Marketing Operations

Marketing isn't just strategic planning and creative development.

Although it's a crucial component, there's much more to it. Behind the more "fancy" externally facing pieces of any marketing department are the workflows, processes, and people that execute the strategy, build the tactics designed to reach crucial business goals and improve marketing initiatives over time.

It's less exciting than those award-winning TV spots or interactive digital ads. However, it's what makes all of the possible and maximizes their chances of success. That's what marketing operations are all about. At Universal Creative Solutions, we help you set up and optimize your own operations processes and team.

What is Marketing Operations

Marketing Operations is a function that enables the marketing team to operate efficiently and deliver the desired results through processes, people, data, and technology.

While traditional marketing skills like creative and strategic thinking are still needed for marketing operations, employees also need analytical and technical skills to succeed in the ever-changing marketplace. They are the engine that drives results within the organization, so that brand awareness, sales, and profits can be generated.

In other words, it's the logical work required to run effective marketing campaigns. Marketing operations generally refer to the process of strategizing, executing, and optimizing procedures and policies that support the company's goals.

The Role of Marketing Operations

The role of marketing operations includes many functions within your organization that allow the marketing to run efficiently. This includes:

Prioritizing strategy, design, and execution of marketing campaigns
Measuring and analyzing performance metrics to improve future campaigns and track them against the goals set
Budgeting for areas that generate the highest ROI
Implementation of marketing technology (i.e., lead management processes, CRM, and marketing automation)
Oversee the execution of the operational marketing strategy

Often, marketing operations personnel are people who gather and analyze data. Additionally, they build reports to tweak current and future campaigns. Marketing ops managers make strategic decisions and plan what's to come next.

Marketing Operations Platforms We Support

✔️Marketing automation tools (Activedemand, Marketo, Hubspot)

✔️Chatbots (Crispchat)

✔️Website platforms including Webflow, WordPress, and Wix

✔️Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Tools (Salesforce, Method CRM) and more!

Marketing Operations and Automation

Marketing operations and automation mean having a more efficient, transparent, data-driven view of your marketing. The future of market strategy is in the systems and data. While marketing will always be a creative endeavor, it's important to know how to measure your results. We are firm believers in using efficient, cost-effective marketing strategies.

‍

At Universal Creative Solution, our company devotes a lot of time and resources to developing the best marketing operations and automation practices for your business. We implement integrated marketing tracking systems and cutting-edge marketing strategies to help you reach your goals.

Part of our marketing op involves tracking new marketing channels and improving existing ones through conversion rate optimization. We track the success of your campaigns closely and improve upon them. Additionally, our company offers marketing automation software consulting services, where we educate in detail how each automation software works, how to interpret the data properly, and build systems within the software to improve results.

Marketing Automation Results that Your Business Can Expect

Marketing automation makes things much easier for both business owners and customers. It typically refers to a method that automates or streamlines marketing tasks. Marketing automation helps keep you on your budget, help you generate more leads, saves you time, and provides you with a multichannel outlook of your prospects. If you haven't adopted marketing automation strategies or are still doubtful it will work, consider the following result.

Time-efficient marketing

Marketing strategies take time, but once the automation is implemented, it can repeatedly perform a task on autopilot with a trigger. Business marketing automation tools such as live chat software can save you hours finding out what your customers need. Your prospects may access your chat menu, click on what they need, and follow the prompts available. This saves your customer service reps time and gives your sales team access to hot leads. Data generated from a marketing automation platform helps us create better strategies, programs, and other ways to enhance your products or services.

More qualified leads

Marketing sequences delivered through an automation platform can nurture leads, turning new prospects into qualified leads that are ready to buy. Automation tools offer various segmentation and lead scoring features allowing you to decipher between hot, warm, and cold leads. You can spend less time worrying about lead generation and lead nurturing and focus more time on closing deals.

Provide a multichannel view

It massively improves your bottom line.

It's no wonder why companies recognize the effectiveness of automated marketing and continue to increase their spending in this area. What automation brings to the table is way more valuable than any other area of investment, as long as you're using the right tools. It boils down to conversions. If your marketing processes don't turn leads into paying customers, something is off.

Automations can send messages to boost engagement, and sales are sent more quickly and to more people than having your team do it manually. That alone increases the chances of conversions. This efficiency creates a snowball effect. It enables more immediate responses to customers. Furthermore, it increases the likelihood of people opening your messages and purchasing because you have the data to create a more personalized approach.

Company realignment

Rather than having two departments with separate goals, you can align the processes and goals together. Often, sharing data from each department can help each team perform better. Marketing automation can make B2B tasks easier, including email campaigns, lead management, and landing page generation, so you can prioritize what matters most in your business.

A marketing strategy needs to align with its business goals and core values. With proper marketing operations, we can evaluate your data and how it aligns with your goals. Aligning your marketing strategy ensures that you are presenting your business in a positive light while maintaining its core values in mind.

Lead Generation and Return on Investment for Optimization

Leads are prospective customers, so it is essential to generate enough of them through your advertising. By improving customer experience across all marketing channels, you are increasing sales productivity and lead generation. Our marketing operations consultants are skilled in recognizing which practices work best to generate qualified leads. Through research and experience across many industry verticals, we have understood what works and what doesn't. You won't need to go through the trial and error period yourself since we've already been there.

‍

We implement a robust customer relationship management (CRM) system and set it up to match our client's individual needs. We can increase automation through the right tools to help our clients handle more leads and customers. This is a cost-effective method to manage leads since it doesn't involve hiring more people onto your team.

lead generation and return on investment for optimization

Return on investment is the most crucial to ensure you are spending your resources wisely. You want to know if you can change certain elements of your strategy to get better returns. Our marketing consultants start by deciding which ROI tracking tools will best suit your situation. After executing on improvements, we track the changes and compare them with your previous results. Continuous iterations are made to ensure ROI is kept at optimal levels.

Search engine marketing (SEM) is often a pay-per-click model to advertise above or within organic ranking platforms like Google. It's an effective marketing strategy if implemented correctly. However, it can lead to wasted marketing investments. That's because targeting the wrong audience or mismanaging the campaigns can lead to poor returns. Our marketing consultants understand how and where to market your business. We know the importance of search phrases and keywords. That's why we implement them into your content so that you can reap the benefits of keyword phrases in your industry. We're constantly learning and staying on top of the newest changes in search engines' algorithms so that you have the best odds of ranking high and receiving high-quality traffic.

And most importantly, our consultants understand how to structure ads to grab attention and drive clicks for your campaign. We'll track the success of your search engine advertising and tweak it in the process. This results in optimal ad spending for your campaign, and you will see the results of search engine marketing when done right.

What Makes Marketing Operations Successful

Now that we know how to manage an organization's marketing operation and how it can improve your existing efforts, let's zoom in and take a look at what makes marketing operations successful:

‍Analytics and Reporting

For marketing operations to guide all of your marketing activities effectively, it needs to encompass sophisticated analytics and reporting. Once the marketing activities are correctly managed, it's much easier to sort through the results to assess performance better, forecast future results, and make strategic decisions for the marketing department.

At Universal Creative Solutions, we can provide the following marketing analytics and reporting tasks to help you succeed:

Preparing a wide range of reports to gauge performance
Using analytics to forecast future performance
Diagnosing changes in performance
Using analytics to shape future actions
Creating dynamic dashboards to present information in ways that foster good decision making and sound judgment

Marketing Tech Stack Management

Sourcing, maintaining, and managing the right tools is a crucial aspect of the success of marketing operations. Given that new tools emerge and features emerge every year, it requires an operationalist to evaluate new opportunities, and only choosing tech is will significantly drive results.

We can help with the following activities when it comes to tech stack management:

Assessing the suitability of new tools
Updating and maintaining existing tools
Managing accounts/permissions
Troubleshooting and contact support

We aim to minimize the number of tools needed within your marketing and operations. Most marketers use about twelve tools at a given time, and some may use up to 31 tools to manage their various campaigns. Using many tools only increases the complexity and skill required for the marketing team to use them.

Furthermore, the risk for overlapping functionality is high, which can affect your projects' profitability. Universal Creative Solutions, we bring years of marketing operations experience and advise your team on the best tools you need, which minimizes the need to get a dozen different software that doesn't move the needle in your business.

Our consultation services enable organizations to strategically innovate and develop creative approaches to address these digital transformations. Consultants aim to explore the value of digital evolution and how it affects and influences trade across various business processes and industries so that you can gain market share.

‍Compliance

The marketing operations team is responsible for ensuring that all marketing collateral is compliant with industry standards, along with internal and external guidelines. Our operations marketing staff helps to perform the following activities to ensure compliance:

Reviewing and approving creative content
Securing approval from key decision-makers
Sourcing many review and approval tools

Here's how we can help you in terms of compliance in your industry:

Develop a thorough review and approval workflow

We develop a smooth review and approval workflow and incorporate it into your projects. This workflow functions systematically and ensures that any non-compliant material gets out.

Stay on top of internal and external rules.

It's important to stay on top of the latest internal and external guidelines. We develop and keep a register of these rules in a centralized location and share them regularly with the rest of the team.

‍Marketing Process and Project Management

Marketing projects often involve multiple decision-makers, and they can be incredibly complex. If you're going to get the best results from your marketing endeavors while keeping your team happy and productive, you'll need to engage in marketing project and process management.

Some of the marketing project and process management tasks that we encounter regularly are:

Creation and implementation of workflows
Collecting and processing feedback
Onboarding new clients
Spinning up new projects

At Universal Creative solutions, we can help manage your projects on one platform. This platform helps speed up review rounds with status updates, reminders, and approval decisions. Rather than sending endless chaser emails, we work synergically to ensure you're getting out campaigns and content on time.

How Digital Marketing Operations Can Transform Business

Your goals are our goals. We typically hear from business owners that they are trying to scale their company but struggle with finding someone with the right expertise. Our managed marketing operations services help you create systems, processes, and automation to drive the results you're looking for predictably. We're here to support your company to thrive and maximize your investments. Whatever your business goal, our services provide you with exceptional technical, strategic, and operational support as you scale and supply you with an extra hands-on deck.

Our operational marketing managed services can help you grow rapidly, implement new technology and processes that reduce costs, increase productivity and improve sales. We provide a proven, unified strategy designed to scale your goals without requiring additional resources.

Think of our marketing operations consulting services as an extension of your current marketing team —whether that's a team of 1 or 1,000. Hit business goals faster, improve your marketing's impact and gain efficiencies with advanced reporting for definitive insights. At Universal Creative Solutions, we'll help you take your business to the next level by leveraging our specialized marketing operations experience. Book a special consultation call with us today and learn how we can help.