Implementing Strategy: Marketing Ops

Around 90 percent of marketers found content marketing to be effective in their companies.

It highlights the value of not only content marketing but having a marketing plan that creates quality content. Creating quality content is all a part of marketing ops, which stands for marketing operations.

Marketing operations is a significant part of implementing strategy into a business. It’s a broader term that encompasses a vital part of marketing as a whole.

For instance, marketing ops encompasses your organization, your strategy, and the technology that allows you to successfully have a marketing strategy.

Of course, there’s a lot more to it. Here’s a guide on everything you need to know about marketing operations and how it drives your business forward.

 

Your Marketing Strategy

The first part of your marketing ops is to create a strategy to involves aligning your technology with your sales team. It’s marketing that ensures Sales are communicating with the Marketing team on how to best drive in leads.

So, what should the sales and marketing team discuss? What should drive their strategy?

Here are some ideas that can lead the initial discussion on how to create alignment between sales and marketing.

Choosing Mediums

Implementing strategy is about choosing mediums. It’s about finding the technology that can help you attract visitors to your website.

Nowadays, there are a lot of mediums to choose from. You can choose Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Snapchat, and more. It can be hard to choose which one is going to benefit your business the most.

Another part of choosing mediums is considering how you’re going to use them. You need to consider if you are only posting organic content or if you are using these mediums for advertisements.

The marketing operations team needs to think of what medium is going to best drive in leads. They need to consider their acquisition strategy, and what the best practice is for producing the greatest number of leads.

Another part of choosing mediums is figuring out where your target market is hanging out. If you are choosing social media mediums, you also need to have a strategy for how you are going to use them.

This means you need to consider how often you are posting on these platforms, what you are posting, and the quality of what you are posting on these platforms.

Evaluating Budget

Another part of aligning your marketing strategy with your marketing operations is evaluating the budget needed to promote your mediums.

You need to consider how much you are devoting each month to your marketing plan and operations. How much of a budget is devoted to maintaining your social media presence? How much are you devoting to your website in order to keep it up to date?

When you have a strategic plan, you need to consider what your budget is going to be and cap it off. You want to set a standard of how much you are going to spend in order to achieve the results you want.

You can then assess if you need to redirect your budget based on the performance of your marketing campaign.

Assessing Analytics

Another critical part of marketing operation is analytics.

Analytics is a critical part of marketing operations. It’s how you evaluate performance and decide what is working and what isn’t.

Looking at various metrics can be overwhelming in marketing, which is why it’s essential to know what to look for and what gives you the most insight into how your marketing strategy is working.

You want to assess cost-per-lead, cost-per-conversion, click-through rate, open rate, as well as other metrics that give you insight into the customer journey.

It’s important to find the metrics that give you the best idea of if you need to make changes to your website, your email marketing strategies, or your social media presence.

Your marketing operations need to evaluate metrics because it indicates if you need to make minor major changes in your business. It can tell you what you are paying per customer acquisition and what your total revenue is.

Also, part of analytics is taking a look at reporting. This means you are consistently evaluating the analytics based on weekly reporting. You need to assess how often to look and make any changes in your marketing strategy based on how often you receive reports.

Customer Cycle

After you develop the initial strategy and determine what analytics to look for, you need to consider the customer cycle.

This is the customer journey. By now you should have the customer journey mapped out. Marketing operations should know what the process should look like when a customer goes through the entire sales cycle.

Choosing marketing mediums, having a budget, and understanding metrics is a vital part of the customer cycle, but there’s also a lot more to it when it comes to understanding marketing operations.

If you want your marketing operations team to have a better grasp of the strategy they need to create and how to refine the process, they need to know specific parts of the customer cycle.

Here are some questions that can help your marketing operations team refine their customer cycle.

Who’s Your Target Market?

Having a social presence won’t matter if you don’t know who your target market. The purpose of a social media presence is for your target market.

This is why it’s critical to define who they are. You need to know their demographics, where they shop, their behavior patterns, and more about them when you are adjusting the customer sales cycle.

The marketing operations team should consider creating a buyer persona that identifies the ideal customer. When you do understand everything about your target market, you have a better idea of how to serve them.

