As a Marketing Operations Manager, you’ve probably found yourself in a situation where your CMO says “we need to do this now – make it happen”. “This” could be anything from a specific task to a more strategic initiative, often with little direction. Either way, our job as MOPs Managers is to efficiently execute these tasks that come bubbling down from our leadership and roll them out effectively.
So what does it really take from an operational perspective to roll out a strategic marketing initiative in a marketing automation tool like Marketo?
I asked some of our Adobe Marketo Engage Champions to get their thoughts on the matter and have put together 10 examples of strategic marketing initiatives and what an Adobe Marketo Engage Champion recommends to do about them.
Take a look and let us know what you think!
Marketing Strategy #1: Ensure Marketing & Sales alignment for passing on lead assignment/follow up.
Marketo Tip #1: Create operational programs that assign the leads that enter your system to SDRs or Sales Reps based on geography / demographic behavior, based on department / role, or even better, based on their specific request or entry source. There are hundreds of options, but pick one to start out with and build from there.
Contributor: Chloe Pott
Marketing Strategy #2: Be an inbound marketing “machine” & attract new names in a short amount of time. Be able to quickly turn around the launch of a new piece of content once it is ready for promotion.
Marketo Tip #2: Template, template, template! Template emails, template programs, template flow steps and even smart lists. Add relevant tokens to all programs and emails so that when new content is ready to be promoted, your MOPs team can roll it out the door in minimal turnaround time by simply cloning the appropriate template and editing it to fit the new initiative.
Contributor: Chloe Pott
Marketing Strategy #3: Communicate only with our most engaged leads to improve deliverability and potential blacklisting.
Marketo Tip #3: Create a “Last Activity Date” field so you can timestamp important activities, filter on interesting moments, and set up bounce management campaigns to monitor deliverability. Using these in combination will help determine who’s active and suppress anyone who’s not.
Contributor: Jenn DiMaria
Marketing Strategy #4: Only emailing people who are compliant.
Marketo Tip #4: Set up a mailability segmentation. Segmentations process faster than nested smart lists (which are used in OTHER smart lists) and help eliminate human error. Just drag in your “Mailable” segment to help save Marketo time when it processes undesirable contacts from your email blasts.
Contributor: Jenn DiMaria
Marketing Strategy #6: Target your customers with the right content and messaging.
Marketo Tip #6: Create customer/prospect segmentations based on your business model. This effort allows you to develop dynamic content in your emails and on your landing pages to create a personalized experience for your prospects and customers. A side benefit is that segments process more quickly than smart lists and provide a more accurate view into your contact database. Most companies that implement dynamic content and messaging see significant results and return in generating business (leads and closed-won).
Contributor: Trent Cross
Marketing Strategy #5: Track lead attribution from quarter to quarter.
Marketo Tip #5: Have a Last Touch UTM set of fields (most recent), as well as a First Touch (UTM values existing on person creation) and a Multi-Touch (concatenating history) set of fields to record information on leads who have interacted with campaigns containing UTM parameters. The Multi-Touch field will be especially important in reporting if you don’t have a 1:1 for your marketing campaigns to a Marketo Program or SFDC Campaign, but still want to see who has a field containing that value and who opened an Opportunity around that product prior to campaign launch in order to attribute revenue credit.
Contributor: Brooke Bartos
Marketing Strategy #7: Ensure your data is accurate and clean up bad or missing data.
Marketo Tip #7: Create and build data management smart campaign batch programs that run on a daily basis to correct, update, and include data to ensure your database has accurate values. Examples include standardizing country abbreviation, language codes, name capitalization, and many other similar items without a 3rd party tool.
Contributor: Trent Cross
Marketing Strategy #8: Track success based on campaigns
Marketo Tip #8: When setting up campaigns, ensure that you are using the correct campaign progression statuses and that you’re recording those statuses in Marketo and your CRM. You must also make sure that your ‘success’ statuses are added too. Do you want to call someone who registers for a webinar a ‘success’ or someone who attends? Or both? However you set it up in Marketo you need to make sure that the campaigns correspond correctly in your CRM and that the same statuses are successes too.
Contributor: Julz James
Marketing Strategy #9: Improve alignment around the sales-marketing handoff.
Marketo Tip #9: Ensure that you have spent time with Sales to find out their process and make sure that the leads you’re passing over to them are relevant to their needs. There is nothing worse than MOPs created tons of MQLs for Sales to just reject them all. Work with Sales to understand what is a good quality lead for them - they will have the best understanding of what type of leads are converting. The more in-depth the definition of an MQL from Sales, the better quality leads you can deliver.
Contributor: Julz James
Marketing Strategy #10: Drive more marketing campaigns faster across a larger marketing team.
Marketo Tip #10: Creating canned Center of Excellence (CoE) programs and reports will keep your instance clean and consistent, and it will make processes easier if there are multiple Marketo users. Create a folder or workspace for a CoE and have the most commonly created programs in that area with the proper tokens, email modules in the emails, LP variables and form fields so when it is cloned, every program is aligned the same way and executed the same way. Make sure to have that go-to point person in your organization to ask questions so all answers are consistent. This will eliminate a lot of headaches in the future and make your instance beautiful.
Contributor: Chelsea Kiko
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