Digital marketing operations involves the application of capabilities, processes, structures, and technologies to cost-effectively exploit and scale the interactivity, targeting, personalization, and optimization of digital channels.
Marketing operations have a critical role in driving bottom-line growth. That capability directly enables the speed, agility, iterative development, experimentation, and responsiveness that successful companies need to react to and shape the marketplace.
Marketers are aware of what needs to be done, and many are taking action. But that often boils down to implementing new technology platforms, adding head count, or increasing digital allocations within the marketing-spending mix. While these are important steps, they won’t solve the challenge.
Fundamentally, modern marketing operations calls for the thoughtful, deliberate development of new processes, coordination, and governance. We’ve identified five attributes of effective marketing operations.
1. Truly understanding customers Like any meaningful relationship, getting to know your customers well is a commitment. Tracking, analyzing, and interpreting customer behavior and attitudes should be an ongoing, often moment-to-moment undertaking that is critical not only to targeting and shaping relevant content and experiences but also to optimizing how they’re delivered—an important capability, given that during the buying process consumers add an average of 1.7 brands to those they are considering.
2. Delivering a superior experience What happens when customers have a bad experience? They stop doing business with a company. And a souring of the customer experience can take place at any point, which is why getting the consumer journey right requires getting everything right. Meeting customer expectations calls for mapping out each of the steps that define the entire customer experience, highlighting not only the technologies and processes needed to enable a smooth journey but also the various functions across the organization that must coordinate to deliver it.
3. Selecting the right marketing technology . Delivering on omnichannel customer experiences requires marketing technology that can automate processes, personalize interactions, and coordinate actions. Marketing technologists, in particular, have a critical role in navigating the ecosystem of more than 2,000 marketing-technology providers to create solutions that deliver the most effective customer experiences. They effectively act as a bridge between the customer experience and marketing operations.
4. Implementing processes and governance . Technology enables the customer experience, but it requires people, processes, and governance to ensure technology does what it’s supposed to do. The failure to establish guidelines for how business units might pilot new technologies, how data will be shared across the organization, or which capabilities will be managed in-house versus by external agencies and partners could result in a patchwork of efforts across the enterprise that sow confusion and hamper attempts to scale.
5. Using the best metrics to drive success . Technology is now catching up to the holy grail of marketing: the ability to monitor, track, and manage the effectiveness of marketing investments. Measures of marketing effectiveness need to move beyond what has often been limited to a narrow set of metrics. As companies become more customer-centric, for example, metrics should focus on customer activity rather than simply product or regional activity, as is often the case. Metrics should also reinforce new behaviors and processes, such as how fast a product is launched or how quickly lessons from the field can successfully be integrated into the next marketing offer. To be most effective, however, metrics need to deliver insights quickly—often in real time—so the business can actually act.
Source - McKinsey&Company (Adapted from article written by David Edelman and Jason Heller)