Do either of these scenarios describe your current situation?
You’ve been in and around marketing, perhaps as a marketing generalist, for a number of years, but have always looked on longingly as colleagues of yours played with the hot new martech tools, or architected some cool automation logic, or pulled and discuss marketing success numbers. Maybe you’ve seen the salary ranges for marketing operations professionals and you want in. Maybe you just love a good puzzle.
Or, maybe you’ve been in the tool for a bit now, doing it all at the company that gave you the chance (or dropped it in your lap, could go either way), you’ve taught yourself the tool and you’re ready to move on to your next instance with a team of folks who get what you do.
So, what do you to ensure you put yourself on a career path that will be both fulfilling and lucrative?
If you’re one of those that have already been in the game for a bit, some great advice from Amy Goldfine is to remember that “a lot of companies want their marketing ops person to do every possible thing that could possibly [be] related to marketing ops and it’s just not realistic. ...now that you’re getting more advanced you can decide what you want to focus on”.
And that’s just what we’re here to do.
First things first - you have to understand that marketing operations as a title is a LOT of skills and specialties all rolled up under one umbrella name. The current market hasn’t quite caught on to this and tends to inaccurately think someone who works in MOPs can and does do ALL THE THINGS well.
As you step into the field it’s best to go in with a plan in place. Helen Abramova, recommends “finding your specific MOPS niche and focus your efforts and grow strengths in that area. MOPs are becoming broad and diverse; we have to choose what kind of MOPS we are.” She also mentioned something that is absolutely worth sharing as you move into the MOPs world, “ Just imagine that the financial issue is entirely resolved, and you have enough resources to travel, enjoy life and hobbies – what would be your next step? What would you love to do? Go from there.”
Find the path within MOPs that speaks to you.
That can be done by starting with the understanding that there are 4 different paths you can take:
- Platform Operations
- Campaign Operations
- Marketing Intelligence
- Development for Marketing Operations
Let’s break these down a bit.
Platform Operations
Being a specialist in platform operations means you are happiest elbows deep in the architecture, administration, and governance of marketing technology platforms, typically with a deep background in a marketing automation platform specifically - Marketo, Eloqua, Pardot, Hubspot to name the big players in the market right now. You are working on lifecycle processes, operational programs, revenue cycle modeling, mapping out lead flows, buyer journeys, and prioritizing lead sources. If you’re a platform junkie, you are responsible for telling the platforms exactly what to do, when to do it and how to do it.
Campaign Operations
If you speak HTML/CSS like a pro, have naturally epic organization (lucky) and easily create an order with what could be chaos a campaign specialty might be your way to go. A campaign operations specialist typically works on the front lines of coordinating with disparate field marketing teams to create a centralized intake process for campaign launches, and then builds, QAs and launches those campaigns. This is a role for someone with amazing attention to detail, who really loves the feeling of accomplishment when he or she sees the results come flowing in from a campaign launch.
Marketing Intelligence
You’ll know intelligence is your jam if you dream of data, love to share the stories it tells and are excited to come up with logical strategies to pull the right levers to meet the overall business goals. It’s not just about being able to find and compile the data, it’s being able to say “look at all this super valuable and useful information! Here is what it’s telling us and this is what we can do to make these numbers go up and this one go down”.
Development for Marketing Operations
Development might be the way to go if you’re already a developer - ha! This specialty tends to be a bit of an outlier in that it’s adjacent to MOPs while also being right smack in the middle of it. Without developers, there wouldn’t be API’s or middleware integrations, MOPs would only be half of what it’s capable of but, it’s not usually a specialty that folks happen upon. The path for development in MOPs starts on the dev side and then merges with the MOPs side. Granted, I am SURE there are folks who have done exactly the opposite of what I’ve laid out, I’m sure of it.
If that is you - please get in touch with me, I want to talk to you! crosenberg@mopsjobs.com!
Finding your passion within MOPs as soon as you can help you take control of the direction of your career path.
Play to your strengths (and passions!).
