Flock’s Top Tips for Marketing Operations

Flock recently partnered with the WFA to conduct a piece of research on the evolution of the Marketing Operations function.

View a sample of the study here;

Watch our webinar on the findings here.

From this research Flock have developed six top tips for marketing operations:

1 Processes

Understand your existing processes, structures, tools and technology. Once you understand what capabilities you currently have, you can start to visualise where you want/ need to be in two or three years to stand out from your competitors. To help you to frame where you want to be, review your customer experience. Do you have a full overview of your customer journey? Are you building customer feedback and insight into your marketing processes as well as team and agency appraisals, or is it a once a year thing that sits on a shelf? What should your customer experience look and feel like? Re-engineer your processes based on your vision and the customer needs, not on yours.

2 Standardisation & technology

Exceptional marketing processes are essential. By creating standardised templates and effectively using technology it will give marketers more time to focus on what they are brilliant at and release funds to invest back into the brand. With the continued emergence of different communication & commerce channels, marketers are getting swamped by day to day operational issues.

3 Skills Assessment

Especially in the current situation with COVID-19, many advertisers are accelerating plans for their marketing skills assessment to identify a combination of the technical & team marketing skills and marketing infrastructure (like technology and data) that you need to win in today’s and tomorrow’s competitive environment.

4 People

You must provide the right environment where evolving and learning are central to your values. Talent is the platform of all businesses, so it is vital to attract and retain the right people. This is not just for creatives but for marketing operations professionals too. Think about ways you can make marketing operations, the environment, and the tools we use, cool!

5 Agency ecosystem

Wherever you are on your journey with your agency partners, always align with all your internal stakeholders and review what marketing functions should be delivering in-house and what you should outsource to external partners. Sounds obvious but it is a pitfall we have seen many people fall into and therefore they have found marketing transformation almost impossible.

6 Data risk mitigation

GDPR is the first of many data initiatives that will impact our business. Get under the skin of how they will affect you and how you set yourselves up for success to benefit from these changes. Don’t lose sight of your legal obligations and the restrictions around content usage and licensing, especially as we continue to use new content sources including UGC.