How to Design Systems for Streamlined Marketing Operations

Julius Caesar has a famous quote, and that is, “I came, I saw, I conquered.” When you embark on multiple exciting marketing initiatives with many colleagues, you need a good plan, but you also need centralization. Without organized marketing operations ensuring that all parts of the marketing strategy are working with one another, things will become chaotic quickly.

How do you know who is working on what? What parts of the projects are complete? If they are complete and started, did they work?

A marketing team can produce a big impact on a company and increase revenue if successful. Unfortunately, if you are unsuccessful, it can be a large, wasteful expense. No one wants a wasteful expense.

Streamlining your marketing operations is key to both success and growth. Chaos, and zero accountability, will not work, especially during times of expansion.

You came, you saw, and now you must conquer!

If you are ready to clean up your marketing initiatives and get organized, you must design an excellent system. To shed some light, here is exactly how marketing operations can get it done. Now, let’s get to the details.

What Does Marketing Operations Do?

Let’s give credit where credit is due. Think about what a coach does for a sports team: 

• Carries a whistle
• Schedules practice
• Sets up drills
• Directs games
• Keeps a score sheet
• Makes sure players arrive on time
• Ensures that a player will play their position
• Maps out a good team play on a dry-erase board
• Creates a winning team

Well, marketing operations are a lot like that. They oversee a company’s marketing plans. Like a coach, marketing operations strive to create a winning team because of all their planning.

Marketing operations is the part of the marketing team which plans campaigns and strategic annual activities. They also manage marketing software and determine marketing metrics.

Tackling the Fragmentation

Fragmentation can be a common challenge for multiple teams working on separate projects, even if they roll up to one common goal. How do you get a handle on this? If your marketing department suffers from separation and discord, this is certainly not a foundation for success.

Unfortunately, some functions of marketing will work in isolation. Without a connection to the overall strategy, data can get lost. It can be available in a mismatching format or mishandled completely.

Effective Communication

SHRM recently mentioned a report where employees revealed that the typical loss for their company is $62.4 million annually because of inadequate communication. This is from communication that is lacking “to and between employees.”

Lack of team communication can play a negative role in your marketing strategies and hurt results. 

Marketing operations can fix all of this by rolling out the right marketing software. No more fragments as you put together the pieces. There will be centralization.

It is the technology that marketing operations use that is a key part of streamlining all efforts. When you centralize, you can easily see the relevance each piece has to the entire strategy.

One Central Goal

While each part of marketing has its own goal, really, they all wrap up to just one. The overarching “bullseye” on the marketing target for everyone generates more sales for the company. With this outcome in mind, the following strategies are usually parts of the plan:

• Brand awareness
• Developing customer relationships
• Thought leadership
• Lead generation
• Achieving traffic targets

While each part has the same goal, often, companies keep them separate from one another. This can have a negative impact.

There are many people involved in all these pieces, from social media to outbound marketing, and marketing specialists with a wide range of skills. Marketing operations must streamline all the staff members who are involved with a part of the organization’s marketing initiative to achieve the company’s set goal. They must create standards.

The Help of Marketing Automation

According to recent studies, 31% of marketing professionals say that purchasing a marketing automation solution is on their task list for the upcoming year ahead. Meanwhile, 42% of marketing and sales professionals agree that marketing automation will be a piece of their business’s overall digital strategy.

While marketing automation simplifies processes and eliminates unnecessary manual work, it also does a fantastic job of enhancing team collaboration.

Marketing Operations Embraces Technology

According to a recent study, 87% of employees believe leaders must rethink the way they see technology in the workplace. Plus, 84% report that companies are missing out on opportunities when not moving to modern solutions.

Marketing software with multi-functional capabilities is critical to being able to deliver a cohesive marketing operations strategy. It’s a connective tissue to help everything come together. Fragmentation and poor team collaboration happens when there is no central technology.

Imagine baking a cake. You have the recipe and all the ingredients, but you forget to add the flour before putting it in the oven. What do you think will happen when the cake comes back out of the oven?

That is why marketing operations leverage technology because when you eliminate human error and close the loops on missed communication, you won’t forget to add the flour!

The Importance of Team Collaboration

For a group to achieve the same goal, they must collaborate. Inc.com reports that businesses with effective communication are 4.5 times more likely to keep their best talent.

Further, Forbes says that staff members that work collaboratively will stick to their tasks 64% longer than a peer that works alone. This is because of higher levels of engagement. Plus, fatigue levels will lower for your marketing staff, leading to higher rates of success.

