As brands navigate increasingly complex marketing landscapes, defining and establishing marketing operations and workflows is essential. This is particularly crucial for brands collaborating with a hybrid mix of internal teams, creative agencies, digital teams, and advertising agencies. By owning the workflow, brands can maintain control, protect their integrity, and ensure efficiency and compliance across campaigns.
A significant advantage of brand-led workflows is the flexibility it provides to change agencies, hire freelancers, or appoint specialised teams without disrupting processes or compromising output quality. This adaptability gives brands confidence that their systems will deliver consistent, compliant outcomes, regardless of who is executing the work.
Introduction
Marketing operations is a crucial function within a marketing team that focuses on streamlining processes analyzing performance data and technologies to support marketing strategies and campaigns. It is the backbone of marketing success, ensuring that marketing efforts contribute to key performance indicators (KPIs). In this section, we will explore the definition, importance, and benefits of marketing operations in a marketing team.
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Definition of Marketing Operations
Marketing operations is the combination of people, processes, and technology that turn marketing strategy into actions. It encompasses the people, technology, and processes that support a marketing team’s activities, aiming to optimize and scale marketing efforts, move potential customers through the marketing funnel, and grow revenue. Marketing operations professionals need excellent management skills, analytical thinking, and effective communication skills, as well as being technologically savvy and comfortable working with analytics and data tools.
Importance of Marketing Operations in a Marketing Team
Marketing operations is essential for a marketing team to perform optimally in their roles. It ensures that marketing efforts are executed efficiently and effectively, with solid workflows, access to analytics data, and use of technology. Without marketing operations, businesses may lack a clear path to effectively reach their intended audiences and acquire new customers. Marketing operations helps scale a business by optimizing and streamlining marketing efforts.
The Problem with Agency-Led Processes
When brands rely on workflows dictated by external agencies, they relinquish control over critical elements of their marketing operations. This can lead to inefficiencies, inconsistencies, and risks that can impact the success of their campaigns. An effective marketing operations strategy can help brands maintain control, protect their integrity, and ensure efficiency and compliance across campaigns. Let’s examine these challenges in greater detail:
Inconsistencies in Branding
Agencies often have their own established workflows, which may not align with the brand’s processes or guidelines. This can result in:
- Misaligned messaging: Without a centralised framework, agencies may interpret the brand’s tone, voice, or positioning differently, creating inconsistent messaging across campaigns.
- Fragmented visual identity: Variations in the use of brand colours, typography, or logo placements can dilute the brand’s visual identity, confusing the audience and diminishing trust.
- Lost brand equity: Over time, inconsistencies erode the perception of the brand’s professionalism and reliability, undermining the equity built through years of marketing efforts.
A well-organized marketing department is crucial in achieving strategic business objectives and streamlining tasks, ensuring consistency supports marketing efforts and maximizing the return on investment for marketing activities.
Approval Delays
One of the most common challenges in marketing workflows is the approval process, which becomes even more complicated when agencies set the rules. Brands may face:
- Bottlenecks in communication: Agency-led processes often lack visibility, making it hard for brands to understand where a project is in the approval cycle.
- Missed deadlines: Misaligned expectations around timelines can cause significant delays, jeopardising campaign launches.
- Frustration among stakeholders: Internal teams may struggle to provide timely feedback or approvals due to unclear processes, leading to frustration and inefficiencies.
A cohesive marketing operations team can streamline processes and ensure timely approvals, mitigating these challenges.
Compliance Risks
Compliance is a critical concern, particularly for brands operating in regulated industries such as pharmaceuticals, finance, or alcohol. Agency-led processes can increase compliance risks by:
- Omitting necessary checks: External teams may not prioritise legal and regulatory checks if they’re not integrated into their workflow. This can result in costly compliance breaches.
- Lack of audit trails: Agencies may not maintain detailed records of approvals, making it difficult to prove compliance during audits.
- Disparate standards: Different agencies working on various campaigns may interpret compliance requirements inconsistently, increasing the likelihood of errors.
Effective marketing operations management plays a crucial role in ensuring compliance and maintaining detailed records of approvals.
Dependency on Specific Agencies
When agencies dictate processes, brands can become overly reliant on them, which creates challenges such as:
- Disruption during transitions: Switching agencies or hiring freelancers requires the brand to adapt to a new set of workflows, which can disrupt operations and cause delays.
- Lack of agility: Dependency on specific agencies limits the brand’s ability to pivot quickly to meet new demands or explore different creative approaches.
- Increased costs: Long-term dependency on a single agency can prevent brands from negotiating better rates or engaging more cost-effective talent.
A well-defined marketing operations and data management strategy is essential for maintaining agility and reducing dependency on specific agencies.
Benefits of Marketing Operations
Marketing operations offers numerous benefits to a marketing and sales team, including improved efficiency and productivity, better alignment with business goals, and enhanced customer satisfaction.
