What is a Marketing Operations mindset? I made a commitment to share 50 reasons, over Twitter, to embrace Marketing Operations; one tweet per day over the next 50 days. This shaped my thinking for what I now call Marketing Operations 2.0, and led to the development of the course I now teach for UC Extension and my own company. I added a couple of new reasons and organized the list into four topical categories: enterprise transformation, marketing accountability, marketing efficiency and effectiveness, and marketing transformation. Enjoy!
Enterprise Transformation
- A generator of generative learning. Marketing Operations = greater capacity to create the future & reinvent Marketing from within.
- Align the yin to Web 2.0’s yang. Marketing Operations provides infrastructure, knowledge sharing, transparency from the inside out, complementing Social Media’s outside-in approach.
- Competitive advantage. Organizations committed to Marketing Operations out-perform the competition in efficiency, effectiveness.
- Customer-centricity. Mobilizing behind the customer requires cross-functional alignment & collaboration. Marketing Operations drives this effort.
- Early warning. Competitive, market dynamics can be opportunities or landmines. Marketing Operations tracks leading indicators to manage turbulence.
- Enterprise health. Like a good circulatory system, MO enables blood flow between Marketing & other groups.
- Greater shareholder equity. Alignment of data, forecasts & metrics leads to more predictable results.
- Live the brand. Narrow the gap between your marketing messages and your enterprise’s actual performance.
- M & A integration. Large orgs combining = disparate systems + information silos + competing cultures. Marketing Operations enables 1+1 = 3.
- Robust institutional memory. Scattered memory = wasted investment. Marketing Operations = documented, shared knowledge.
- Scalable marketing. Organizations over-relying on individual heroics waste resources, burn out people, don’t learn from experience.
- Smarter decision-making. The right data + process + technology = maximum learning IQ = breakthrough results.
- Superior customer experience. Marketing Operations aligns touch points so actual experience resonates with brand promise.
- Sustainable market leadership. Marketing Operations provokes continuous innovation through business intelligence, voice of the customer, process, company-wide involvement.
- Sustainability. A Marketing Operations approach (solid foundation, conscious stewardship) is built to last.
Marketing Accountability
- Better corporate citizenship. Marketing Operations owns marketing performance, accountability, compliance (including sustainability).
- Compliance leadership. Laggards no more, Marketing Operations helps Marketing set quality/performance standards in the enterprise.
- Credible dashboards. Garbage in. G.arbage out. A nifty looking dashboard is useless if its output is questionable or non-actionable.
- Fiscal responsibility. Use it or lose it = misuse it and lose it anyway. Marketing Operations delivers budget management discipline.
- Investment insurance. Marketing is a top organizational spender. A big budget without operations to monitor effectiveness is fiscally negligent.
- Marketing strategy = Enterprise strategy. Marketing Operations is key to aligning Marketing to enterprise strategic objectives.
- Meaningful metrics. Marketing dashboards are useless without a Marketing Operations focus to determine what & why to measure.
- Metrics granularity. Measurable data has grown 10x since 2000. It takes a genius to manage this information explosion. Marketing Operations is a great home for such talent.
- Quality quant-ing. Analytics should not become anal-ytics. Marketing Operations keeps the focus on stats that matter.
- Resource justification. Demonstrate the value of your programs and people; protect them from being axed in tough times.
- Risk/contingency management. Marketing decisions can create exposure. Marketing Operations owns the plan to minimize the risk.
- Self-discipline on your own terms. Proactive accountability is better than enforced accountability.
- Smart marketing portfolio. Your marketing mix will be cut it if you can’t tie it to results. Marketing Operations ensures value.
Marketing Efficiency and Effectiveness
- Bridge the strategy-execution gap. Marketing Operations provides operational muscle, agility, measurement rigor, x-functional alignment needed to realize strategic vision.
- An operational roadmap for effectiveness. Not just great for individual performance or activities, Marketing Operations systemizes success.
- Better benchmarking. Marketing is the least benchmarked of all corporate functions. Marketing Operations uses benchmarking to perform critical gap analysis.
- Clear priorities. Organizations tend to be reactive, don’t distinguish between what is important and what is urgent. Marketing Operations helps keep focus on the right tasks.
- Closed-loop marketing. Leveraging people, process & technology through Marketing Operations is the only realistic path to this vision.
- Collaborative planning catalyst. Marketing Operations creates a cross-functional sandbox for strategic process and team learning.
- Competency development. Marketing change requires developing new skill-sets. Marketing Operations leads strategy to close talent gap.
- Leveraged leads. 94% of leads are wasted. 80% of disqualified leads buy anyway. Marketing Operations optimizes lead conversion process.
- More bang for the technology buck. Underutilized marketing automation investment = a cool car in your garage that you never drive.
- Pipeline visibility. Business complexity and disparate systems break the information loop. Marketing Operations is the best bet to repair it.
Marketing Transformation
- Rationalized change roadmap. Marketing Operations builds the business case for new marketing improvement initiatives.
- A catalyst for positive change. Need to do marketing differently? The key is people, more than technology or process. Marketing Operations Mobilizes people power.
- A growth path for the operationally inclined. Marketing Operations is a great career path for project managers, analysts, change management pros, etc.
- Art + Science. Marketing Operations injects left-brain thinking into typically right-brained Marketing function.
- Chief-of-staff role. CMOs need an operational partner to help transform the brand from a vision to an experience.
- Consistent performance. Implementation is uneven in most orgs. Marketing Operations is key to delivering a standard of excellence.
- Evolve Marketing from a service center to a strategic partner. Driving business intelligence, innovation, growth, customer experience, change = clout.
- Higher stature for Marketing. Marketing Operations is key to delivering and demonstrating strategic contribution.
- Marketing = profit/value center. Perceived cost center no more; Marketing Operations-enabled Marketing drives strategic growth.
- Opportunity to be a hero. Marketing Operations addresses major enterprise challenges. There are lots of gaps to close.
- Shift from firefighting to strategically driven action. Marketing Operations streamlines execution and creates a foundation for long-term planning.
- The CMO revolving door. Marketing chiefs think short-term when their tenures are brief. Marketing Operations = long view.
- Truly integrated marketing. Marketing Operations is the bridge builder integral to transforming the vision to reality.
- Turnover turnaround. The best marketers will flee poorly run departments. Marketing Operations puts the burden on the system, not the individual, so good people want to stay.
Source: B2C
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