How to Build a Marketing Operations Team from Scratch

How does one assemble top talents in marketing and build a winning marketing operations team? Constructing a successful marketing operations team by putting together the right set of skill sets is vital for companies running modern data-driven marketing operations. But, finding and combining top talents can also be challenging as is setting the roles and responsibilities based on the skillset. 

Hence, combining specialists and forming a digital marketing team must follow through the exercise of strategic planning, understanding their skill sets, and delivery expertise. 

So, how does an organization or a CMO need to proceed step-by-step to plan strategies? What are the things they need to consider in determining roles, responsibilities, managing changes? How does one select the marketing technologies that are more fitting to their unique marketing and overall business goals?  

Setting Marketing Goals and Overall Business Objectives

This is the first step, and it starts with setting thoroughly planned and discussed business goals to lay the foundation of your new marketing operations. Many organizations grapple with establishing objectives while setting up new marketing operations processes. 

This challenge typically results from people’s lack of knowledge in how a marketing operation should function and what its capabilities should be. To overcome this challenge, start with studying existing case studies that explain how a marketing operations team functions, how the operation team interacts, and how it aligns with other team members and sales teams. Most importantly, how these benefit the overall marketing process. 

Once the marketing leader sets mission statements and sets an objective for marketing operations, it will guide the operation team in every action. Since goals and objectives set primary outcomes and create measurable steps, building a marketing team based on these goals is more goal-driven and successful.

Create a Multi-Phased Plan

Many companies assume to build a dedicated marketing operation team and adopt strategies overnight, which is impossible. Instead, organizations need to use a multi-phased strategy to construct the team successfully. To build a multi-phased marketing operation team, leaders need to consider the following components for each phase:

• Analysis of gap in MarTech stack
• Skill gap existing in the in-house team
• Establishing team members’ roles and duties
• Building organizational structure of marketing operations team

The multi-phased strategy of creating a dedicated marketing operations team includes defining goals for each stage and planning to achieve that goal in every stage. The analysis of the gap in the MarTech stack involves identifying all technologies currently in use, team members who own those platforms, how those tools are used, and what results are attainable by using those tools. 

Another major gap is noticed in the required skills among in-house team members to achieve goals set in each stage of the marketing operation plan. Perform a thorough gap analysis using a talent management program, or outsource the particular marketing operation to a professional from an agency. Find out how you can fill in your team’s skill gap and scale marketing operations in 5 ways in a restrictive budget.

Set Roles and Responsibilities

No marketing operation team can function as a unified unit without clearly structured and defined roles in place. For example, every professional of a marketing operation team should follow clearly stated roles and responsibilities which adhere to their role in the marketing operations team and overall marketing function in the company. It’s also important to determine the following factors: 

• The team member who will take the ownership of various marketing-related processes and tools from the MarTech stack. 
• Team members who will take the role and duty of customizations and timely updates of the marketing automation platform. 
• Team members who will be given access to critical technologies. 
• How marketing team members interact with other stakeholders of the organization, including the sales team, customer service team, and the IT team, among others. 
• How will they align and coordinate with other stakeholders?  

In addition to these responsibilities, leaders also need to set roles for all consultants and vendors – the marketing initiatives you execute with in-house teams and the portion you outsource to marketing agencies [Find out how outsourcing Marketo campaign execution can drive your business growth during a crisis?].

Define all these roles and responsibilities while forming your marketing operation team to make sure each member will develop a clear understanding of their function from the very beginning.

Manage Change Strategies

Building a dedicated marketing operations function from scratch during a challenging economy takes in handling obstacles and implementing the right change management strategies. Obstacles can be faced by any department, processes, marketing technologies, and budget control, among others. 

All teams of the organization should understand why founding a marketing operations team is beneficial and how it can benefit the organization. This is effective for executive team members who need this clarity to manage and reallocate the budget accordingly. 

As you rearrange and re-establish roles and duties, marketing operation team members might feel apprehensive about the newly defined responsibilities. That’s why marketing leaders need to communicate with the team clearly and constantly to explain change management.

After the marketing operations responsibilities are established, marketing leaders need to focus on reengineering and fixing obstacles. Explain with your team members why the change in strategies is necessary for marketing processes and how it will benefit the process.

Manage Technological Challenges

Another major obstacle to face in building a marketing operation process is the technology barrier. The success of the marketing operations team is dependent on the functioning of the marketing technology in use or the MarTech stack. 

Therefore, businesses need to be aware of various probable technology challenges such as shortage of integration between prime technologies, out-of-date tech in use, access limitations, lack of training, or inefficiency of team members in handling technologies.

Selection of Tools for MarTech

The evolution of MarTech has been speeding up in the last few years with the widely available technical solutions to marketing teams. With innumerable options available today, marketers and businesses are spending much more in their bloated MarTech stack than they need.  

Hence, understanding MarTech vendors and industry advancement is vital for building and managing the MarTech stack and the optimum use of the budget. Also, not all MarTech options can integrate well and make a useful stack. Make sure the MarTech stack and other software are integrated and functioning well together to support implementing your marketing strategies. 

You need to be well aware of all the features, integration capabilities, and limitations of each component of the marketing technology in place. You also need a significant amount of resources, efforts, and time to create a layout for marketing technology to show team members how you can extract the utmost use and function from each marketing technology’s subscription.

Conclusion

Your dedicated marketing operations team must be agile and capable of tweaking as per the changing situations and changing the MarTech landscape. Finally, don’t ever hesitate to seek help as and when needed to be able to adapt to the changing economy, customer demands, new processes, and methodologies. 

We help businesses with flexible skill gaps and MarTech solutions to build an effective marketing operation team. We also provide on-demand training, thorough MarTech assistance from selection, migration, implementation to optimization to ensure maximum returns on your investment. 

Our certified and experienced marketing operation experts will guide you in team building, especially when your budget is restrictive – want to have a chat with us? Click contact us to drop us a “Hello” at info@marrinadecisions.com or DM us via Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn.