Enterprise marketing teams have big goals to hit around content throughput, campaign alignment, and inbound leads. With so many moving parts, your marketing operations team is the engine that makes it all work. To hit objectives and drive efficiency, you’ll want to make sure your marketing operations team structure is solid.
This process typically includes careful consideration of how you’re using your resources and technology, along with digging into workflows to understand where gaps are.
In this post, we’ll review what marketing operations includes, what they do, and the roles to structure your team.
What Does Marketing Operations Cover?
When talking about marketing operations, we mean all the processes, people, and technology you apply to marketing campaigns. It’s all about how efficient you are at every step along the way. Additionally, it ensures that your execution aligns with your content strategy.
Marketing operations plays a big role in every aspect. When you’re running seamlessly, you can:
- Increase productivity
- Measure content performance better
- Automate functions and reduce manual work
- Ensure you have the right people
Marketing operations is critical to every marketing tactic you use, especially relating to content. Content operations involves all the processes, people, and technology required for the lifecycle of content, including planning, creating, managing, and analyzing.
In developing the structure of your marketing operations team, and its subset content operations, what roles will you need and why?
Marketing Operations Team Structure: What Do They Own, and Whom Do You Need?
In defining the right roles for your team, you first have to address what they own. There are four main buckets:
- Technology: This includes marketing automation software, content marketing platforms, CMS (content management system), and analytics tools you need to plan, manage, execute, and measure efforts.
- Data: The insights your marketing and content analytics deliver are in their domain. They are responsible for presenting data and drawing conclusions.
- Process: Every tactic or project is a series of tasks that make up the process, and this team has governance over them.
Across these areas, you’ll need a group of experts that can drive these pillars, improve them, and operationalize them. Here are some key roles to consider. The ideal mix looks different depending on how large your enterprise is, how many business lines you have, industries you serve, or other factors.
Marketing Operations Director or VP
This person leads the team and has decision-making power over hiring, technology procurement, and process improvement. This person lives and breathes data and has an analytical mindset. While they thrive in numbers and facts, they also must be flexible and realize that not everything in marketing is as clear-cut as it is in finance or business operations.
Marketing Technology Manager
This role is your technology guru. They know how to leverage the applications you use to drive value. They’ll greatly influence which platforms you use and oversee training and onboarding of users. Their acumen level should be expert. They’ll be the first to raise the alarm if integrations or other barriers prevent technology from working as you expect.
Data and Analytics Manager
Analysts are detectives when it comes to communicating marketing tactics and their impact and influence on ROI and revenue. That’s often a huge challenge for businesses. A recent survey of marketers put it at the top, with 31 percent saying it was the biggest challenge. Further, only 54 percent said they even track it!
Those filling this role are responsible for defining what to measure, how to measure it, and actually measuring it. The data and analytics experts should also be creating reports and digging into why some things are successful so you can recreate them going forward.
Content Process Manager
This project manager-type role should develop workflows in your content marketing solution. They need to have a keen understanding of each project’s tasks. They’ll need to consider resources, timelines, approvals, and more. Once they define workflows, they’ll also be monitoring those by looking at analytics to identify roadblocks keeping the team from meeting production goals. That person could then tweak processes to resolve any challenges.
Email Marketing Operations Manager
Email is an effective channel for content distribution, nurturing, and lead conversions. Advanced marketing teams often have numerous nurture drips. The email expert will set up these within technology. These can be very complex and operate on if/then scenarios.
The other part of this job is email marketing analytics. Every campaign should be measuring open rates, click rates, MQL (marketing qualified lead) numbers, and other metrics. The email marketing operations team’s responsibility is to analyze performance and what’s working to drive engagement.
Digital Marketing Operations Specialists
This team owns website-related initiatives. They aren’t webmasters exactly but focus more on measuring engagement on the website with all the proper links and tags. They also deliver those stats to understand traffic sources, what actions users are taking, and what’s driving conversions.
Another part of what they do has to do with website personalization. They’ll be accountable for making this happen on the backend, whether that’s something as simple as location-specific content to more sophisticated aspects of content personalization, such as customer versus prospect.
The Right People, Processes, and Technology Deliver Marketing Operations Success
Experienced team members who constantly refine processes and ensure optimal technology usage is a great formula for success. What you consider success depends on your goals. It could be hitting content throughput numbers, increasing conversion rates, or proving marketing ROI.
The operation behind your marketing is keeping all components in motion. Their collaboration with creators and strategists makes for an enterprise marketing organization that crushes its goals.
You’ll be more productive, efficient, and data-focused in your marketing efforts. When considering what technology to adopt, you’ll find that the DivvyHQ platform combines core functionality for planning, creating, distributing, and measuring content. See how it can support your marketing operations today by starting a free trial.