How Marketing Operations Can Help Your Startup Grow

Congratulations! You’ve launched your startup and you’re beginning the process of marketing your product or service. Before you know it, you’ll have a tsunami of requests for marketing projects that will completely overwhelm whomever you have in that role.

That’s where marketing operations come in. According to Gartner, “marketing operations is the function of overseeing an organization’s marketing program, campaign planning and annual strategic planning activities. Other responsibilities include technology and performance measurement and reporting and data analytics.”

Don’t get it twisted, though. Marketing operations (MarOps) is distinct from marketing strategy. The latter is about determining the objectives and tactics that will advance your business’ brand, reputation, lead generation and customer experience. The former is responsible for implementing the machine that will get everything done.

It’s an important thing to get right from the start, before you’ve created workflows, approval processes and productivity tools that potentially bog you down before you get any momentum. In this article, we’ll look at how marketing operations can help your startup with:

• Improved efficiency
• Better ROI
• Enhanced collaboration
• Scalability
• Competitive advantage

Improved Efficiency

Even if you consider your marketing efforts to be relatively small scale at the moment, you’ll be surprised how many necessary projects begin to stack up. At minimum, you’re going to need marketing research, marketing strategy, a logo and a website. Even a simple website breaks down into dozens of other tasks like copywriting, photography selection and graphic design.

How you organize and prioritize all of those projects will greatly determine how quickly and well they are done. Whether you’re using a simple spreadsheet like Excel or a more robust project management tool like Asana, Basecamp or Workfront, it’s all got to be wrangled somehow.

As you work with many stakeholders from the board of directors to front line staff, you’ll need to clearly communicate realistic timelines for the projects they’ve proposed. Creating service level agreements (SLAs) for common marketing processes like design of a graphic will help. From the moment a request is made, you can share when the asset can be reasonably expected.

As your marketing organization grows (internally and externally), you’ll undoubtedly have moments where one person or team is overwhelmed while another has plenty of bandwidth. A good MarOps function should include a way for you to have visibility on that. If your graphic designer has 12 projects that are due in 3 days and the total hours required for that is 52, then you’re going to need to make some quick decisions.

Libby Chambers is the chief strategy, product and marketing officer for Western Union. “There isn’t a huge amount of magic to it,” she says about marketing efficiency and the data it requires to obtain it. “It’s just getting it all in one place and being able to produce analysis and information that people can use to make decisions… Digital marketing has massively enabled that.”

Better ROI

Startups are all about getting the best possible return on investment. Maybe you’ve already observed that not all marketing requests are created equal. One person’s “urgent” is another’s back burner project. It can be hard to tell someone that the video they want made isn’t going to be prioritized in the near future.

One way of making this a bit easier is to rank projects by their type and prioritize them by which are most likely to generate revenue (if that’s your startup’s main objective at the moment). Once you’ve done that, the conversation pivots from “Sorry, we can’t get to that for a while” to “That request falls under our Product Roadmap category, which we need to prioritize behind Demand Generation for the next month. I hope you understand.”

It’s not a bad idea to get all senior leaders on the same page about what those priorities are, to minimize drama when someone needs to wait a while on their request.

You’ll also likely get to that moment where someone asks “A blog article takes how long to create?!” (Or video, or infographic, or white paper or trade booth.) “Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good” is wise counsel when you’ve got limited resources and seemingly unlimited marketing projects to knock out. While it’s certainly important to create effective marketing materials that are on brand and high-quality, it’s equally important to create them quickly so they can be deployed and start generating results.

You’ve made an investment in your marketing plan and marketing tools and it’s critical to get the most out of them that you can. An effective, efficient marketing operations function should make that a primary focus.

“In principle, managers should try to estimate the full cost of the marketing activity, including creative development, media spend, and customer-facing staff time,” says Jill Avery, a senior lecturer at Harvard Business School.

So how will you know when you’re getting the best ROI on your marketing efforts? Analytics. You’ll have metrics for all kinds of things:

• Hours spent on marketing projects
• Labor costs for those projects
• Performance data for social media, email, website, podcast, etc.
• Brand KPIs for consumer sentiment, recognition, share of voice, etc.
• Data for sales, revenue, customer retention and customer success

Part of your marketing operations function should be pulling all of that data into dashboards that give you a sense of the bang you’re getting for the buck, AKA ROI.

Enhanced Collaboration

Most successful marketing projects require the skill sets and efforts of more than one person in a marketing department. A writer might hand off to an editor, who hands off to a designer, a web developer and finally a marketing manager to approve the final product. It’s just like a relay race in a track event: if those hand-offs don’t happen cleanly, you’re going to lose.

A critical aspect of marketing operations is making sure that a resource is notified promptly, with a clear deadline and all the information they need to do the job right. If they have conflicting priorities, there needs to be a way for them to flag the problem. And if they don’t get their work done on time, it can’t linger for a week or more until someone finally notices.

Of course, collaboration doesn’t need to happen simply within the Marketing team. Other team members in Sales, Product, Customer Success and even Accounting must work well with Marketing in order for the business to thrive. In particular, the relationship between Marketing and Sales should vibe like peanut butter and jelly.

“The process to determine the go-to-market approach and target audience often falls to marketing alone,” notes Gartner. “They develop personas, understand the market and collect data about buyers and the product. But the sales team has plenty to add to this conversation. They spend all day talking to buyers and thus understand their challenges on a granular level. It is critical to bring together the broad perspective of marketing and the specific perspective of sales to identify the most likely customers. This is relevant whether you are focused on leads or accounts.”

I worked for a company once where one team consistently didn’t do their work on time. The CEO would bang his fist on the table and complain loudly about everyone’s incompetence. None of us wanted to publicly throw the responsible team under the bus, so we took those hits with them. It was incredibly frustrating. Eventually, someone created a workflow tool that showed responsible teams and deadlines, and a row would light up in bright red when a deadline was missed. As soon as the CEO had that visibility, his ire was directed to the appropriate place and the situation was resolved. Funny how transparency can have that effect.

Of course, effective collaboration shouldn’t require such political wrestling. You just need tools and end-to-end processes that help people work smoothly together.

Scalability

According to McKinsey and Company, “While most companies tend to focus on launching new businesses, the real value comes from being able to scale them up. Based on an analysis of U.S. venture-capital (VC) data, two-thirds of value is created when a company scales up to penetrate a significant portion of the target market.”

Marketing ops professionals make that scaling up happen. Once you’ve created (for example) an optimized blog article that generates 5 new customers in a month, it won’t be long before you’re going to want a steady stream of other articles that do the same. Why settle for a few customers from one asset when you can create marketing campaigns that create hundreds? Also, someone in your organization will want to try new content marketing channels (TikTok! A podcast! Influencers!) and that translates to more and more work for your marketing team.

So who’s going to do all that work? A key part of marketing operations is not just how efficient you can make your internal team but whether they should be doing specific tasks to begin with. You may find that a contractor or vendor can do the work better, faster, and/or more affordably.

Your marketing operations manager will need to assess the strengths, weaknesses, gaps and costs of all available resources and direct work to the right person or team. That complicated email marketing campaign targeting three distinct audiences and six different products might get done twice as fast by an agency and at half the cost. Making that determination requires many conversations and calculations.

To truly scale and optimize your marketing, look beyond one-off, highly-customized assets to automated channels that move prospects further down the marketing funnel without human intervention. Not every prospect is ready to “convert” into a paying customer right away, so you’ll need to find ways to nurture their understanding of your brand and its value in a dynamic customer journey.

This could look like a series of weekly emails automatically sent to people who downloaded a white paper from your website. Perhaps the white paper did a great job of identifying a particular problem and different ways to resolve it, and your email campaign can illustrate your customer success stories and product features.

Drip campaigns like that can be created in any number of customer relationship marketing (CRM) tools like Eloqua, HubSpot and Braze. You may even want to develop a rubric for determining what moves a marketing qualified lead (MQL) to a sales qualified lead (SQL) so your Sales team isn’t forced to deal with prospects who aren’t yet ready or appropriate for that kind of engagement. You can move beyond a one-size-fits all messaging approach to one where segmentation of audiences deliver different messages at various stages of the customer lifecycle. There are plenty of marketing automation platforms that can help you with that, with all the integrations for different apps to work together. They can also protect your customer data with all the legal requirements and best practices.

With all this martech in place, you’ll want to choose a project management methodology that ensures high-volume, high-quality output. Waterfall and Agile methodologies as well as Kanban and Scrum frameworks should be evaluated to determine the best way for your teams to collaborate in a way that helps your business scale.

Competitive Advantage

Your competitors are going after many of the same customers as you. They’re creating content that they hope will resonate with that target audience and inspire them to buy. They may be attending some of the same events as your brand and literally talking to the same people.

But will their initiatives be more successful than your marketing function? It depends.

• Has their market research identified the right audiences, with enough specificity?
• Do their workflows generate content that is consistently on brand and high-quality?
• Have they found and implemented marketing technology that optimizes and scales their efforts?
• Have they scaled their marketing operations so the reach of their content matches or exceeds yours?
• Does their chief marketing officer have attribution of which channels are performing well with their target audiences? Are they able to continually streamline that performance based on the marketing data they see?
• Has their CMO calculated ROI on their marketing strategies to get the most impact possible out of every dollar they spend?

All of these things depend on marketing operations. If your marketing operations department is killing it in those areas, there’s a good chance you’ll be a step or ten ahead of your competitors.

Start building your marketing operations today

Marketing operations strategy is complicated stuff, and it can make a huge difference in the success of your startup. Done well, the efficiency, ROI, and collaboration gains put you well ahead of competitors eyeing your lunch money. The real question is how to get there. Building in-house gives you full control, deep institutional knowledge, and a team that lives your roadmap every day, but it also means months of hiring, layered salaries across ops, analytics, and tooling, and the slow climb up a steep learning curve before output starts to compound. Partnering with a specialist firm shortens that climb, because you plug into a team that has already solved these problems across dozens of similar-stage companies, brings the stack and playbooks with them, and scales up or down as your stage shifts from Series A through C. Use the considerations above as your decision inputs: the maturity of your funnel, the volume of campaigns you run, the data infrastructure you already have, and how quickly you need results. If you have the runway, the headcount budget, and the time to build, hire in-house. If you need leverage now and want senior expertise from day one, bringing in a partner is often the faster path to the same outcome.