There is a need to deliver more impactful campaigns, improve lead quality, and increase customer engagement. This is where marketing operations step in to streamline processes, enhance campaign efficiency, and ensure alignment across teams.

What is Marketing Operations? 

Marketing operations is a function that includes people, processes, and technology. It helps marketing work more efficiently and maximize impact.

The way I like to define marketing operations is ‘the art and science of executing great marketing.

– Darrell Alfonso, Global Marketing Operations Leader at Amazon

Marketing operations aim to standardize marketing processes to enhance productivity, efficiency, and accountability. 

Here are some of the key processes included in marketing operations: 

1. The use of MarTech platforms to manage data (both internal data and customer data)
2. End-to-end campaign management
3. Enable accurate and useful marketing reporting
4. Collaborate with other departments to build internal marketing products and processes. 

Business Benefits of Marketing Operations

Nearly nine out of ten large organizations (with over $10 million in annual revenue) have a dedicated marketing operations team or individual. Even – the smaller organizations (with less than $10 million in annual revenue), 64% have invested in the same. 

Here are a few reasons why: 

1.Efficient Campaign Planning and Execution

Marketing operations can help you understand the efficiency of your campaigns at the granular level. Marketing operations also streamline the process of campaign planning and execution. It helps your team save time, and they can spend more time on activities of higher value, such as strategy and creative development.

2.Automates Marketing Tasks

Repetitive tasks drain the resources and productivity of the marketing teams. Marketing automation tools can automate several tasks, including lead nurturing, email marketing, customer onboarding, and more. It results in several benefits, including:

• More dedicated time towards strategic activities. 
• Reduced focus on repetitive tasks and manual efforts. 
• Ability to speed up tasks through an automated process. 

3.Better Conversion Rates

Marketing operations use data and technology to personalize interactions. It helps deliver the right message at the right time. If your team gets the data to understand the conversion rate of different campaigns, they can work accordingly and double down on their best-performing campaigns. It helps save resources on campaigns that bring lesser ROI and enables you to optimize your messaging accordingly.

4. A Continuous Marketing Engine

Starting from scratch every time is time-consuming and resource-intensive. You need processes that your team can repeat, and that’s exactly what marketing operations provide you. With marketing operations, you can create several repeatable processes for: 

• Campaign planning and execution
• Content creation and approval
• Lead management
• Data management and reporting
• Budgeting and resource allocation

Having repeatable processes in place reduces the risk of errors and eliminates any guesswork. It helps your team efficiently execute marketing activities. 

5.Access to Good Quality Data

Marketing operations make the right data accessible to the people who need it. It includes collecting, refining, and disseminating data and insights across the business. Good quality data leads to better customer insights. It can help the marketing team with smarter decision-making. 

The ability of marketing operations to provide clear data and reporting reduces the risk of any politics or functional issues that may hinder internal collaboration within teams. 

Enhance your Marketing Ops Capabilities with Marketing Automation

Marketing operations have the power to streamline processes for both the sales and marketing teams, which will help them achieve better business results. However, all of this comes to fruition when you invest in marketing operations and see how they function. 

If you’re ready to enhance and streamline your marketing processes, partner up with an experienced marketing operations agency like Digital Di Consultants. Learn how to achieve your business goals without getting in the loop of manual effort and low-quality data outputs. 

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As a company grows and evolves, the goals and objectives revive. This allows an opportunity to evaluate the tools you have in place, whether they meet your needs, and what upgrades or new tech stack may be necessary to meet your organizational goals and requirements.

That’s where marketing technology assessments come in: The goal of a MarTech audit is to determine if your current setup is working for you.

What Is a Marketing Technology Audit?

A Martech stack audit assesses your current digital marketing technology and how it contributes to your organization and revenue goals. It helps you understand what tools you have in place, how they work together, and where you may need to upgrade or add new systems based on your goals and requirements.

What are the benefits of Marketing Technology Audit?

A MarTech stack audit assesses your current digital marketing technology and how it contributes to your organization’s revenue goals.

What to Know Before a MarTech Audit?

There are some basic things you need to know before you audit your MarTech Stack:

⦁ The different types of tools used.
⦁ The reason for each of the tools being used.
⦁ The functionality of each tool
⦁ How each tool should be used
⦁ The integration between these tools

5 Steps to Auditing Your Marketing Technology Stack

Auditing a marketing technology stack takes time and requires a robust strategy. Here are the exact steps you need to follow.

1. Get a Buy-In from Everyone

Bringing together stakeholders from marketing, sales, operations, and finance is essential. They know and understand what needs to be accomplished for their success.

2. Gather Information 

Collect details such as vendor names, tool names, owners, costs, usage purposes, integrations, and security requirements. Also, collaborate with stakeholders to gain insights into tool usage, benefits, challenges, and integrations.

