More campaigns, target groups and channels – innovations are making marketing more complex. This means the view of overarching goals and functions can easily get muddled. Marketing operations marketing helps to stay on track in this respect. It is one of the hot topics within the industry in 2021, as a survey shows.
Marketing operations management: the definition
Digitalisation offers marketing today a diverse range of channels and opportunities. At the same time, these advantages make the challenges for companies more complex and lead to a higher number of threads to control: growing budgets, projects that run in parallel and which are closely interconnected. More today than ever before. But the required communication and organisation cannot always keep up with the intensified pace.
A well-integrated marketing operations management (MOM) can improve this. It takes over the role of an overarching, structuring hand within the agile agency routine. Marketing operations management is in charge of implementing strategies, keeping an eye on process flows, pushing through important projects and then monitoring and analysing them. What’s more, they collaborate with the Sales and Finance departments when it comes to budget optimisation.
Survey: marketing operations management takes highest priority for decision-makers
The functions named above are gaining more and more interest. Just how significant marketing operations management is today was what BrandMaker wanted to find out, a developer of software for marketing operations and marketing resource management based in Karlsruhe, Germany. They surveyed 100 marketing leaders from global enterprises in the areas of retail, financial services and fast moving consumer goods (FMCG) employing more than 500 members of staff.
The current survey, BrandMaker PULSE (German), showed amongst others that nearly all those responsible for marketing (94 per cent) are battling with inefficient processes and workflows. They frequently named the following aspects in connection with this:
- Inadequate technology (39 per cent)
- Lack of transparency over real-time budgets (34 per cent)
- Difficulties integrating relevant information from the entire companies into meaningful results (33 per cent)
- Tedious adaptations of campaigns for an optimal global impact (28 per cent)
- Rigid processes which prevent collaboration, agility and fast decision-making (29 per cent)
To overcome these barriers, those responsible for marketing want to give their departments more space for marketing operations management in 2021. This stated 62 per cent of those questioned. This makes MOM just as important as the marketing strategy. The topics brand development (41 per cent), finance management (40 per cent), campaign management (35 per cent) and pipeline and lead management (26 per cent) are less important, according to the survey.
Although marketing operations management takes priority amongst those questioned, only 38 per cent of them see it as being their core competence. At the same time, nearly all of them (99 per cent) want to improve their marketing processes. Here is where they attribute great potential to technological solutions. MarTech Stacks, in other words software tools, play an especially leading role. A total of 51 per cent of the survey’s participants expect to gain “holistic transparency and control over the otherwise stand-alone marketing systems and tools to date”.
These are the advantages of MOM
The range of marketing operations management is not so much individual campaigns, but mainly the organisation and monitoring of the entire department. It creates transparency and shows what works well and where optimisation is needed. It can also share its insights with other divisions and companies. The goals: agility, collaboration and customer-centricity. Ideally, MOM improves the profitability of the entire company.
A key role in achieving these is the analysis of all marketing activities as well as individual project phases. Based on (meta) data and the comparison with previous campaigns, (automatically generated) recommendations for improvement, for instance, can be determined for upcoming projects. On top of this, MOM systems enable all stakeholders to simultaneously access relevant information from a centralised hub.
