Level up your marketing with campaign operations

While you’ve likely heard of marketing operations, it’s less likely that you’ve heard of campaign operations…

This rarer role within marketing ops can take your marketing to the next level.

By working closely with your campaign ops team can help you to streamline your marketing campaigns and prove your ROI. But before we get into that, let’s start with the basics.

We’ll discuss:

What is campaign operations?

Campaign operations is a subset of marketing operations that encapsulates the production process behind your marketing campaigns.

From planning and execution to reporting on your campaign’s results your marketing operations (or MOps) team will be working in the background to support your marketing activities and ensure success.

Campaign ops pull the strings to confirm things are going as planned, measure key marketing metrics, and monitor the campaign’s impact on revenue.

Roles and responsibilities of campaign operations

There are so many roles within a marketing organization, so it can be difficult to keep track of who’s responsible for what. When it comes to campaign operations professionals, they tend to be responsible for:

Building the back end of campaigns.
Analyzing audience insights within the CRM.
Managing the campaign tech stack.
Tracking progress towards goals and monitoring campaign ROI.
Running and analyzing A/B tests.
Setting up campaign automations.
Ensuring data compliance.

However, these are just a few tasks a marketing operations manager might have. Many smaller ops teams won’t be as specialized and may run campaign operations on top of other MOps responsibilities.

Why is campaign operations important?

Campaign operations can help you take your demand-generation campaigns to the next level by optimizing your processes and making better use of customer data.

Launch campaigns faster

Support from your campaign operations colleagues can mean help with the more technical aspects of your campaign such as setting up automations and analyzing data. This means you can spend more time creating a campaign to delight your customers.

That’s less time spent triple-checking your CTAs are being tracked and more time crafting the perfect marketing message, or even planning your next campaign.

Better data tracking and analysis

Your marketing ops team members likely know their way around your customer relationship management (CRM) database like the back of their hand. So when it comes to tracking and monitoring your campaign success across the customer journey – they have you covered.

A concrete marketing operations strategy can allow for accurate attribution of your marketing efforts to revenue, as your ops department can track customer touchpoints across departments.

Align with sales

Working with your MOps team means aligning your efforts with your sales team and creating streamlined processes for handoffs between departments. Campaign ops can plan and manage the handover of MQLs from marketing to sales reps, so your leads don’t get lost again.

Data compliance

Your marketing department likely sends a high number of emails and stores a lot of customer information. This can lead to concerns with Google’s spam policy and data privacy.

Working with your marketing operations management peers can improve your compliance with email deliverability best practices, mainly by removing unsubscribers within the recommended three day window.

While you might worry that removing contacts from your marketing database will reduce your success, it actually means your audience is more engaged with your content. This may result on increased click-through rates (CTR) on your email campaigns.

Your MOps team will also handle data management best practices to ensure your database is clean and complies with data governance policies.

How to launch an effective marketing campaign

So without further ado, here’s our breakdown of how to launch a stellar marketing campaign with a little help from your colleagues on the operations side of your org.

Audience selection

Your MOps team will be well acquainted with the contacts within your organization’s CRM database, so they can assist your marketing team in defining the ideal target audience for your campaign.

Working with your marketing operations team to select your audience can lead to data-informed strategies, as your team can dive into the data to target accounts that are more likely to take action.

For example, if you wanted to target customers who have abandoned their cart in the last three months, your MOps team can pull this data from your CRM and create a new segment for this marketing campaign.

User experience

Effectively targeting your customers allows you to forecast their needs and provide them with the right content after they click on your campaign. Will they respond best to educational content, a landing page, or maybe something else?

Understanding your segment can allow data-backed decisions on how best to engage your audience and drive conversion. Ask your campaign operations team to dive into customer journey data from previous campaigns for more insights into your buyer’s path to purchase.

Once you’ve decided where your campaign will take prospects, ensure you let your MOps team know so they can set up tracking.

Automation

But before we discuss tracking in more detail, let’s understand how to take your campaign management to the next level: marketing automation.

Campaign operations is one of the most automated marketing activities, with 40% of organizations automating these processes. Automation can allow you to run marketing campaigns faster – with less human error – helping you stay ahead of the competition.

There are many activities you could automate within your marketing campaign such as:

Email - Set up welcome emails and abandoned cart messages, and update your email list automatically.
A/B testing - Test out different subject lines, headings, and CTAs in your messaging.
Reporting - Automatically pull data into a report for easy monitoring.

Tracking and monitoring

Tracking your campaign’s success is critical and it’s your marketing operations team’s role to ensure everything is being tracked correctly.

First, they’ll ensure each data point is being tracked and stored accurately, and implement any new marketing technology required for tracking your customer journey. Then the data can be added to a campaign-specific report, and any other team or department-wide reports as required.

This should allow all stakeholders the necessary access to the data insights and results of your campaign. Your marketing ops team may even format this report into visualizations of your team’s KPIs to allow quick and easy monitoring.

We know ROI is a major player when it comes to getting a budget for your marketing efforts. Luckily, your operations peers can follow MQLs and prospects through your buyer journey to show how much revenue was generated by your campaign.

Iteration

There’s always room for improvement, especially when running marketing campaigns.

Your campaign operations team can help you make sense of your campaign’s results and compare them to past campaigns, to give you a full picture of what worked and what didn’t.

MOps can also analyze your A/B testing data to help determine which experiment performed better. You can then choose to run a new experiment or roll out the highest-performing campaign to a wider audience.

This analysis and iterative improvement allows your marketing team to continue seeing the ROI of your marketing efforts.

TLDR;

Campaign operations is a subset of marketing operations that works behind the scenes to ensure campaign success.
They can help you launch campaigns faster, track your campaigns with ease, and ensure you comply with data best practices.
Campaign ops can help at each stage of the campaign process. From audience selection all the way to iterating on your campaign.
Automation within your campaign is where your MOps peers really shine. They can set up automated campaigns to save you time.