As the martech stack continues to advance at an accelerated pace, it is critical that CMOs should think about their strategies for utilizing marketing ops to its extent.
Acting as the strongest pillar of the modern marketing team, marketing ops help to support and enable modern marketing workflows. Not only is it helping CMOs produce relevant business data but also to answer questions about performance cause and effect and offer recommendations depending on the insights. Enabling organizations to optimize their workflows, marketing ops today has emerged from just a backroom operational task force to a strategic team. In fact, as per BrandMaker’s “State of Marketing Ops Survey”, 62% of executives have ranked it as their top priority, with 70% claiming they have a dedicated marketing ops team.
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However, with martech continuously advancing, ever-emerging use-cases for martech and data, as well as a shortage of skilled manpower, CMOs should think about their approach to marketing ops. They need to develop strategies that will enable them to utilize marketing ops to their extent. Here are three elements of marketing ops that CMOs can consider to drive optimal value for their MOPs in 2022:
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Centralizing or Localizing
Centralizing or localizing marketing ops is and seems to be an eternal debate. Since both can elevate or hamper marketing efforts, CMOs should decide which one will perform better according to their needs.
If the brand wants to scale while keeping consistency and accuracy at its center stage, CMOs should consider opting for centralized marketing ops. They should establish a core marketing ops center of excellence while maintaining the most profound and most critical skill sets in one place that will benefit the entire organization.
With remote work continuing to thrive as teams improve at their digital collaboration, especially in digital-first functions such as marketing, CMOs should push for an optimal MOPs structure to best serve business needs irrespective of the location of the employees. While the option between centralized vs. decentralized depends on the organization size, budgets, customer needs, and more, what is crucial for them is investing in a team that has a well-defined structure, training, and processes.
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Rethinking about its core responsibilities
To drive productivity, CMOs should draw some boundaries about the marketing ops responsibilities. They should concentrate on areas where marketing ops can make the most impact instead of falling for anything related to automation or data. While the focus on CX and privacy, data maturity, and omnipresence of martech have contributed to marketing ops success, it is equally necessary to empower the rest of marketing with training, allowing self-service for standard use-cases along with rigorous documentation. This will allow CMOs to drive value from their MOPs investments without slowing down their marketing execution.
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Including marketing ops from the beginning in the marketing efforts
Even with its strategic importance, marketing ops are not always included early and deeply while having strategic marketing conversations. Instead of treating marketing ops as a help desk, CMOs should build and coach the marketing ops team to become active and vocal contributors for driving the success of the marketing team. CMOs should include them in cross-functional planning from early on, get their views while creating a roadmap and stick to it rather than thinking of MOPs as a quick-fix resource.
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