What is operational marketing? Why would I need to worry about having an effective operational marketing team? Well, in short, operational marketing is marketing to operate efficiently. It is the business of marketing, the thinking and implementation of marketing techniques in order to have a successful business.
Having a proficient operational marketing team ensures that your business’ marketing campaigns are running smoothly. The operational marketing team primarily focuses on:
- Data management: managing customer relationships, primarily done through a CRM. This entails ensuring customers are enrolled in workflows and sequences, depending upon where they are in the funnel.
- Reporting: Do you know if you are making any money? What about how many people visited your website or if there were any demos scheduled for the month? These numbers and many more are accounted for in the monthly marketing reports. Operational marketers develop these reports and present them so that you are able to determine the overall effectiveness of a marketing campaign.
- Market research: Do you have any ideas what your competitors are up to? What about if you wanted to release a new flavor for a product but had no real idea what the flavor profile consisted of? Market research is just as the name implies, researching about what is going on within your target market. What are your competitors doing that you should be doing, but better?
- Campaign operations: This is on the back-end of the reporting. Operational marketers ensure that marketing campaigns are running smoothly -- tweaking as needed in order to meet the specific goal or outcome that was established in the campaign planning stage.
- Strategic planning: Marketing strategy -- how and what will you produce during the campaign to effectively increase the growth of your business? Operational marketers take care of the planning, allowing you to focus on the growing.
- Process improvement: If something is not working with the campaigns or something needs to be fixed, operational marketers make sure that this is done in a timely manner. They are constantly improving upon processes.
- Budgets: They make sure that you are not overspending on campaigns -- primarily advertising campaigns.
- Lead sourcing: Finding and discovering prospective customers
Each of these areas have one goal: become a more accountable, efficient, profitable, and competitive business. They use a variety of tools such as your products, price points, promotions, advertising, and customer service in order to make this happen. Operational marketers are in charge of the long-term goals and branding of a business. These individuals essentially develop an operational marketing plan which serves as a “road map” for all marketing activities for the year. All of which is included in what was outlined above. All the while you are on the front lines, focusing on developing and growing your business.
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