If you're looking for help to improve your marketing operations, such as the business processes, technology, and strategy, we're here to help. Universal Creative Solutions offers marketing consulting to help you set up your marketing operations team and strategy to help your marketing team improve their productivity and effectiveness. Schedule a consultation call with us and learn more about how we can improve your existing marketing operations strategy.