Marketing Operations Comes of Age
Everywhere you turn these days it seems as if another marketing system is being put into place. And though they may address very specific needs, marketing automation platforms, new marketing databases, CRM systems and a host of BI tools share common links; the desire to make marketing more scientific and measurable, and a growing role of marketing operations in their selection and management. A fairly new function by traditional marketing and sales standards, marketing operations is quickly evolving into marketing’s nerve center. A recent study commissioned by SiriusDecisions in conjunction with the Marketing Operations Cross-Company Alliance (MOCCA) revealed details of the function’s progress, and the distance it still has to travel. Today, I will share findings from our study identifying three defining forces impacting marketing operations functions both now and into the future.
One: New Responsibilities
We define marketing operations as the function responsible for the capture and dissemination of marketing information to the enterprise, be it performance metrics, data or strategy/planning initiatives and budgets, as well as the systems and processes that help generate this information in a systematic, predictable fashion. As part of the study, we asked marketing operations professionals to list the most important new responsibilities they have taken on; finishing far above the rest was the construction and administration of marketing dashboards. While on the surface this response doesn’t seem like much of a surprise the fact that it was most often cited as a new responsibility is indicative of the amount of work that still must be done in the area of marketing measurement. Additionally, assuming responsibility for dashboard management is that you make of it; if it is viewed as a low-level chore, senior decision makers will connect low-level value to it. In our study, more than 75% of respondents indicated their dashboard efforts have only limited or moderate credibility with senior management.
Two: New Investments
Third on the list of new responsibilities for marketing operations (following dashboards and budget planning) was the category of infrastructure/technology investment. In our study, we found that present marketing operations budgets are tilted toward people (51%), followed by programs (28%) and systems (21%). A related question asked respondents to break down the allocation of personnel resources by responsibility; at 30%, the management of systems topped the list. Thus, when fully loaded, roughly 36% of overall marketing operations budgets are spent on the purchase and oversight of technology. Over time, we expect the programs budget – largely a holdover from the days of marketing operations being the jumping ground for projects that no one else wanted – to decline in favor of an even greater focus on systems.
Three: New Opportunities
As many know, the word “opportunity” is merely a code word for “challenge,” and when it comes to technology and dashboards, we’ll settle on the fact for operations leaders, life is all about a little bit of both. In the b-to-b organizations we surveyed, only 14% reported that they have fully automated marketing dashboards. Roughly 57% of organizations are currently developing these dashboards, while the remaining 29% have no automation. This dovetails well with the previous information that shows an increasing responsibility for this task, as well as the funding that surrounds it. Recent discussions with our clients indicate that the more manual (both in terms of technology and process) the dashboard currently is, the more likely the function is continuing to track and report “old-time” marketing measurements such as brand awareness and response rate. Automating metrics that mean very little outside of the walls of marketing – rather than the metrics and key performance indicators that truly provide insight into the health of an organization’s reputation and demand creation activities – does virtually nothing to promote marketing as a discipline.
There is little doubt through our study that marketing operations continues to grow up right before our eyes. Whether it is identifying and accepting new responsibilities, changing the way it invests or building requirements to match the needs of other functions, both the strategic charter and day-to-day activities are constantly in flux. One of the most important byproducts of this evolution is the degree to which marketing operations will need to interface with other marketing functions, as well as sales, particularly for those organizations that aspire to be best-in-class.
