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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
Agencies often have their own established workflows, which may not align with the brand’s processes or guidelines. This can result in:
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.
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:
A cohesive marketing operations team can streamline processes and ensure timely approvals, mitigating these challenges.
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:
Effective marketing operations management plays a crucial role in ensuring compliance and maintaining detailed records of approvals.
When agencies dictate processes, brands can become overly reliant on them, which creates challenges such as:
A well-defined marketing operations and data management strategy is essential for maintaining agility and reducing dependency on specific agencies.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.