Skip the Ramp-Up: A Fully Functional Marketing Ops Team

I’ve been constructing and leading teams for decades, and I finally built one that just works. A few years ago, this crew came together — some I handpicked, some I lucked into — and found a rhythm, complimentary skills, mutual respect, and a matching work ethic. It’s a once-in-a-career dynamic that I don’t want to lose. So we’re for hire…together.

We’re calling ourselves MKTGWEBOPS. As the name suggests, we provide marketing operations and web operations, plus customer experience and content (and more if you need it). We solve common challenges confronting marketing teams, ideally before they become problems, so marketing can hone strategy:

• Optimize workflows for seamless hand-offs and scalable processes
• Provide real-time data to make informed decisions
• Integrate accessibility and compliance (GDPR, CCPA, HIPAA, FCC, WCAG) into workflows and deliverables
• Manage the marketing techstack, vendor contracts, and documentation
• Create consistent brand messaging and content across campaigns, channels, and audiences
• Train colleagues on processes, standards, and tools to ensure alignment

Why you need a solid marketing/web ops team

If you’re ready to put some money behind your marketing, a team like this is vital to protecting your investment from double-digit waste. Marketers admit that 1/5 of their budget goes down the drain with bad data, lost productivity, and ineffective spending. And even worse, it also means missing out on 20% of potential revenue.

They need more marketing ops support.

Challenges that stifle marketing efforts

In my decades leading marketing and operations, and now marketing/web operations, I’ve seen marketing departments fail myriad times—not because they were bad marketers, but because they did not have the skillset to operationalize their campaigns. Nor should they.

In my own companies, I’ve seen marketers ideate fantastic campaigns, only to have the campaign fail to launch on time, because the marketers did not have experience in how to execute. There might have been lack of alignment across channels or siloed efforts spread across multiple vendors that created gaps. There were countless insurmountable errors that reflected poorly on the campaign, but the campaign wasn’t the issue.

Take, for example, a digital and direct-mail campaign my marketing team launched several years ago. They conceptualized an amazing, immersive experience for purchasing our software, but the marketers lacked distribution knowledge. They wanted to distribute 250,000 digital catalogues to our client base, but though there were lots of ideas for channels, there was no cohesive plan. No one on the team knew how to generate the catalogue file and distribute it, whether online, as a printed book for direct mail, or as an ecommerce solution.

The answer was, of course, those channels and more.

That’s the type of support a marketing team needs. Even if a marketer were to tackle such an operational task, it would  likely mean engaging disparate (often expensive) vendors—and who manages them? The creative marketer?

The critical role of marketing operations

Marketing operations is a service organization—one that addresses operational requirements across the organization, not only marketing. If you think about marketing operations as a service provider, it’s clear why web, design, studio, content, customer sentiment, automation, project management, analytics, reporting, and vendor management should be the responsibility of the marketing operations team.

Marketers need the latitude to be creative, but they need the support of a service organization to surface actionable data in easily consumed reports; they need a content team to write on-brand, consistent text; they need design and studio teams to produce relevant, compliant images; they need a web team to stand up supporting, SEO-savvy pages; and they need a project manager to marshal the outside vendors, manage privacy and compliance, and keep the entire organization aligned.

What MKTGWEBOPS does differently

MKTGWEBOPS upends the conventional structure of a marketing ops team to align contributors that play key roles in marketing support. It gives marketing teams the insights to make (iterative) smart decisions, provide a consistent experience across touchpoints, break out of silos to collaborate cross-functionally, and clearly show the ROI of marketing initiatives.

• We redesigned, rewrote, and rebuilt a 600-page corporate website in four months, producing a fully ADA- and WCAG-compliant site ranking in the top 10% of 100,000 websites for accessibility. Accessibility was paramount as a compliance risk mitigation measure as well as a reinforcement of brand values for an enterprise providing accessibility services.
  The concrete impact was visitors weren’t bouncing for usability reasons; every consumer with a disability clicking on our ads arrived on a navigable landing page, easing the path to conversion and boosting return on ad spend.
• That website’s revamped cookie consent increased the cookie acceptance rate from 35% to 90%. Not only did this provide valuable site performance and analytics data and allow marketing to retarget visitors, it ensured optimal site functionality, including live support chat, for a significant improvement in user experience that tied into rising customer sentiment.
• We integrated a Voice of the Customer program with our CRM that allowed real-time tracking and response for customer experience improvements, boosting our NPS score 45%. That initiative reflected a focus on customer retention, the top priority for the company’s most established business lines that targeted a saturated market and a niche customer base that highly values peer referrals.
• Our multi-channel content strategy increased blog-driven conversions 104%, newsletter engagement 158%, and chatbot use 230% within a year. Engaging, educational content throughout the customer journey aligned strategy with key business goals: building brand awareness for a young business line, reducing customer acquisition costs, strengthening customer retention and win-backs, and prioritizing customer experience.

The structure and internal integrity of our team makes it possible to achieve big wins like these in shorter timeframes; we implement end-to-end processes that create visibility, eliminate duplication of efforts, and smooth handoffs. These processes pass on the same clarity and productivity enhancements to your marketing team and interdepartmental collaborators.

Additional needs? Tap into Special Ops

MKTGWEBOPS creates structure and support for your marketing team; we don’t replace them. However, if your goals demand expanding talent beyond your existing staff and the essential functions of our core group, we have trusted colleagues in additional areas that can extend our capabilities:

• Marketing data and analytics
• Full-stack development
• Research and insights
• UX design

Each of these Special Ops members has our endorsement for competence, work ethic, and collaborative attitude, and they can integrate seamlessly with our team.

“How can I hire MKTGWEBOPS?”

Save yourself months of recruiting and onboarding by hiring us on as a permanent team to provide full-time support as your marketing efforts evolve — for the big projects and the everyday needs that allow marketers to consistently execute campaigns, provide real-time visibility, ongoing optimization, and brand storytelling. You can add any or all of our Special Ops members to the core group to tailor the team to your needs.

Contact us and get started with a marketing operations techstack audit. »