Is Marketing Operations The New Industry Buzzword?

The rise of Marketing Operations

Marketing Operations is not a new thing, necessarily. It has been around for years – however, in the last few years, it has seen a steep rise in its importance.

Twenty years ago, Marketing Operations was focused much more in consumer research. But, with the increase in use of technology and tools, Marketing Operations has taken a massive shift towards software based solutions with the purpose to increase efficiency and drive agility within an ever-changing environment.

This constant change, driven by the rapid developments in technology, media, and consumer behaviour, leads to a new level of specialisations. Increasingly, CMOs are looking to new team structures to cope with these growing demands.

We like to look at and categorise Marketing Operations in three key areas – Process Optimisation, Technology and Tools, and Data Management.

• Process Optimisation: Ways of Working, Timelines, and Roles and Responsibilities

Flock has helped global clients like Mondelez, Campbell’s and McDonald’s to successfully transform their processes. With McDonald’s, Flock was faced with the challenge of changing a time-consuming and inefficient marketing process with lack of clarity on roles between teams. However, through a variety of carefully tailored solutions, McDonald’s was able to create more time for marketing with an Estimated 15% reduction in meetings per campaign and 25% reduction in time spent in meetings as well as the introduction of two new roles.

For more detail on this work that Flock did with McDonald’s, see our blog here

• Technology and Tools: Project Management, Tech Stack Review and Optimisation, Integration, and Asset Management Systems

During our recent engagement with eBay Classifieds Group, we worked with the global leadership team to define the four pillars of business change management they were looking to address. This included people and internal processes, the overall customer experience, all areas of data and the current and future martech requirements for a hub-based centralised delivery team.

During these early discovery activities, marketing technology was the driver of the business audit and analysis recommendation. The lack of automation and innovative marketing technologies within the business impacted delivery and development to maintain market share and gain leadership positions in existing and future markets.

Our recommendations for future investment in technologies were designed to embrace not only traditional technical platforms but to encourage disruptive thinking where social and other channels could be harnessed for maximum efficiencies in ongoing customer acquisition strategies.

See our blog post on this project for more details on the efficiencies we helped to create.

• Data Management: Reporting metrics, Analytics, Optimisation, Insights, and Programmatic

With Diageo, Flock had to build and deliver a measurement and evaluation framework that would span 50 markets, 9 brands, 16 global agencies and 14 media channels. This included elements such as a common currency for the value generated by each element of the campaign, enabling a consistent ROI calculation.

See more on this project with Diageo on our blog here.

At Flock, we pride ourselves in the success that we have created for these clients, and many others. If you are interested in learning more, please do get in touch, and we can show you some great examples of how other marketers have driven their efficiencies to win in the industry.