3. Organize the Inventory

Categorize MarTech tools based on categories like department, marketing function, contract type, or cost.

4. Identify Gaps

Address key questions like: Are any platforms redundant? Are there two tools that perform similar functions? Assess their strengths and weaknesses and analyze channel alignment with marketing goals. Track platform spending and ROI and pinpoint where upgrades or new systems are required. You can replace or update platforms that underperform and opt for cost-effective alternatives when platforms offer similar functionalities.

5. Plan and Review

Regularly update your MarTech stack to keep it in line with long-term goals and evolving needs. Ensure your stack remains current with advancements in technology.

Conclusion

Periodically auditing your organization’s MarTech stack ensures you use your tools best. In a landscape where new technologies emerge daily, it’s important to understand what you have in place and whether it’s still relevant. Anytime you feel the organization setup is not working as expected, look for an audit consultant.

Digital Di Consultants can help you audit your marketing tech stack and plan your future MarTech strategy roadmap. Book a call with us to optimize your stack for operational performance and financial efficiency.

FAQs

1. How Often Should You Conduct a MarTech Audit?

How often you want to audit your MarTech stack depends on your capabilities. You can do it annually or if you feel the processes are not working as expected. With the right marketing automation consultant, a sustainable process, and clear governance, your team can effortlessly capture important information about their tools and vendors.

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But when looking closely at feature sets between the enterprise-focused Marketo, SMB-friendly HubSpot and Salesforce-aligned Pardot, significant differences and specializations emerge. This guide breaks down core platform capabilities, strengths and ideal use cases between the Big Three marketing automation heavy hitters.

Marketo Overview

Marketo remains the advanced platform of choice for complex B2B marketing landscapes requiring robust segmentation, customized branding and enterprise integrations spanning global divisions. The ability to handle high transaction volumes and layered hierarchical account structures makes Marketo a popular choice for sophisticated marketing organizations. 

Marketo Consultants and Marketo Certified Experts praise the solution’s powerful analytics, especially predictive intelligence tools, to model customer lifecycle paths and optimize experiences in real-time. Superior data visualization also provides actionable insights for constant improvement.

Ideal for: Fortune 500 enterprises, complex tech B2B sales cycles, global/regulatory compliance needs

HubSpot Overview 

As a leader in the inbound marketing and sales movement, HubSpot remains the standard-bearer for content and community-driven customer acquisition. HubSpot’s mantra centers on crafting marketing people love through education, interaction and added value over time via blogs, social media, email automation and more.  

HubSpot Certified Experts and HubSpot Consultants consistently recognize HubSpot’s ease of use, making the tools accessible across organizations without demanding high technical skills from every user. From sales enablement to CRM, the platform also takes an integrated approach, connecting systems into efficient automated ecosystems. 

Ideal for: SMBs, early startups, inbound methodology devotees, content marketers  

Pardot Overview

A Salesforce company, Pardot slots marketing automation directly into the world’s most popular CRM and cloud platform for immediate pipeline visibility and sales empowerment. Tight integration with Salesforce products via connectors and APIs brings proven results aligning sales and marketing goals.

Pardot Consultants and Pardot Certified Experts know the platform’s lead scoring, grade lead routing and automated Salesforce synchronization eliminates previous data reconciliation headaches. Its B2B focus also shines, supporting complex workflows beyond simplistic email capabilities alone.

Ideal for: Mid-large enterprises deeply bought into Salesforce ecosystem, lead-to-revenue cycle focus

While all platforms overlap in core functionality, clearly distinct software package advantages, advanced tools, integration ecosystems and specialty applications emerge when evaluating Marketo, HubSpot and Pardot side-by-side. Hopefully this overview and positioning assistance aids your purchasing decisions as the need for marketing acceleration reaches a fever pitch industry-wide.

Conclusion

In closing, when evaluating enterprise-caliber marketing automation platforms to take customer engagement to the next level, Marketo, HubSpot, and Pardot consistently rise to the top. Marketo brings robust segmentation and predictive intelligence strengths at enterprise scale. HubSpot makes inbound engagement automation intuitive for passionate growth marketers. And Pardot tightly aligns marketing and sales workflows powered by the Salesforce ecosystem.

All offer capabilities like email marketing, lead management, campaign builders and analytics at their core. Yet between Marketo’s analytics leadership focused on B2B complexity, HubSpot’s ease-of-use catering to startups, and Pardot’s specialization in optimizing Salesforce deployments – significant differentiation exists. Use this overview of features, capabilities and ideal implementation environments when approaching your own purchasing decision making process. Then be sure to leverage dedicated marketing automation experts like Digital Di Consultants to maximize platform adoption and utilization tailored to your unique business needs and workloads. 

Their specialized consultants across Marketo, HubSpot, Pardot and other leading platforms can provide more focused and flexible support than the vendors themselves. Digital Di’s expertise spans both strategic consulting for capability mapping all the way through tactical implementation, integrations, campaign creation, and performance optimization. With the backing of expert guidance from Digital Di Consultants, aligning automation to your specific use cases, rest assured you have a specialized partner ready to guide your success

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Understanding Marketing Automation

Marketing automation refers to software platforms and technologies designed to automate repetitive marketing tasks. This allows marketers to more efficiently nurture leads, convert sales, drive ROI and adapt campaigns without manual oversight of routine processes. automation helps businesses scale their marketing and standardize processes using digital data and tracking.

Platforms provide features like email templates, landing pages, lead scoring, campaign creation workflow builders and integration with sales and CRM systems. Leading automation providers include HubSpot, Marketo and Pardot. Tools provided by these b2b marketing consultants and digital data consultancies act as a marketing automation specialist to help streamline campaign management.

Demonstrating Marketing Automation Through Real-Life Examples

Here’s a common example of marketing automation:

A prospect fills out a form to download an e-book from your website. They provide their name, email and other information. Your automation platform automatically captures this lead information and initiates a pre-set workflow.

This could involve adding them to certain email lists and nurture tracks and excluding them from others. It may score their lead based on information provided. A digital data consultancy could help analyze the lead scoring methodology to determine the optimal thresholds for identifying marketing qualified leads. Over the next few weeks, a series of 5 carefully timed emails is automatically deployed to nurture that lead. The messages educate readers further and aim to convert them into marketing qualified leads by directing them to book sales appointments.

Automated lead scoring also helps determine if they become viable sales qualified leads to contact directly. If lead scores don’t rise sufficiently, the automated nurturing cycle repeats to continue engaging them. If lead scores hit thresholds, the contact is automatically handed off to sales reps as a highly qualified lead.

What Makes Marketing Automation Useful?

There are many powerful reasons brands make automation for marketing a centerpiece of customer engagement:

• Consolidates customer data from all channels and CRM in one place to enable smarter marketing and sales decisions and tracking. Provides a holistic view of the customer journey.
• Automatically nurtures leads over time to become sales qualified without direct manual oversight.
• Frees up significant time for marketers and sales teams to focus on more valuable priorities than basic lead follow-ups.
• Helps ensure standardized, respectable contact with every lead to represent brand effectively.
• Enables running and optimizing many outreach campaigns simultaneously.
  Gives insights needed to determine the highest converting marketing assets and tactics.

Platforms and Tools

Many software options provide automation for marketing capabilities. When reviewing providers, it can be helpful to consult with a b2b marketing consultant to explore which platforms would best align to your budget, target customer profiles, in-house expertise and existing martech software stack. A marketing consultant that specializes in b2b can provide valuable outside guidance when it comes to selecting and implementing the right automation tools for your business needs and growth goals.

Here are some top marketing automation platforms to consider:

• HubSpot – Comprehensive inbound marketing and sales software with intuitive automation workflows. Strong mid-market presence.
• Marketo – Fully-featured marketing automation for enterprise brands. Complex but powerful. Adobe also offers Marketo Engage in its Experience Cloud.
• Pardot – Salesforce’s marketing automation offering tightly integrated with Salesforce CRM. An enterprise-ready solution.
• Ontraport – Affordable and intuitive solution well suited to small businesses’ needs.
• Zoho Campaigns – Capable marketing automation with approachable pricing for mid-market firms. Integrates with Zoho’s wider business app ecosystem.

The key is choosing a platform aligned to your resources and needs that can ultimately scale with business growth over time. Many platforms offer free trials to experience capabilities firsthand.

Next important steps involve mapping your ideal automated workflows, importing contacts, configuring lead scoring methodologies, establishing data tracking, designing campaign templates and assets to feed the system, integrating complementary technologies, and equipping marketers to run the software day-to-day.

While the setup process takes concerted planning, refined automation for marketing ultimately lets your business engage customers like never before possible at scale. Approach the beginnings thoughtfully, map it to long-term strategy, and marketing automation will produce game-changing results.

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You have two options:

• Company A is a full-service marketing agency. It offers digital marketing, content marketing, sales enablement, lead generation, website design, and other services to help you improve results from your marketing and inbound sales efforts.
• Company B is a Marketing Operations (MarTech) agency. It focuses on bringing the human element and technology together to drive the company’s business operations forward by bringing marketing, sales, customer service, and leadership team together. It focuses fully on continuous improvement by making data-driven decisions, building effective processes, and a focused approach toward the company’s bottom line – revenue.

