When is the right time to hire for marketing operations?

Hiring the right staff as your organization grows is crucial. Your decision will have a rippling impact on your strategies, execution, and growth for the foreseeable future. Do you bring in someone with experience, or do you go after someone their junior who can execute on business critical tasks? Is your current pain point handling an overwhelmed sales pipeline, or is your sales pipeline struggling to pull in the right leads and struggling to move those leads to opportunities? In the case of the latter, you may have a need to fulfill a marketing operations role in your organization.

Marketing is typically broken down into 3 core functions in a business. The creative marketing, also referred to as Brand or Content Marketing which can help you deliver exceptional pieces of content both written, graphical, or through the use of video. The Product Marketing function which help to drive your go-to-market (GTM) and product-led growth (PLG) strategies, competitive and user research, and sales enablement. And the Growth or Demand Generation Marketing which aims to fulfill pipeline through owned and paid media channels. Often overlooking, but at the core of all exceptional marketing teams is Marketing Operations.

What is Marketing Operations?

Marketing operations are the people, processes, and technology that empowers a business’s overall marketing strategies and campaigns. It is the glue that allows the systems to talk to one another. It ensures that data is collected and utilized in a compliant manner. It allows a marketing team to set goals, measure success, and fuel the fire behind the most successful integrated marketing campaigns.

From faciliting marketing activities managing accounts and executing nurture campaigns, to training your marketing staff, to assisting with budgeting, and even ensuring accessibility standards are met, Marketing Operations is often a silent partner to the other marketing functions but often as, or more important depending on your stage of growth as an organization. So how can you tell when your marketing team is suffering from not having a MOps team member? Let’s take a look at some of the more common signs.

  • The Sales pipeline is becoming stagnant
  • There are complaints that there are no good leads
  • You struggle to make consistent improvements from testing
  • You constantly ask, “What is working?”

How can Marketing Operations help with these issues?

The Pipeline has Friction

When the sales pipeline isn’t moving it is because there is friction in your process. That friction needs to be uncovered from the data and that is where marketing operations shines. Your MOps team can help determine what stage in the sales pipeline the leads are getting stuck in and coordinate with demand generation and content teams to help you add force to that friction to help get your pipeline moving again. This could mean looking into keywords and topics, tracking their intent and page views, or evaluating the items on opportunities to help with sales enablement.

The Leads are No Good

This is an all-too-common complaint that arises and it falls to a MOps team to uncover why. This starts by looking at the source of the bad leads and collaborating with sales and development teams to understand why the leads are bad. Is it a matter of spam? Or is it a bad target? Without a competent MOps team in place, it may be difficult and teams can often waste more time testing because they are not able to uncover, or aware of what the core issue is.

Testing for the Sake of Testing

Whether you are testing simple A/B variants in an email, or conversions on a landing page, you need to be able to execute those tests and gather data from the results in a concise and actionable manner. A MOps professional can help you by providing you with the insights from your tests that help them build on previous learnings and evolve your marketing over time.

Accelerating Growth with Marketing Operations

Once you start to become more data-driven, you are able to streamline and optimize processes to enhance your marketing efficiency, effectiveness, and scalability. By integrating your marketing platforms you can deliver enhanced analytics and data-driven strategies to ensure your campaigns are precisely targeted, resulting in your resources being better allocated and maximizing your customer engagement. This holistic approach enables organizations to quickly adapt to market changes, personalize customer experiences, and measure the impact of marketing activities in real-time, ultimately driving faster and more sustainable growth.