Take Your Marketing Operations to the Next Level

The marketing operations function enables the marketing organization to operate more like a business, with formalized processes, infrastructure, and reporting. Best-in-class marketing operations organizations develop a performance measurement process that cascades from corporate objectives to marketing objectives to marketing programs.  A best-in-class marketing operation organization should tackle three areas:  the measurement of marketing ROI and demonstration of value, balancing marketing strategy with tactics, and tying marketing success to the goals of other groups. As you evaluate your marketing operations function, you want to make sure that at a minimum it:

1. Drives the processes for budgeting and investment decisions and more effective strategic planning

2. Leads the charge for marketing performance measurement processes.

3. Identifies and implements the required infrastructure to maintain the consistent implementation of processes.

If you’re ready to take your Marketing Operations to the next level, here are five things you should tackle:

1. Collaborative and transparent planning processes to ensure alignment between marketing plans and business outcomes.

2. Increased visibility and accountability in the budgeting process and expenditure tracking that ensure alignment between investments and impact.

3. Detailed project plans that link tasks to deliverables to outcomes and define the workflow for the approval process for the deliverables to improve predictability, on-time deliverability, and cost management.

4. Systems for storing and easily searching marketing assets along with guidelines outlining usage parameters and templates that enable field marketing, sales and distribution partners to localize and customize any content for specific geographies, customer segments and customers that promote sharing and reuse and ensure that sales and field organizations can find and use these assets, resulting in better return on investment.

5. Development and deployment of dashboards that enable marketing organization to gain instant visibility into key outcome-based, operational and activity metrics.

VisionEdge Marketing, Inc, is a leading data-driven metrics-based strategic and product marketing firm located in Austin, Texas. The company specializes in consulting and learning services that help organizations use data to make fact based decisions to address market, customer, and product opportunities and to improve and measure marketing performance. For more information, go to www.visionedgemarketing.com.