Ways to Optimize Marketing Operations

Marketing industry veterans are always on the prowl to seize all the opportunities to make the most out of fewer resources.

Pre Sales teams of all organizations should have faster time to market, ensuring brand consistency throughout all the channels. It is crucial to get a competitive edge by adapting to changing consumer norms and expectations. Moreover, marketing teams must design compelling marketing campaigns to achieve the desired results. Businesses of all sizes and types need robust tools in their MarTech stack that offer real-time data analytics. Additionally, the MarTech stack should have other technologies to help the marketing teams pinpoint each effort’s effectiveness. As consumer, market, and employee expectations constantly evolve, marketing is no longer the black box it was before. Stakeholders and other business owners are continually pressuring the CMOs to boost the ROI and prove their team’s value.

Also Read: The Role of Marketing Operations in Transforming Businesses

Hence, optimizing the marketing operations is the only option for marketing leaders to accomplish the desired results. Marketing optimization isn’t a one-day task; it is a continuous process. In this article, let’s explore options that CMOs can consider to optimize their marketing operations:

Develop cross-functional teams

One of the crucial aspects of improving marketing operations is developing a seamless project workflow between pre-sales teams and other departments throughout the organization. 

Internal workflows of each team can tremendously influence how other departments raise a project request or how they accomplish every project. CMOS must establish a seamless workflow by leveraging tools to assign tasks, set deadlines and follow up.

Keep the target audience in mind

Another crucial challenge marketers face is managing the noise, especially in the digital marketing landscape. The market today in almost every industry is cluttered with many vendors offering the same products and services to the same target audience. Many organizations ignore the importance of effective research to determine their brand, products, and services, who is looking for a similar product or solution, and how or when to deliver a message. Marketing business leaders can explore opportunities to evaluate their customer data, focus on social media conversations & engage with them and then create a content marketing strategy that aligns with the business and audience’s goals. The marketing teams must customize interaction with the audience and constantly review & tweak.

Determine what the stakeholders expect

CMOs, before they embark on a journey to improve their marketing operations, need to interact effectively with the stakeholder. Marketing leaders with transparent communication with the stakeholders can effectively align their teams and resources to accomplish those goals. Moreover, determining what stakeholders expect will help marketing leaders to prioritize their goals effectively. Marketing teams can even embrace internal service level agreements (SLAs) in their workflows. These service level agreements will help the marketing teams to establish a set of deliverables to other departments. It is an effective way to set transparent expectations and resolve potential issues. For example, if key stakeholders want to make the most out of their email marketing efforts. Marketing leaders can optimize their email marketing operations on priority to ensure success.

Set a measurable metric to determine the success

CMOs can establish 2 to 4 key measurable metrics to guide all marketing campaigns. Without setting benchmarks, the marketing teams will not aim to achieve the desired goals individually or collectively. Organizations that want to optimize their marketing efforts should determine ways to measure success before initiating the campaign. Marketing leaders that set a measurable metric can monitor the strategy’s success through the marketing improvement plan. The majority of the marketing teams do not have customized KPIs that they track to calculate their success. Many marketers track generic KPIs like leads generated, conversion ratios, and other metrics. Marketing teams should monitor more metrics to calculate the effectiveness of the marketing campaigns’ number of leads vs. unique Website visitors, monthly recurring revenue, and others to evaluate the success. Monitoring the measurable KPIs will help the marketing team understand their progress and challenges in accomplishing the desired results.

Develop and review marketing optimization roadmaps

One crucial aspect that would streamline the improvement of the marketing strategy is visually illustrating the workflows. It is one of the significant ways to create better alignment between steps, inputs, and the desired output. The success of marketing optimization will depend on operational excellence. Organizations that do not have road maps of their marketing Ops need to consider it as their top priority.

Marketing teams that want to optimize their operations should start working on specific, realistic, measurable written objectives. They must also precisely determine the highest potential market segments to improve the conversion rates.

Additionally, it is crucial to establish key opportunity and accessibility criteria to compare different market segments. Pre-sales departments should map the potential customers buying journeys. It is essential to determine the sequence of their decision process while the prospect is looking to purchase a product or service for them. Marketing leaders must establish a roadmap based on observable customer behaviors and make it the basis for all marketing and sales activities. Businesses need effective data and analytics tools that translate raw data into actionable customer insights.

Also Read: CMOs Playbook to Smash Silos in Marketing Operations

Moreover, organizations must focus on adding value to their marketing efforts to optimize their operations. The best marketing teams that succeed in their campaigns are value creators. Hence, pre-sales teams of all organizations should shift their focus from being service providers to serving as value creators. Businesses need to track and monitor how long or how much cost they require to convert a customer. Marketing leaders should design and enforce an actionable dashboard of marketing campaigns that align with the management’s expectations.

A marketing operation should ensure they have the right processes to accomplish the desired results. Marketing leaders should constantly evaluate their operations and find all the opportunities to optimize their processes to improve business ROI and get a competitive edge. CMOs can consider these strategies mentioned above to optimize their marketing operations.