Martech is great, but a lack of time and resources to use these technologies in the optimum way is a common challenge, but why is it important to use marketing operations in the first place? Editor for B2B Marketing David Rowlands sat down with Karla Wentworth, Propolis Hive Expert in Marketing Operations, to find out.
DR: In our Marketing Operations and Process Hive report, which is only available to members of Propolis, we looked at just why it’s so important to have someone responsible for marketing operations in the company. From a personal point of view, why is marketing operations so important? What challenges can it help solve?
KW: Let me start by giving you the football analogy I’ve used for some time. In a football team there are 11 players, all performing very different roles. If your football team was full of strikers you’d be pretty ineffective at one end of the pitch and maximising that effectiveness is the sweet spot that Marketing Operations fits right in to. For your striker to score a goal, you need to have the support of a faultless goalkeeper to keep your own goal line safe, a solid defence to protect every inch of your half and a forward-thinking midfield who can build a strategic charge forward alongside your talented strikers and release them to complete their purpose. Now if you’re a striker in life, the last place you want to be is in goal. And whilst you may have practised the principles and must occasionally put the goalkeeper gloves on, you’ll always want to be making the dashes up front and smashing balls into the back of the net and that’s where your focus will remain. There are two very distinct types of people in the marketing world; the dreamers and the doers. The dreamers are people that are thought of when you say you work in marketing. Creative strategists who have their finger on the pulse of what’s happening out there and know just the right places to take the risks. They are your strikers. And then there are doers. Doers are turned on by process. Often found planning, organising and obsessively analysing data, they see the value in automation, efficiently and technology. They are your goalkeeper and defence. It’s really important to understand that the skill sets are very different but equally important – like scoring or saving goals.
DR: Why do you think then that more organisations don’t have a marketing operations person or department? Is it just a case of struggling to justify the expenditure of more people on the payroll? Or is there more to it than that?
KW: There are a few reasons, some payroll, headcount and the usual business budget restraints. But mostly it’s about lack of experience, understanding and ultimately the definition of Marketing Operations that is not 100% written just yet. I would say a majority of ‘Marketeers’ think that the Ops work is part of the generic marketing role and in some cases it has to be. Small or start-up business situation does not often afford the ability for you to be a specialist in anything. There are Marketing Operations colleagues out there that don’t even know that’s what they are doing. And there are some CMO’s who are so focussed on sales targets that they front load the Marketing with high performing marketers who then dilute themselves trying to get and analyse their own data, use multiple automation tools, manage suppliers and much more. Every business has its own story, but the job of improving this sits squarely with that CMO or leader. They have the tools and authority to educate the business and the team, to apply budget in smart places and to lobby for the benefits good MOps talent brings.
DR: For anyone listening who doesn’t use marketing operations, but wants to, what are the first steps they should make?
KW: Education is the first step. Understand what MOps talent looks like and how it can help your business and team. Then, reflect on what you currently have. Your marketing team WILL be performing operations roles. And that means they’re not scoring the goals you want them too because they’re busy defending. Document the duties of your team and you’ll start to see who spends more time on MOps and frankly, who shouldn’t. If you can, I would highly recommend you get some help from MOps transformation experts. Transforming your busy marketing department isn’t easy and you could end up making it worse if you’re not clear on how to make your team function like and you also need to set your goals and be sure you see the benefits you want.
DR: And for those who are a bit further along the journey – i.e. they’ve introduced marketing operations, but don’t know how to use it to its full potential – what steps can they take? How do they continue to optimise and improve?
KW: Well you’re on the right track and I would stress, keep you focus. Marketing teams are always busy and you need to realise and be able to show the benefits, so don’t miss your chances to gather that data. And also, again, get some help from experienced MOps experts to be really sure you can visualize, document and deliver the benefits you’re looking for. Even if that is a conversation or connection to the experts in the Hive or other channels. Their experiences will really help to improve your direction.
DR: How do you think Covid has affected marketers’ approach to marketing operations? For instance, are you finding that, with marketers relying more heavily on digital, that the need for marketing operations is becoming more prevalent?
KW: Digital has been growing exponentially for the last couple of decades. There now over 8 thousand marketing tools to use and it’s really hard to keep up with all the new tech coming on board. However, during Covid, the entire technical landscape has been forced to make huge progress, pushing functionality improvements much faster than a typical software roadmap normally would. And businesses have pivoted to a digital existence, creating new products or moving their services to digital journeys. It’s been quite and incredible journey for technology and for marketing operations on the whole as automation and tools are now prominently used to market within almost every business far and wide. But with more tools comes more siloed processes, disconnected data journeys and potentially a whole lot more risk. So now more than ever, get your Marketing Operations right or it can really impact your resources and your customers down the line.
DR: At our upcoming event, B2B Marketing Ignite USA, we’ve got a stream dedicated to marketing operations and technology. One of the sessions under this stream will be by Darrell Alfonso, who’s the global marketing operations manager at Amazon Web Services. In his session, Darrell is going to ask ‘who is our customer?’ and ‘what can we build to best serve them?’ And that’s just a small snippet of what he’s going to discuss, I hasten to add! From your own point of view though, how can marketing operations help serve the customer? At a first glance, marketing operations feels a little insular, but is it actually more customer focused than that?
KW: Darrell is a brilliant MOps representative and I’m looking forward to his contribution. I have spent many years walking customers through ‘the buyer’s journey’ before building or marketing anything. It’s a bit like requirements gathering on your customers behalf. Your products and services are not for you, they are for your customer and if you don’t understand what they are thinking and feeling that leads them to you, you will never truly tap into the full sales potential. This is beyond the typical ‘buyers persona’, although that’s key as well, you need to really understand who you are building your products for and the tech stack that supports the end to end customer journey, the way THEY want it. Tech is something MOps people end up delivering but the process to get there is the important part and it all starts with the customer.
DR: How do you see marketing operations evolving over the next five years or so? Is it only going to get more important as the tech stack grows?
KW: If you document the tasks of your marketing team, you will probably see that 80% of a typical marketing team’s work will fall under Marketing Operations activities. If you don’t have real specialists performing the right roles, that’s 80% of your resource that you could do better with. And as a business leader, that’s a golden opportunity to make improvement. I see the balance of marketing shifting significantly to really define that 80/20 split and hopefully some really amazing case studies of how operations free strategic marketers to do what they are best at – scoring more goals.
You can get in touch with Karla on Twitter @karlawentworth
Want to learn more about marketing operations? Find out more at our community hub, Propolis, where you can find out more about strategy and processes, martech, marketing automation and CRM: www.b2bmarketing.net/en-gb/propolis-homepage