How to Get Started Streamlining

Marketing operations remove silos and make a cohesive unit. It unites systems.

Now that you know how critical marketing operations are and why streamlining is essential, let’s go through some methods on how to accomplish a streamlined approach. This is what will generate results. 

1. Define the End Solution and Work Backwards

Marketing operations must begin with identifying what they want to be achieved at the end of the streamlined process, before doing anything else. Next, they must work backward. This is how they can determine what tasks and assets will are necessary to get to the solution they want.

In creating a digital map, marketing operations will determine what technology is necessary to get from one point to another. 

2. Team Communication and Best Practices

For productivity and efficiency, good team communication is the fastest path. That said, the process still requires formalities with attention to detail.

Expectations must be clear to all the team members. This helps with accountability and execution, much like any good project management system. 

3. Delegate Based on Niche

You have many team members with different backgrounds and experiences. When selecting who does what, you want to make sure you assign the right tasks to the right team member. If someone has niche expertise, roll with it!

When you choose tasks for team members based on their capabilities, you will reach a better result. Plus, when you do not have to train and research, things move a lot faster. 

4. More Hands-on Deck

Further, you may find that no one has the experience of handling a task. Or there is so much growth in your organization (which is a good problem to have) and not enough people to handle the tasks. Marketing operations may determine that the best course of action is to hire more people to help.

5. Unnecessary Workload

As marketing operations evaluate the pieces of the process and data-driven metrics on what they achieve from each task, they may determine that something is no longer necessary. It could be money is going out the door and is not generating results. You may find that there is an unnecessary workload being performed, and you must eliminate it from all parts of the strategy and process. 

6. Outsource When Needed

You do not have to take on every task or burden internally, especially if it is cheaper to outsource. Sometimes you need to partner with a vendor that has the systems or tools already in place and invested in to help make parts of the marketing strategies run faster or smoother. If you can improve efficiency by outsourcing a part of your tasks, consider it carefully and move forward, if needed.

7. The Three Ws

It helps all team members to achieve better results when they can define the three Ws before beginning any project. It is important that marketing operations ensure they have helped with identifying them:

• What?
• Why?
• By when?

What is the task you are working on and why are you doing this task? Plus, when is your part of the project due, so that you do not let others down? 

8. Do You Need to Make Purchases or Additional Investments?

Departments are required to have budgets. You want to discuss costs before you work on projects. If you wait until later, you risk not having the funds and a project will fall to the wayside.

Marketing software and technology are critical to streamlining processes. If something else needs to be purchased, plan it upfront. For ad spending, print materials, monthly subscriptions, etc., have all members of the team get involved with predicting what the budget will be.

Before you begin any part of the set projects, run the numbers and make sure that your vision is workable. 

9. Work with Sales, Leverage Relationships

Again, when streamlining a business, it will not work if a team is working in isolation. Sales and marketing should always work with one another. Sales have relationships.

Through marketing initiatives, what is being accomplished should be projects and tasks that help sales to speed up their relationships with customers and prospects. When sales and marketing work in harmony, profits will increase.

10. Creating inspiration

You find teams will achieve higher results when operations are driven by a common belief system. When beliefs align, they inspire team members to work together for their common goal. For success, team collaboration depends on a common purpose. 

11. Leverage Collaborative Software

As your teams are moving through the processes and completing tasks, there must be a single system to work in. All documents and files must be in the central online workspace. A single system is key to transparency, improving communication, and streamlining workflow. 

12. Marketing Metrics 

According to Villanova University, 100% of marketers in the U.S. believe that, in the future, analytics and data will play a critical role, while 78% say that understanding marketing technology will be more and more of an important skill for their position.

When you are working toward steps one through eleven, as just mentioned, you are getting the wheels in motion. As team members complete projects, data, and metrics generate. The numbers tell a story about how all the efforts are going.

Is each part of the marketing strategy working? Are they successful and hitting your set goals? Are profits being generated?

Equally important is how the data is all relational. You want the numbers to tell you a story and paint the overall picture. Can you make adjustments to one area that will lead to success in another area?

When you analyze all the pieces and put the puzzle together, you can place them strategically and fulfill the goals you have set. Streamlining equals success!

SWELLEnterprise Can Help You Streamline

If you are looking to help improve marketing operations by leveraging the right marketing software, SWELLEnterprise can help! We came, we saw, and now we are working to help your business conquer.

No more switching and combining, we help you do it all. You can easily replace multiple apps with one software that will give you better marketing metrics.

Generating results means it is time to centralize and organize! Reach out to SWELLEnterprise today and try our software for free.