Marketing Operations Elevates Public Relations and Communications Prof…

Is your marketing department taking advantage of MOM and MRM? Do you have

BAM and DAM systems in place? Do you know how to measure NPV? Do you already

know what I’m talking about?

If so, you may not be a “Quant” (a marketing scientist or specialist in marketing

analytics) but you’re certainly ready to seize a leadership role and stimulus your

company into the new world of Marketing Operations.

Marketing Operations (AKA MOM or Marketing Operations Management) seeks to

enhance performance and measure ROI by sustainable processes, best

practices and clearly-defined metrics. Admired technology companies (like Intel, IBM

and Adobe) are hiring VP or director-level individuals to improve and fine-tune their

marketing organizations to run with an operational focus. Market research firms like

Gartner and Forrester are also rolling out new research sets with a heavy focus

on Marketing Operations. And the first U.S. conference on Marketing Operations was

held in New York this past May.

Marketing operations tackles:

(1) measuring the performance of marketing effectiveness;

(2) ensuring appropriate marketing organization;

(3) deploying marketing processes, tools and infrastructure;

(4) managing marketing skill development; and

(5) building a sense of community across the marketing discipline.

Why should you care?

For starters, Marketing Operations is a great means for becoming more strategic

and less buried in task. It equips you to talk the language that C-level executives

appreciate, take control of your destiny and ultimately become more valuable to

your organizations. Best of all, you can address head-on the issues that affect you

directly and also represent corporate America’s biggest challenges, including how

to:

(1) define meaningful success metrics from which performance can be measured

(one kind of measure, NPV or Net Present Value, calculates the present value of an

investment’s future net cash flows minus the initial investment);

(2) optimally leverage resources in increasingly thinner marketing departments

(MRM or Marketing Resource Management focuses on workflow, role definition,

project management, planning, budgeting and other resource allocation strategies);

(3) more effectively manage shared knowledge so insight is retained already after meaningful

employees move on, enabling more informed decision-making (knowledge

management strategies include BAM or Brand Asset Management, and DAM or

Digital Asset Management); and perhaps most importantly

(4) replicate successful marketing programs so marketing best practices are

institutionalized (and you aren’t).