Improved Efficiency and Productivity
Marketing operations improves efficiency and productivity by automating repetitive tasks, focusing on high-growth activities, and generating the most results as efficiently as possible. It ensures that marketing team members are equipped with the best technology and training to create groundbreaking marketing campaigns. By streamlining marketing processes and workflows, marketing operations enables marketing teams to focus on high-value tasks that drive business growth.
Marketing operations also improves efficiency by ensuring seamless usage and accurate data capture. It chooses the right technology, such as customer relationship management (CRM) or content management systems (CMS), with present and future needs in mind. By ensuring that everyone in marketing organization knows how to use the tool properly and is actually using it properly, marketing operations minimizes the risk of technology hindering efficiency.
By improving efficiency, customer data, and productivity, marketing operations enables marketing teams to achieve more with less, driving business growth and revenue.
How to Establish a Marketing Operations Strategy for Hybrid Teams
1. Invest in Marketing Technology and Project Management Software
The foundation of effective marketing operations is a robust project management platform. Tools like Admation are specifically designed for marketing ops professional and teams, offering features that streamline workflows, approvals, and compliance processes. Admation enables brands to centralise their operations, ensuring all teams—internal and external—work within a unified framework. A marketing ops team plays a crucial role in managing budgets, providing training, and facilitating collaboration across departments.
Key Features of Admation
- Approval Workflows: Admation allows brands to set up tiered approvals, ensuring the right people sign off at the right stages, from creative concepts to final deliverables.
- Audit Trails: Built-in audit trails keep a record of every decision and approval, providing transparency and compliance assurance for industries with stringent regulatory requirements.
- Multi-User Briefing: Teams can collaborate on briefs in real time, reducing back-and-forth communication and ensuring clarity from the outset.
- Asset Management: Admation centralises all assets, from logos to templates, ensuring everyone uses the latest approved files.
2. Define and Document Your Marketing Processes
Clearly defined processes ensure that every marketing project follows a consistent structure. Admation makes this easier by allowing brands to standardise and document workflows directly within the platform. Developing a marketing ops strategy that outlines clear goals and objectives can further enhance the effectiveness of marketing operations.
How Admation Supports Process Definition
- Customisable Workflows: Admation enables teams to design workflows tailored to their needs, incorporating specific steps for briefing, creative development, and approvals.
- Integrated Compliance Checklists: Compliance is built into the workflow, with mandatory checks that teams must complete before progressing to the next stage.
- Templates for Consistency: Admation’s reusable templates for briefs, approvals, and compliance documents ensure every project starts with a clear and consistent foundation.
3. Educate Marketing Teams and Agencies
Training and onboarding are critical to ensure smooth adoption of workflows and marketing tools used. Admation simplifies this process with user-friendly interfaces and resources to help teams and agencies get up to speed quickly. Marketing operations teams also work closely with other marketing team members to ensure effective coordination and alignment with the overall marketing strategy.
How Admation Makes Education Easier
- Intuitive Design: Admation’s user-friendly interface reduces the learning curve for new users.
- Centralised Documentation: Training materials, brand guidelines, and process maps can be stored within Admation, making them easily accessible to all stakeholders.
- Guided Workflows: Admation’s step-by-step workflows guide users through tasks, ensuring processes are followed correctly.
4. Use Technology to Ensure Transparency
Transparency is key to successful collaboration. Admation provides real-time visibility into project statuses, feedback, and approvals, ensuring that all stakeholders are aligned.
Marketing operations support and enhance the marketing performance, of various marketing departments through transparency and collaboration.
Transparency Features in Admation
- Dashboard Views: Admation’s dashboards provide an at-a-glance view of project progress, deadlines, and approval stages.
- Version Control and Consolidated Feedback: All feedback and versions are tracked in one place.
- Automated Notifications: Admation keeps teams updated with notifications for pending approvals, deadlines, and completed tasks.
5. Monitor and Optimise
Even the best-defined processes require ongoing refinement. Admation provides tools to monitor workflow performance and identify areas for improvement.
Marketing operations teams play a crucial role in supporting various aspects of marketing, such as budgeting, planning, and campaign management.
Optimisation with Admation
- Reporting and Analytics: Admation’s reporting tools track key metrics such as approval turnaround times, helping teams identify bottlenecks.
- Feedback Loops: Teams can use Admation to gather feedback from internal and external stakeholders, pinpointing opportunities to streamline workflows further.
- Scalability: As brands grow, Admation’s scalable platform ensures workflows can evolve to meet new demands.
Conclusion
For brands working with a mix of internal teams, creative agencies, and freelancers, defining and enforcing marketing operations and processes is not just a matter of efficiency—it’s a strategic advantage. Brand-led workflows ensure consistency, compliance, and control while providing the flexibility to adapt to changing needs or partners. Marketing operations managers play a critical role in ensuring effective communication, collaboration, and technology adoption within marketing teams.
With the right processes and tools in place, brands can confidently collaborate with any team, knowing their campaigns will meet high standards, protect their reputation, and drive results. By owning the workflow, brands don’t just have creative team to lead their marketing—they lead their market.
