Here’s the thing about: Marketing Operations Red Flags 🚩
Last week was my company’s quarterly Unplug Weekend, so I took the opportunity to step away from everything that I have been working on personally and professionally as it was beginning to feel a little too heavy on my mental capacity. I spent the 4-day weekend with nothing but my books, earbuds, and the beach.
One of the two books I finished over the break was The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win.
The plot is relatively unambiguous and is entirely too compact if the intent is to depict a real company transformation. However, that’s not really the point. The book is intended to convey certain ideas and whether you agree or disagree is irrelevant.
I learned that IT is more than just a department in the company; it is a central competency that supports every department in the company.
This is how I think of Marketing Operations and their relationship with the Marketing organization as a whole. Chaos could quickly ensue without the proper process and tools in place to enable the teams to succeed.
So, What are Marketing Operations (MOPs)?
Marketing operations is a term used to describes the function of the marketing organization including people, process and technology that support marketing strategy and campaign execution. The vision of a marketing operations function is to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of said people, processes, technologies and the data that supports the infrastructure of the marketing organization.
Ineffective marketing operations can stifle the growth of your marketing team and your business.
The thing is:
MOPs focuses on “How” to make your marketing goals possible.
MOPs builds and manages the processes that make your marketing effective and ultimately drive more revenue. This includes the infrastructure that helps you choose appropriate marketing technology and tools as well as creating systems that allow you to gather and understand your customer data from your products and marketing efforts.
I will not mention all the pillars of MOPs because as previously mentioned; it is a central competency that supports your entire marketing org thus, it covers many areas and duties. But, I think there are 3 key areas that we can discuss regarding the impact to your marketing strategy.
When I am working on creating a new marketing strategy, a few questions I typically ask are around the Strategy, Process and, Tools.
In order for your marketing initiatives to be successful, you must have systems and processes in place to effectively execute, launch and report on your campaigns.
Now let’s get into some red flags you should be on the lookout for and why they are important.
Strategy
How do you perform A/B testing and feature splits?
🚩 "We have a homegrown solution."
Why this is a red flag:
If the capability you want to build could be its own company, and it’s not a current or planned core competency of your business, you should probably buy it. Feature flagging and A/B testing is a surprisingly complicated system to operate. I suggest touring LaunchDarkly to understand why you shouldn’t be building this yourself. You wouldn’t propose building your own ESP to send campaigns, would you?
How do you build a tracking plan? What events do you use to measure success?
🚩 "We don't."
Why this is a red flag:
For this question, I will refer you to the previous article, where I talked about the importance of a tracking plan and how you can create one.
How do you trigger potential or existing customer comms based on their activity?
🚩"We don't.”
Why this is a red flag:
You cannot rely solely on manually triggering your campaigns. Event-triggered communications are a part of your lifecycle marketing strategy that lets you send emails, push notifications, in-app messages and SMS messages based on the occurrence of real-time user activity. These events could be a particular account-related change such as when the user updates their email address or billing details or when it is the user’s birthday and you want to send out a special offer.
Process
How do you perform segmentation in your marketing tools?
🚩"Analysts upload a CSV."
Why this is a red flag:
Manual uploads leave a lot of room not only for errors but, even more importantly the potential for your customer’s PII (Personally Identifiable Information) to leak. With the proper data management infrastructure and marketing automation tools in place, you should be able to segment your users within the tools to be able to assign your audience without playing the CSV shuffle or exposing customer data.
How do you measure the success of your lifecycle comms campaigns?
🚩 ”We look at the Opens and Click-through rates of that email”
Why this is a red flag:
The Apple Mail Privacy Protection (MPP) feature launched on September 20, 2021. It anonymizes the open tracking pixel causing us to lose sight into the activity data rendering the Open Rates inaccurate and thus ineffective as performance metrics.
Litmus’s email client market share data shows the Apple Mail client—on iPhone, Mac, and iPad devices—with more than 57% of combined email opens as of July 2022.
While the Open rates are still crucial for monitoring your deliverability rates, it is not a good measurement of your campaign's performance.
Your click-through rates are great for measuring the activities on a per-email basis, but this does not reflect the success of the initiative itself.
What you need is a tracking plan that you can use to set up the goals and conversion metrics of your campaigns beyond the messaging itself.
Tools
How do you deploy your marketing comms?
