Marketing Operations - WTAF?
Buckle up, this is a long one!
Since I graduated Uni back in 2000, I’ve been asked countless times “What does Marketing actually do?”
Often, this question was intended as passive/ aggressive criticism, and came from accountants, lawyers, advisors, and generally people who deal with billable hours or measurable outcomes. They worked in a black and white world, where spending $X brings $X+10% tangible income from identifiable clients. In other words, their contribution could be demonstrated in concrete data, and attributed directly back to them. Thus, they felt solely responsible for their success, which nobody helped them achieve. Despite hours of discussion, they could not see that their job depended on marketing – the CRM and data analysis that identified their target client, the brand that the client saw, the email campaign their client received, the website that their clients viewed, the proposal document that their clients studied – even the event at which they originally met their client – was all selected, written, developed, fine-tuned and facilitated by a Marketing Operations professional. For these people, I stopped wasting my breath and responded with something like “Your mother” (FYI some global accounting firm Senior Partners were not amused).
Sometimes, people would ask me this question out of a genuine desire to better understand what I did, and how my role worked to support their business. For these people, I was happy to have a longer discussion with them, in the context of that specific business.
My problem is that, marketing is basically intangible, difficult to quantify and marketing roles and functions change between one business and the next. So I was constantly redefining myself and my value as a Professional Marketer.
So how did I explain the Marketing Operations role to people? The short version was, and still is “I make stuff happen”.
The longer version? What I do is so much more than that.
I recently came across a professional in the UK named Karla Wentworth, and she says “Marketing Operations is a definition that has not been written yet” then goes on to list all of the things that Marketing Operations covers. This section is my favourite 1 minute 46 seconds https://youtu.be/NkPcfF8dt_c but the full version is almost 28 minutes https://youtu.be/TEvcz4m11qo . I encourage you to watch/ listen to the full podcast if you can, and think about your business and your marketing. Feel free to message me if you’d like to chat about anything in particular.
I’ve been managing marketing operations for 20 years – I can help you feel more confident that your marketing tasks are running efficiently, effectively and without your constant attention. Best of all, unlike upwork or fiverr – you can message or call me directly to discuss.