What is Marketing Operations? Marketing operations is the science and art of optimizing efficiency and effectiveness of the Marketing organization.

The purpose of marketing operations is to increase organizational efficiency, agility, and value.

Whereas typical Marketing Operations (MO) practices focus on metrics dashboards, resource/asset management, and automation of marketing processes — the future of Marketing Operations has greater impact on the company’s success by integrating Marketing strategy, guidance, processes, metrics, ecosystem and technology, with the aim of running the Marketing organization as a value center, driving long-term company growth.

What is Marketing Operations Maturity? Marketing operations maturity is the implementation level of these 10 essentials: 1) The Automator, 2) The Quantifier, 3) The Modeler, 4) The Optimizer, 5) The Chaos Minimizer, 6) The Social Butterfly, 7) The Customer Conscience, 8) The Connector, 9) The Resource Expander, 10) The Strategic Opportunist.

What is Customer-Centric Marketing? The degree to which the entire Marketing department centers everything about their work on helping customers reach their intended outcomes.

Sign of mature customer-centric marketing include:

1) Co-creating marketing with customers.

2) Silo-bridging

3) Dedicated customer experience budget

4) Balanced emphasis of marketing effort across the end-to-end customer life cycle

As Peter Drucker said: “The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well the product or service fits him and sells itself.”

What is Strategic Marketing? Strategic marketing is unwavering focus on core-growth customers’ views and goals as north star of every Marketing does.

How Does Marketing Operations Impact Customer Experience? Marketing Operations sets the tone for customers’ introduction to your company and how well the customer lifecycle is supported by marketing. This tone is established by the external and internal marketing metrics selected and how they’re managed, how campaigns are setup and optimized, how customers are segmented, how well marketing collaborates with internal and external stakeholders, and how marketing talent is developed.

Customer experience goes well beyond a momentary impression: it’s cumulative. Closing the gap between what’s promised and what’s delivered is vital to good customer experience, brand integrity, relationship strength, and customer lifetime value.

What is Marketing Management Maturity? Marketing management maturity is the level of accountability, alignment, and agility of the marketing organization from the perspective of customers, channel partners, alliance partners, suppliers, and internal stakeholders.

Levels of maturity are mobilize, operationalize, align and embed.

• Mobilize: discover stakeholders’ realities and expectations
• Operationalize: emphasize stakeholders’ interests across all marketing strategies, governance, processes, metrics, technology, and infrastructure
• Align: close the gap between stakeholders’ realities and expectations
• Embed: make organizational agility (nimbleness) a way of life

What is a Marketing Ops Maturity Journey? A roadmap toward balanced integration of marketing ecosystem, strategy, guidance, process, metrics, technology and infrastructure.

• Ecosystem: key drivers (change management, shared vision) that enable a Marketing organization’s successful collaboration and alignment with key stakeholders
• Strategy: fact-based decision making
• Guidance: competency development, marketing governance, portfolio management
• Process: creating efficient and effective handoffs
• Metrics: customer profitability, predictive analytics, enterprise metrics alignment
• Technology: enterprise marketing management
• Infrastructure: talent, reporting, budget