If you talk to a handful of marketing professionals about marketing operations, most of them will nod knowingly about what you are saying, implicitly understanding what it is all about. But if you ask them how marketing operations is conducted in their company or who's the person in charge of it, maybe 1 in 10 will be able to hit the nail on the head.
Well, the thing about marketing operations is that you know it when you see it. But it's hard to pinpoint exactly what it is. Feedback we have gathered from corporate marketing executives shows the depth and breadth of marketing operations.
Generally, most executives in the know say marketing operations involves gathering and filtering a company's best practices, documenting these and communicating them to key persons within the company. The second step is to gauge how well the company adheres to these practices.
As far as focus is concerned, executives involved in marketing operations should set goals geared towards achieving greater effectiveness in strategic planning, operational decision-making and budgeting. They should take the lead in instituting processes to measure marketing performance. They should also put the necessary infrastructure is in place to make sure that processes are implemented effectively.
Perhaps the best definition is this: marketing operations is the process that concerns everything about the way marketing is done, how results are measured and the type of systemic support necessary. In a nutshell, it's the 4Ws for marketing -- who, what, when and where -- as well as the how. Or, as I like to say, it is everything concerned with “optimizing your marketing machine”!
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