Five Key Areas for Marketing Operations to Tackle

Best-in-class marketing operations develop a performance measurement process that cascades from corporate objectives to marketing objectives to marketing programs. In 2007, Marketing Operations Partners conducted a benchmarking study, "Journey to Marketing Operations Maturity," which revealed three priorities for the Marketing Operation organization: calculating ROI based on Marketing and demonstration of value, balancing marketing strategy with tactics, and tying marketing success to the goals of other groups. The marketing operations function enables the marketing organization to operate more like a business, with formalized processes, infrastructure, and reporting.

 

At a minimum the marketing operation function should:

 

• Drive the processes for budgeting and investment decisions and more effective strategic planning.
• Lead the charge for marketing performance measurement processes.
• Identify and implement the required infrastructure to maintain the consistent implementation of processes. 

 

As marketing operations evolve and mature, best practices will begin to emerge. For those of you on the journey or just beginning we recommend your marketing operations organization at least tackle the following:

 

1. Collaborative and transparent planning processes to ensure alignment between marketing plans and business outcomes.
2. Increased visibility and accountability in the budgeting process and expenditure tracking that ensure alignment between investments and impact.
3. Detailed project plans that link tasks to deliverables to outcomes and define the workflow for the approval process for the deliverables to improve predictability, on-time deliverability, and cost management. 
4. Systems for storing and easily searching marketing assets along with guidelines outlining usage parameters and templates that enable field marketing, sales and distribution partners to localize and customize any content for specific geographies, customer segments and customers that promote sharing and reuse and ensure that sales and field organizations can find and use these assets, resulting in better return on investment.
5. Development and deployment of dashboards that enable marketing organization to gain instant visibility into key outcome-based, operational and activity metrics.