Everything You Need to Know About Marketing Operations

Marketing operations can be defined as how various elements like people, processes, technology, and data work together to simplify the customer’s journey through the funnel. It is the summary of all the effort that goes into building and maintaining your marketing stack, driven by human oversight, to attract, engage, and convert prospects into qualified leads.

It’s how marketers manage the collection of project management tools they use to deliver the right messages at the right time. It’s essentially the summary of all that happens behind the scene and under the hood of an organization’s department for marketing teams.

In this article, we’ll be looking at marketing operations, how it matters to your organization, and how you can leverage it to move more leads from the top, all the way to the bottom of the funnel.

The role of marketing operations

Before we define how best to manage your marketing operations, it’s important to define where marketing operations sit in your project management big picture.

1. Operational benchmarking

It’s a common saying in marketing that what gets measured, gets managed. As a result, for marketing to work, you must first define what success looks like before your team starts making any specific effort to deliver marketing outcomes.

Marketing operations are responsible for establishing metrics for measuring the effectiveness of your efforts. This entails taking a good look at the organization’s project management goals such as increased revenue, a larger customer base, etc., and mapping out actionable steps for delivering on them.

2. Owning the customer journey

The customer journey is the summary of steps the customer takes through the funnel, from their first interaction until they convert, i.e. buy your products or subscribe to your services.

Marketing ops is responsible for:

• Designing the customer journey
• Determining strengths, weaknesses, and threats on the customer’s journey through the funnel, and
• Optimizing the customer experience to boost conversion rates through the funnel

Marketing operations define the interactions the customer makes through the funnel until they convert and design systems and workflows that simplify the customers’ interactions with the business.

3. Systems and processes

In its simplest definition, marketing operations are simply the art of designing and organizing marketing tools, systems, and processes so it’s easy to manage prospects through the funnel until they can be passed to sales.

Marketing operations is responsible for:

• Creating marketing systems and processes that automate prospect management, including email workflows, follow-up drips, lead management, etc. Marketing operations help with automating an organization’s marketing set up along with marketing templates so it’s easy to focus more on creative tasks.
• Building intelligent automation to ensure an organization’s marketing project management software stack works together to deliver targeted marketing outcomes.

Types of marketing operations we see in an organization

Marketing operations include the combination of tech, automation, and the human factor, all put together to move potential customers through a business’s funnel.

Here are the main branches of marketing operations tasks that you can expect to set up and operate for your organization.

1. Lead management

Lead management is simply the art and science of handling prospects, from the moment they make a measurable interaction with any of your marketing assets until they’re either converted or churned. Lead management involves segmenting leads based on intent and their position within the funnel, and keeping in touch with them until they can convert. determining their needs, and offering assets that

2. Data management

You’d generate a lot of data from observing the trends and insights of how prospects are interacting with your marketing assets. Data management is simply taking a look at those insights and determining where you can apply your findings in order to optimize and drive better results.

3. Campaign management

Campaign management involves:

• pointing out parts of your marketing outcomes that could be improved on
• determining what needs to be changed to get these results
• creating a plan for carrying out these changes in order to drive improved results in your marketing

4. Content development

Great content is the soul of marketing ops. Otherwise, how then would you be able to get your messages across to potential customers to get them to convert?

Here is the most practical part of marketing ops where the marketing ops can start executing on their plan. By determining their target prospect’s needs and answering their questions from the prospects’ viewpoint, the creative project management team can determine what content that’ll resonate with them and go ahead to create them.

Content development involves creating fresh content, updating executing assets, and keeping track of their performance to draw in potential customers.

5. Reporting and analytics

Reporting and analytics take all that happens within your funnels and present them in simple, easy-to-read data so you can have a 360-degree overview of how prospects are flowing towards your business. You can uncover what could be changed for better results.

How Kissflow Project helps to manage marketing operations better

At Kissflow, we use Kissflow Project to manage all our work in the marketing department. It helps us build accountability, project transparency, and project collaboration into our marketing ops so it’s easy to focus our time on doing actual work instead of being lost in a sea of apps.

1. Accountability

Kissflow Project is designed with intelligent task management capabilities that make it easy to create, assign, and project tracking software helps you keep track of tasks across your marketing ops team. At any point in time, you know who’s responsible for what and where the bottlenecks are.

2. Transparency

Kissflow Project offers 360-degree visibility into your marketing ops systems, processes, and workflows so at every stage you can be able to pinpoint what’s getting done or not. It makes it easy to see who’s doing what, how far a task has come, and what’s still needed to be done. Likewise, it’s easy to take a look at your marketing operations and see what’s working, what’s not, and what to do about it.

3. Collaboration

With @mentions, email alerts, and robust collaboration capabilities, Kissflow Project helps your entire team stay on the same page while working towards your marketing ops goals. This way, it’s easy reaching a consensus and hitting your targets when you’re working hand in hand with your entire team. You can provide feedback and comments without using different project management tools.

Start your marketing operations with Kissflow Project

Kissflow Project is an intuitive tool and is ideal for teams of all sizes. If your marketing is looking to simplify its marketing operations, take Kissflow Project for a spin. It’s free for 10 users.