What is Marketing Operations
by Kimberly Prescott
For those of you who are new to this term or for those who are wondering what your friends or family are doing in marketing operations, let’s put some clarity on this term.
First, Marketing operations is a rather new term that evolved about 15 years ago. It was developed to identify people who work in a practice in companies that implement, manage and execute the technology, people and processes required to do digital marketing. In other words, all the technology platforms in the world will do a company no good unless there are people behind the scenes who know how to make them run.
Let’s take a deeper dive.
The People.
The people on a marketing operations team vary greatly from company to company as there are differing beliefs on what a great marketing operations team should be. For many, a typical marketing operations team is thought of as a marketing technologist, a campaign manager, a solution architect, and a leader of some sort.
For small to mid-sized companies, this is often just one person handling all these functions. For much larger global organizations, there may be teams like this in every region. Regardless of how big or small, the need for this type of talent has grown to astronomical proportions over the past 15 years. Today, the need for talent is so great that many people who are getting trained in this field have multiple job offers. Hence, why we are creating AskNya, a marketing ops training institute to help new people to the industry get trained up so that they can take advantage of these wonderful opportunities.
The Technology.
The technology for the role of a marketing operations team member varies greatly. With thousands of potential systems out there to learn and master. Thus, no one place can be the end all or be all. However, the basic strategies, tips and tools can be applied across the technologies available.
So, having a common understanding of what marketing ops is and how it is applied as a discipline is a key component to understanding the need for any such technology. At AskNya we are starting with a behemoth of a platform, Salesforce Marketing Cloud. Why? Because through teaching people about this platform we can embrace this common understanding of marketing ops and the practices behind the technology to help people master the key terminology and concepts behind the tech.
The Process.
Understanding the processes that make marketing operations run will be an important part to any curriculum. It is imperative to understand what makes marketing operations successful from a process component. This can include SLA’s, interactions with sales operations and sales, process flows to enhance the user experience, and much more.
Understanding the process behind the technology and people is the third leg of the stool that makes everything click. To that end, at AskNya we will deep dive into process courses that teach how to flow out a process and what questions to ask to get to root causes of problems. These talents are the secret sauce to driving new campaigns and initiatives in marketing operations that drive huge success.
As time goes on, we will publish more information on specific hot topics for marketing operations so that you can learn more about it. And don’t forget, on September 19, AskNya launches the first ever marketing operations institute with a whole slew of training videos. Check it out and be the first to graduate.