Marketing Operations is here to stay. Building and scaling your MOPs team the right way will ensure your success.
Your marketing operations team should be built around the expertise required to run an efficient marketing automation platform; this is the spine of the entire marketing operations department.
The general approach of a well-structured MOPs team includes an employee and eventually, a team of employees who will own the following functions within your marketing technology infrastructure.
You can efficiently and logically grow your team from a team of one to an entire Global-scale team if you apply the below approach - Stages 0 to 3.
Stage 0
This is where you are if you currently have a team of one. This is usually a marketing manager who is creating their own campaigns and using a preset marketing automation system to execute them.
Stage 1
This is where the real journey begins. Stage 1 is begun by making your first MOPs hire. Your first hire should be what is in the market being called a marketing operations manager. This person is usually an independent contributor and will own the entirety of Marketing Operations.
You can go one of two ways here, a platform focused manager OR a campaign focused manager. It depends on what your priorities are and where you are right now.
Platform Focused MOPs Manager:
Generally, this person will do the overall administration and architecture of your marketing automation platform, which can be quite complex. This person will be focused on the administration, architecture, and governance of the Marketing Automation Platform. POPs (Platform Operations) Managers tend to be systems thinkers, have had some coding exposure and are proven creative problem solvers with high attention to detail. They will spend around 60% of their time in the marketing automation platform, 30% on campaigns, around 10% of their time on analytics and time devoted to development will vary based on projects and needs.
Campaign Focused MOPs Manager:
Usually, this person will be focused on partnering with the Marketing Manager on campaign productions and will be responsible for effective measurement, A/B testing, management of multiple campaigns and will have an extremely high attention to detail. A campaign focused MOPs Manager would be your best bet if you are currently doing a substantial amount of events, webinars, emails, landing page creation, etc., especially if those campaigns are being launched under a specific SLA or with tight turnaround times.
Stage 2
Around the 12 month mark, you’ll find that you are fully invested in your marketing automation platform. You’ve gotten the tactics worked out, everything is ready to go and you’ve determined that you need to bring on a second resource. You need someone who is specialized in the pillar your marketing operations manager is least strong in - either POPs or COPs.
Your next best step is hiring a Marketing Operations Specialist. This person is usually a bit more junior than your Marketing Operations Manager. This hire will generally be less of a budget hit in that their length of experience is aligned to a lower salary than your first hire. This person will be focused on owning and building up the pillar in which they are experts. This hire will either be prospect facing in that they are coding, building, doing QA and launching everything that your potential customers and clients will see or they will be on the back end, behind the scenes deep in the tool itself.
While your Marketing Operations Specialist is flexing their muscles, the marketing operations Manager can be focused on their specialty as well as high-level data analytics and overall strategy.
At this point, with your two-person team, all the functions of a successful marketing operations team are being serviced.
Stage 3
This is when we start to look at specialties within a team. A trend I’ve been seeing is that once people get to this stage, they tend to think the logical next step is to take a managed from top-down hierarchy approach and scale the teams they have without thinking about how it could be distributed into separate teams.
As the number of campaigns and tasks your team is handling increases, it’s best to build out your Campaign (COPs) Team first because you’ll be able to build and launch MORE campaigns, faster. The more you can accomplish with the COPs part of your team, the more testing you can do and the more data you can gather.
From here, you then have the option to build up a management structure specifically for this newly created COPs Team. A COPs team manager role can be a great jumping-off point for a COPs Marketing Operations Manager, perhaps one already on your team, giving them the opportunity to get into management. They’ll know the COPs space as well as the entirety of the system and all the moving pieces within it allowing them to help with escalations while gaining leadership skills.
At full scale, the marketing operations organization should be led by a VP of Marketing Operations, someone focused on execution who has performed many of the tasks that team is performing, and who understands the full scope of the people, process, and technologies that are needed to make marketing operations scale successfully.
In this ideal structure, you will have the ability to have marketing operations and communications crafted around a martech spine. Many companies have a process of a marketing manager coming up with ideas and taking it to the MOPs team who ends up having to say "this is a great idea in theory, but it's impossible to execute". Doing everything related to marketing AND marketing operations in conjunction with a marketing manager and the MOPs team allows both teams to simplify and be far more effective. A well-structured MOPs team will be able to test, report and gather data to then roll into everything else marketing is doing, and create and scale processes themselves, so that marketing can focus on creating and innovating campaigns.
Having the right roles filled with the right people with the right skills on your MOPs team working in conjunction with the marketing manager will increase sales and revenue and prove that you have built a high-performing and exceedingly efficient MOPs team.