🚩"It depends. The product, marketing, and customer success team uses different Marketing Automation Platforms."
Why this is a red flag:
With disconnected marketing tools, not only will you not be able to justify the ROI for each tool, you will run the risk of rendering your marketing efforts ineffective due to a lack of transparency and accurate marketing data across the various tools.
MOPs are responsible for supporting standardized processes to use and operate the tools to avoid confusion and duplicity of efforts amongst the teams.
With a silo-operation across the teams, there’s a considerable risk of losing brand tone/voice alignment, campaigns coordination transparency and, lack of communications governance which could cause multiple similar campaigns to deploy to the same audience.
Not to mention the risk of potentially violating the CAN-SPAM law when the users unsubscribe from one MAP/ESP but they will continue to receive comms from a different platform due to the data discrepancies.
How do you correlate spend to user activity?
🚩"Google Analytics."
Why this is a red flag:
Unless you have a truly connected data architecture implementing the Modern Data Stack, you’re almost certainly relying on point-to-point uploads from some backends system or CSV, to get data into Google Analytics to give you only a woefully incomplete or entirely inaccurate view of your customers. Are you making lookalikes by LTV? Are you able to retarget MQLs? Are you winning back your churned users?
Is it possible to make Google Analytics as useful as an agnostic product and marketing analytics platform like Amplitude or Mixpanel? Mostly. Should YOU own the GCLIDS and campaign data that actually contributed to conversions and spend. Without a doubt.
The other thing is:
To reap the benefits of MOPs, here are 4 things you could do to fix the previously mentioned red flags.
Ensure that you establish full transparency and accountability as well as identify your stakeholders’ goals.
When crafting a strategy for your MOPs team, it is crucial to identify your key stakeholders and work with each team to align their objectives and goals.
Audit and optimize your marketing data and identify the best course of action.
Your stakeholder(s) will likely request something that your current marketing infrastructure can’t yet handle. It is up to the MOPs team to understand the limitations and abilities of the current technology available and to collaborate with the teams you support to create the best course of action for implementing a new tool or process.
Identify your marketing tech stack/infrastructure and invest in tools that will streamline and connect your marketing teams.
Enumerate and visualize (build a Data Flow Diagram ) all of your current marketing tools and techniques that your company is using to collect and track your customer data and marketing results. Then, determine if there are any additional tools required to function efficiently.
Monitor and report on success metrics.
It can be challenging to measure the success of MOPs own metrics as they support various functions of the marketing organization. An easy way to combat this is to identify metrics that connect to the goals of your stakeholders.
De-emphasize tracking metrics of specific marketing campaigns, until you actually know how you’re doing tracking at all.
The last thing I will mention today:
Strong MOPs can offer several benefits, including:
I think we can all agree at this point that an effective marketing operations strategy provides several benefits to your company and marketing team. It helps ensure that your marketing efforts are strategic, data-driven, and aligned with your company’s goals.
Here are some of the main benefits of good marketing operations.
Create and manage a comprehensive tech stack to ensure that all marketing technology brings the team forward and simplifies daily tasks along with more extensive and long term strategies
Streamline data analytics, transparency, reporting processes and, ability to build dashboards that will help you better understand the success of marketing initiatives and their progress toward goals.
Review and manage tech-related processes like data segmentation, software permissions, email marketing setups, and more.
Create and manage standard marketing operating procedures to ensure the repeatability of all tasks and create efficiencies that become independent from the people involved
Ensure the scalability of the entire marketing effort, thanks to a combined focus on workload, technology, and processes
Not to mention a slew of other benefits such as:
Higher ROI on marketing efforts
Accurately tracking your customer data
Enhanced customer experience
Generating more traffic to your website
Increasing your marketing impressions
Driving sales of your product or services
Identifying new markets
Provides oversight for long-term goals
Ensures readiness for future growth
Marketing operations are the backbone of a marketing team. With the proper people, process and tools implemented, MOPs can help increase efficiency and drives results in marketing organizations.
In the age of a data-driven world, marketers need to expand their skill sets to include technical and analytical skills in addition to traditional marketing skills.
Understanding the marketing operations requirements, which will allow for the success of your marketing efforts no matter what function of the organization you are accountable for, is the first step to future-proofing not only your campaigns but, your career as well.
Come say hi to me on twitter and let me know what you think about this article!
Jello
