Picture this: you’ve secured executive buy-in on a marketing automation platform. One with all the bells and whistles – but there is just one thing missing. You’re not quite sure how to bring this investment to life.
What you expected from this investment was a fast-track to success and maximizing your Marketo value realization, but you quickly learn that while you have an amazing marketing operations team, there are some gray areas that could be hindering your growth.
It’s no wonder that marketers only utilize 58 percent of their MarTech stack’s potential.
After working on more than 1,500 projects in Marketo, we’ve learned a thing or two about marketing operations confidence. Our team of Marketo consultants have partnered with countless marketing operations teams to instill confidence through a technical and human approach, and we’re here to share that insight with you.
Step One: Find The Right People
Above all, ensuring that you have a team of experienced, agile marketers that are able to work well together is paramount to instilling marketing operations confidence.
Let’s begin with who exactly you’ll need on your team.
The Data Analyst
Accurate and actionable data is at the core of your business’ success.
Your data analyst should strive for excellence in data collection, understand post-campaign metrics, and interpret contribution to revenue. From standardizing form fields, KPIs and dashboards, to streamlining the data collection and reporting processes, they see the patterns and connect the dots on a higher level.
As a result, they are able to provide technically-sound advice for future campaigns, targets, and spending.
The Senior Marketing Operations Manager (or Marketo Admin)
This is the kind of superstar who understands the power of Marketo and realizes its ability to drive innovation, streamline processes, improve workflows, and foster results.
Your MOps manager acts as the Marketo Admin, seeking to “protect” Marketo from untrained users, in addition to spearheading continual creation and adoption of Marketo best practices — such as templates, documentation, reusable campaign elements, and center of excellence.
The MOPs manager constantly looks for opportunities, including potential new marketing automation technologies that make a positive impact on the business, as well as its people, processes, and customers. They lead the implementation followed by overseeing effective and efficient campaign execution.
Marketing Operations Specialist or Manager
Your MOPs specialist is a powerhouse— a tireless machine creating and launching campaigns in Marketo. Acting as the go-between between creative teams and field marketers, your marketing operations specialist collects campaign materials, creates lists and segmentations within Marketo, seeks campaign approvals, and pushes the button to launch. If you’re an organization with high campaign volume, you’ll likely need multiple MOps specialists, reporting to your Marketo Admin or Senior Marketing Operations Manager.
And, then there is you.
The Fearless Marketing Operations Leader
Sandwiched between the MOps team and the CMO, you oversee the marketing operations engine of the organization, fluently speaking both “technology” and “business” so that you can effectively translate business goals and vision into action items for your team.
Once you’ve secured the right talent, you can progress to the next step.
Step Two: Understand the Best Approach
While all organizations aim to maximize the full value of their marketing automation investment, they often fall short.
That’s why we’ve developed our Value Realization Framework — a tool that allows your marketing operations team to achieve the true potential of Marketo.
Beyond a framework for approaching projects as outlined above, marketing operations confidence can also be increased by following these three steps:
- Take a consultative approach: As MOps teams work with other business stakeholders, you will want to take a consultative approach. Employ thorough discovery, show deep expertise, use methodical processes, and a genuine love for what you do to profoundly understand the stakeholder’s needs. As a result, you can gain alignment on your shared objectives and deliver a holistic solution.
- Collaborate: You will never want to make a project’s success dependent on a single person. Collaborating allows your team to achieve greater business continuity, faster time to value, and higher quality outcomes.
- Instill proven, methodical processes: One of the best ways to increase efficiency and get more from your MarTech investment is by utilizing proven frameworks and processes.
Now that you’ve gained an understanding of how to achieve Marketo value realization, let’s take a look at some ways you can error-proof your marketing operations strategy.
Project management
We didn’t mention a project manager earlier, but they are a critical player in this approach.
Working with your organization’s project management team will ensure your projects are aligned around your company’s objectives, timelines, and deliverables. The project manager can also track project status, changes in scope, and budget.
Change management
In a nutshell, you’ll want to involve your team from the start, including establishing project milestones, feedback loops, staff training, user acceptance monitoring, post-project check-ins, and ongoing optimization.
Documentation
Often, this step is forgotten or de-prioritized because of limited resources.
To ensure faster build times and easier updates later on, you must create your project blueprint and paper trail of every decision, process, and design detail.
Quality Assurance
This means having internal pre-launch reviews to result in failsafe and flawless execution, predictable quality, and repeatable results.
Step Three: Celebrate Your Team
Now, there is a human side to instilling marketing operations confidence. This step will focus on how you can build and support your MOPs team.
Here are four ways to get started:
#1: Team culture
Many organizations have implemented virtual happy hours, but consider taking your cyber social gatherings to the next level. From theme and topic-based gatherings to casual virtual coffee breaks, create opportunities for the team to connect, share details of their day, and know they are not alone in marketing operations.
#2: Recognize and celebrate employees
Nothing builds self-esteem like authentic praise, positive feedback, and yes, even tangible rewards. Celebrating wins— no matter how big or how small— also helps to meet employee esteem needs. At MERGE, any employee can jump into our #Announcements channel and provide kudos. And, they do…often. It’s great.
#3: See the person, not just the employee
If you haven’t started seeing your employees as parents, someone’s significant other, son or daughter, now is the time.
At MERGE, we have Slack channels for music lovers, readers, makers, and more. A study from the HAAS School of Business at UC Berkeley found that employees who feel like people around them genuinely care are 43 percent more effective and productive.
#4: Be a brand that employees can be proud of
71 percent of employees surveyed say a work culture supportive of giving and volunteering is imperative or very important, according to a survey by America’s Charities. Winning brands attract top talent – be a brand your employees can be proud of.
Throughout it all, be sure to enjoy the journey – and the destination. That’s one of our philosophies at MERGE when helping our customers achieve marketing operations confidence.
Take your marketing operations to the next level
Frustrated with the outcomes of working with another Marketo partner? We invite you to book an introductory call with us. Let us demonstrate how we’re different and what results we can achieve together. Get in touch.