Both sound appealing, but how do you choose which is right for your business?

It’s critical to understand the differences between these two types of agencies and how they can impact your business.

The Growth of MOPs Agencies

A marketing operations agency is a marketing partner. It focuses on improving the effectiveness and efficiency of marketing efforts through:

• Data-driven insights – both for customizing audiences and messaging, alongside measuring campaign effectiveness
• Streamlined processes
• Cutting-edge technology
• Performance optimization

The services are built around six key pillars:

• Data: collection, management, and analysis
• Process: effective workflows, automation, and integration
• Technology: leveraging marketing technology for better results
• Analytics: tracking performance and optimizing strategies
• People: MarTech is only as good as the people behind it to make it effective.
• Sales & Marketing Alignment: ensuring marketing efforts drive quality pipeline aligned with sales, customer service, and operations teams.

As the marketing landscape grows more intricate, the demand for specialized marketing services has significantly increased. Gartner’s research supports this claim, revealing that 49% of marketers now have a marketing operations leader in at least one team.

As we’ve laid the foundation for understanding marketing operations agencies, it’s time to explore its significance in marketing.

Factors to Consider When Choosing a MarTech Agency

1. Business goals and objectives
   Evaluate your short-term and long-term goals, and assess which agency type is better suited to help you achieve those targets. MOPs agency will assist you in effectively driving captured leads to sales, and which will eventually help towards a company’s common goal, revenue.
2. Specific marketing challenges
   Identify your unique marketing pain points and determine if a specialized marketing operation or a generic marketing agency would more effectively address those issues.
3. Available resources and budget
   Consider your financial constraints and resource availability. This way, you can ensure the chosen agency can deliver the desired results within your budget.
4. Level of customization and personalization required
   Determine the degree of tailored solutions needed for your marketing efforts. Then, select the agency that can provide the appropriate level of customization and personalization.

Conclusion

As we’ve highlighted above, a MOPs agency ensures all the data, and processes are in place so that you can target your prospects and customers with the right message at the right time, and then report on what is working well to prove marketing-driven revenue. Marketing Operations also pushes the leads through to Sales at the right time, allowing for more targeted sales, and visibility of the prospect’s actions leading to more strategic, and informed sales calls. Marketing Operations allow the marketing team to really drive the start of the lead to cash process whether that is for net new, retention or advocacy.

If you’re ready to elevate your marketing strategy and optimize performance, consider partnering with a leading marketing operations agency like Digital Di Consultants or Sojourn Solutions. Agencies like these can help you and your company achieve their business goals. Get in touch today!

Author:

Shiv Panchagiri
CEO
Digital Di Consultants

Co-author:

Phil Boyden
Sales Consultant
Sojourn Solutions

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Do you find it difficult to analyze and evaluate the results of your B2B marketing campaigns? Or are you struggling to make sense of a sea of dispersed info and feel like you’re drowning?

If the answer is “YES,” then you are not alone!

The B2B marketing attribution process can be complicated but also essential. It’s because you need to understand which marketing initiatives are producing income and which are not helping you.

Let’s examine the benefits of B2B marketing attribution and go deeply into its concept.

What is B2B Marketing Attribution?

Identifying which marketing initiatives and distribution channels help you generate leads, attract new customers and increase sales is known as marketing attribution. It entails keeping track of and examining several interactions a prospective customer has with the business before purchasing. These interactions may include website visits, email opens, content downloads, and event attendees.

Why is B2B Marketing Attribution Important?

B2B businesses can improve their marketing strategy, effectively allocate funds, and make data-driven decisions by knowing which marketing initiatives and touchpoints contribute to sales and customer acquisition.

Attribution is essential in B2B marketing for the following reasons:

• Find the best marketing strategies and channels:
  B2B organizations can discover which marketing channels and strategies produce the highest returns on investment, thanks to attribution.
• Justify marketing spend and budget allocation:
• Marketing attribution helps convince the stakeholders of the value of marketing spend and budget allocation decisions by tying revenue to particular marketing initiatives.
• Improve customer acquisition and retention:
  B2B organizations can use attribution to pinpoint the touchpoints that result in customer acquisition and retention.
• Evaluate marketing effectiveness and impact: Attribution enables B2B
  organizations to gauge how their marketing initiatives affect sales and company expansion.

Conclusion

Businesses that want to improve their marketing ROI, get more leads, and boost sales must use marketing attribution. Companies can achieve long-term success and maintain an edge over the competition by implementing an effective attribution plan and utilizing the power of data analytics.

If you’re looking for custom data and MarTech consulting services to help you with your B2B marketing attribution plan, check out Digital Di Consultants. Our team of experts can work with you to develop a customized strategy that aligns with your business goals to give you top-quality data.

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