What’s Their Interests?

When you have an idea of who your target market is, your marketing ops team can figure out what their interests are beyond demographics.

This means that your marketing ops can evaluate what kind of content is best to use to attract your target market on social media, your website, and other mediums.

When marketing operations are trying to figure out the target market and their interests, one of the ways to do this is to consider what their problems are. Identifying your target market’s problems can help you figure out their interests in solutions.

How You Are You Moving Them Through the Cycle?

Another vital part of marketing operations is understanding what continues to interest your target market. It’s evaluating what is moving the customer through the sales cycle.

This means finding out what lead magnets, what social media content, and what email marketing strategies you are employing to continue to pique the interest of your target market.

If you are continuing to treat every consumer the same, it’s not going to be very effective. You have to evaluate what kind of content is going to continue helping your target market.

Is Your Sales Team Communicating with Your Marketing Team?

As you refine your customer’s journey, your business needs to make sure that your sales and marketing team is aligned. Your sales team needs to know what kind of leads they are getting from marketing.

This is why communication between sales and marketing is so critical. It’s crucial that when a potential customer reaches a part of the cycle and is ready to buy, marketing has communicated with sales on what to expect when they are getting leads.

Looking at Performance

The final stage of marketing operations is evaluating the performance of your marketing strategy.

You now know the strategy you need in place, as well as the value of the customer cycle, but now it’s about looking at performance. Marketing operations needs to assess how well the entire marketing strategy is performing.

In order to scale your marketing strategy, the marketing ops team needs to evaluate if there is potential to scale or if there need to be changes made in the quality of your content or your overall marketing strategy.

When marketing operations align and connect on how to scale marketing strategies, it can lead to a higher ROI. In order to arrive at that point, marketing ops need to evaluate specific parts of your marketing strategy.

What’s the ROI?

The ROI, also known as the return of investment, will tell you how aligned your marketing and sales teams are.

If your marketing operations team is in charge of looking at analytics, performances, and processes, then it’s vital that they communicate ROI to your marketing and sales team.

Marketing operations is about cohesion in the workplace. While your goal is to achieve the highest ROI in your business, you need to know that the only way to get there is by having your workplace on the same page.

If your marketing team is composed of sales, marketing, technology experts, process team, and more, then it’s more important that they unify and communicate on how to improve your business ROI.

Your marketing ROI is one of the most important metrics in your business because it tells you what you are making when compared to how much you are spending.

What’s Your Conversion Rate?

Your marketing operations should also be unified on how to improve the conversion rate in your business.

This metric impacts your ROI the most. You may have a lot of leads, but it’s about taking those leads and making them paying customers.

Your conversion rate will improve when marketing communicates with sales. It will also improve when marketing and sales communicate with the technology and processes team. This unified vision helps spark creativity between different departments in your business.

It’s what makes your marketing strategy complete when everyone is working together.

If you want to improve your conversion rate, it’s important that you assign specific tasks to members of the marketing ops team. You should prioritize your employee’s strengths and assess if they can contribute to marketing, processing, sales, or technology.

What Can Be Improved?

The final part of implementing a marketing ops team is evaluating your goals and then seeing what can be improved.

Your marketing ops team should consistently communicate on how to improve your business or discuss why some of the goals are not being met.

When you create a marketing ops team that unifies different parts of your business together, they should create new goals that align marketing, sales, technology, and the process that brings it all together.

It shouldn’t just be about a marketing or sales goal distinctly.

The ultimate goal of implementing a marketing ops team is to create a unified vision that is about the overall productivity of the business. When everyone is working together to create unified goals, you’ll have a better idea of what can be improved in your business.

You’ll have more insight from different people in your marketing ops team on what can be improved in your business.

Everything You Need to Know About Marketing Ops

Creating a marketing ops team is about identifying different parts of your business strategy. It’s about taking the vision of different parts of your team and creating a unified goal.

This article gave you insight into everything you need to know about marketing ops and why it’s crucial in every business. Marketing ops is about aligning your team so they can create a collaborative approach to attracting leads and driving in more sales.

If you want help with marketing in your business and want a free digital marketing review, you can contact us here.