How to transform your marketing operations for better campaign results
When was the last time you looked under the hood of your marketing operations? If you're like many organizations, the answer might be “not recently enough.”
Strikingly, a recent Gartner report found that “more than two-thirds of marketing leaders report high collaboration drag across major marketing programs,” meaning they are 37% less likely to exceed their marketing objectives.
While every marketer wants to focus on the campaigns and creative, what this Gartner report underscores is the true engine of successful marketing — marketing operations, processes, and the collaboration of your team are what keep your team running, scaling, and reaching the finish line of real campaign results.
What is marketing operations?
Marketing operations is the backbone of a company's marketing system and include aligning and optimizing marketing processes, technology, and data. Think of marketing operations as the engine to make your marketing campaigns run like a well-oiled machine. It's all about boosting teamwork, measuring what matters, and improving efficiency for better overall business outcomes.
At Aimtal, we talk a lot about marketing ops and marketing processes because we’ve experienced time and again just how successful teams can be when they are working from a strong foundation of collaboration and cross-functional communication. As Tucker Delaney-Winn, Growth Marketing Lead at Aimtal, recently shared:
If you’ve been feeling the strain of collaboration drag, you're not alone. We’ve consulted and built the marketing operations, processes, and systems for some of the largest B2B tech brands.
Here’s what we’ve learned about improving marketing ops and marketing processes with takeaways you can apply within your own team and organization.
Listen to us talk more about marketing operations, collaborations, and sales and marketing alignment in this episode of Called to Action.
4 steps for improving your marketing operations to achieve more efficient, collaborative teams
1. Pick your tools and systems
One of the biggest challenges, especially in larger organizations, is that teams are working on multiple different platforms. Suddenly you realize you’re trying to collaborate on larger marketing goals, but are working in different places.
There are some pretty simple tools you can use to address this. For example,
- Use shared platforms (like calendars or Trello boards) to align on top priorities and tasks.
- Create a knowledge hub as a single source of truth, where you document processes, key stakeholders, goals, strategy, and any other information to help teams succeed. Tools like Confluence and Guru are great for creating a knowledge hub for your team.
- Choose a marketing automation and CRM platform to centralize your sales and marketing efforts. One popular tool is HubSpot, which is a CRM that connects your marketing, sales, and customer service.
Once you’ve decided on your shared systems and tools, be sure to train your team on how to use them, the expectations, and the desired outcomes, like better collaboration and overall business success. Having a shared way of working is absolutely crucial, and the foundation of your marketing operations.
2. Bring your people into the process with easy touchpoints for communication and collaboration
With your tools and systems in place, the next step is to set up the workflows that will encourage much-needed cross-functional collaboration and alignment across the entire organization.
Let’s use marketing and sales teams as an example. Sales and marketing teams are two of the most important teams to be aligned and benefit greatly from focusing on marketing operations. Because the modern B2B buying journey is not linear, relying on a step-by-step flow or the traditional marketing sales handoff is just not cutting it.
Marketing and sales teams need to operate in parallel throughout the buyer journey and across the funnel, staying in close communication and regularly sharing insights with each other. When they do so, they are able to optimize both marketing and sales processes and change or pivot approaches to what’s working best for the company’s target buyers.
A possible workflow could look like this:
- Set up regular, weekly syncs between the sales and marketing team (on your shared calendar!)
- Open up your CRM and look at the lead pipeline every week — ideally, you have a shared dashboard in the system that everyone refers to and uses
- Review the leads that are coming in. Are they qualified? What leads recently became customers? What marketing and sales tactics are working best for which audiences?
- After reviewing and asking thoughtful questions to determine what’s working or could be done differently, align and document next steps for each team to take action on the findings.
- At your next weekly meeting, review progress toward your action items from the previous meeting and then repeat the process.
A regular cadence of meetings with sales, leadership, and other key teams opens the door to regular communication and collaboration, allowing marketing teams to gather valuable insights that can then be incorporated into marketing strategies and content.
3. Align on goals and outcomes
An important thing to remember is that marketing process is not just about setting up tools, meetings, and syncs. Your marketing operations and marketing processes are working toward something much larger — having the systems and structure in place to map your marketing priorities and success back to the broader goals of the organization.
Marketing leaders must understand the company goals and build their marketing operations to support those priorities. When it comes time to present results to senior leadership, you’ll know you are working toward the right goals and be able to present marketing metrics that demonstrate success.
4. Celebrate successes frequently and generously
Remember: humans are the core of your marketing process. Yes, we need to collaborate, work efficiently, and stay in regular alignment. But we also need to celebrate wins and connect success back to the people and processes that make those successes possible. At Aimtal, celebrating our team is a weekly occurrence. Gratitude, recognition, and celebration go a long way toward encouraging collaboration and building team connections.
What does it look like when these four steps come together? Here’s a case study that will give you an inside look: How Aimtal helped 3CLogic increase revenue and engage leads at every stage of the funnel.
Start refining and scaling your marketing ops
Okay, so I want to be a marketing process leader. Where should I start? My recommendation: Start with an audit. Assess the following:
- Current marketing processes and systems
- Current goals (both qualitative and quantitative) and performance of the goals
- Methods and tools for collaboration and communication
- Apps and and systems your marketing team is using for all programs
- Apps and systems that other departments are using, especially sales
With the audit in hand, you can start pinpointing areas for improvement and begin to implement the four key tactics above.
Depending on your organization, your marketing process may be more or less complex. For B2B companies, for example, the buyer journey is non-linear and involves multiple decision-makers, meaning you need to design your processes and campaigns with that complexity in mind.
One final parting word. At Aimtal, we take an integrated approach to marketing so that we can build campaigns that map back to company goals, foster closer collaboration with sales, and continuously refine marketing operations to significantly improve campaign results and overall marketing effectiveness.
Learn more about what goes into an integrated marketing strategy.
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