What does marketing operations manager do

by Feb 2, 2022

A marketing operations manager is responsible for the smooth running of marketing campaigns and activities.

A marketing operations manager is responsible for the smooth running of marketing campaigns and activities. This role involves directing, coordinating and overseeing all marketing operations within an organization. The goal of this role is to ensure that all business objectives are met in a timely manner while maintaining the highest standards of professionalism, quality and integrity.

The responsibilities of a Marketing Operations Manager include but are not limited to: overseeing budgeting and purchasing; analyzing trends in order to determine best marketing practices; tracking sales figures; managing inventory levels; developing new products or services based on market research data collected by sales teams; strategizing on ways to improve customer satisfaction with current offerings as well as how to grow brand awareness among target audiences through social media campaigns (e.g., Facebook ads).

This job is also sometimes referred to as a digital marketing operations manager or online marketing operations manager.

Side note: This job is also sometimes referred to as a digital marketing operations manager or online marketing operations manager. The responsibilities are exactly the same, they just use different terminology.

Digital marketing (online marketing) is a form of traditional marketing that uses digital platforms such as websites, social media, search engines and apps to deliver promotional content to consumers. It includes everything from blogs and podcasts on your website to emails you send out, posts you share on social media and even the ads that pop up in front of videos you watch on YouTube. All of this can be measured and tracked with analytics software that allows marketers to identify their target audience’s preferences so they can better understand them and create more personalized content for them which will lead to better results.

Marketing operations managers plan and execute on campaigns, deliver data and reports to stakeholders, create team workflows, train and develop team members, and ensure that the team is working efficiently.

  • Campaign management. Creating, executing and following up on campaigns is a huge part of marketing operations managers’ jobs.
  • Day-to-day activities: Creating campaigns, analyzing the campaign’s success, gathering feedback from stakeholders, managing follow-ups with customers
  • Data management. Gathering data and reporting on it is a big part of this job as well.
  • Day-to-day activities: Ensuring that data is recorded and stored properly (usually through software like Salesforce), analyzing reports for stakeholders, creating visuals to go along with reports
  • Stakeholder management. Marketing operations managers work closely with various members of their teams — salespeople, marketers — and outside parties — vendors or clients — to ensure everyone has what they need to be successful in their roles.
  • Day-to-day activities: Getting updates from people working on a campaign, communicating stakeholder needs to the rest of the team, providing necessary resources for people working on a campaign
  • Team management. Managing team members can include training them on new tools or processes and making sure they are working together effectively for the best results possible for each project or campaign. This role varies at different companies depending on how many members are in the marketing operations team. At smaller companies or startups, there may be just one marketing operations manager responsible for overseeing other members of the team; at larger companies there may be multiple layers of leadership within this department with different managers who supervise only certain teams within marketing ops (for example, one manager might oversee only paid social media advertising campaigns).
  • Day-to-day activities: Training new hires about workflow processes and expectations at your company; assisting in creating performance reviews; checking up regularly with individual employees to assess progress

They usually report to the senior director of marketing operations or the chief marketing officer.

The marketing operations manager can report to a senior marketing manager, the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO), the Head of Marketing Operations, a senior marketing operations manager, or the Head of Marketing.

What are the key skills of a marketing operations manager?

To be effective in this role, your skillset should include:

  • Attention to detail
  • Project management skills
  • Data-driven, analytical mindset
  • Ability to plan and prioritize
  • Knowledge of marketing automation and other marketing technologies
  • Knowledge of marketing processes and best practices
  • Collaboration with stakeholders and vendors

Those are the hard skills. The soft skills you’ll need for success in this role are: communication and presentation of information, ability to collaborate with others

What is the career path for a marketing operations manager?

You can take the next step in your marketing operations manager career by becoming a marketing operations director. There are no rigid requirements for this position, but it’s a good idea to have experience with all of the following:

  • Working with your company’s marketing team to identify and set goals
  • Working with your company’s sales team to identify and set goals
  • Working with your company’s product team to identify and set goals
  • Working with your company’s executive team to identify and set goals

These goals should be aligned, so you need strong communication, negotiation, and leadership skills. The marketing operations director is responsible for ensuring that these teams are working together effectively. In addition to their management responsibilities, a marketing operations director often handles strategic planning as well as analyzing data.

The job of a marketing operations manager is to make sure that everything runs smoothly with the company’s marketing activities.

If you’re a marketing operations manager, your job is to make sure that everything runs smoothly with your company’s marketing activities. Marketing operations managers work closely with the marketing team to coordinate campaigns and maximize their effectiveness. They also support marketing activities by gathering and analyzing data, managing campaigns, and managing technology and infrastructure.

Let’s look at these different tasks in more detail. First of all, it’s the job of a marketing operations manager to gather data about how well their company’s marketing campaigns are working. They may do this by monitoring sales numbers or traffic on the company website. Then they analyze this information and pass it on to the people planning future campaigns.

The next task is campaign management: they set campaign objectives, such as increasing sales or improving brand recognition (how many people recognize your brand). Then they decide which strategies will help them meet these goals, create action plans for each strategy, and track the results of each strategy over time.

Finally, a big part of any marketing operations manager’s job is to manage technology. They should understand what technologies will best support current goals — for example, if one goal is to increase online sales leads by 10% per year for three consecutive years then you would want an online lead generation tool that integrates into your CRM software — implement these technologies, train the relevant employees how to use them correctly (this may involve writing instructions), monitor their performance over time to make sure that they continue working correctly and update them if necessary (for instance when new features are released).

A Marketing Operations Manager plays an important role in supporting marketing initiatives through data gathering and analysis, campaign management, and more

A Marketing Operations Manager plays a key role in supporting marketing initiatives through data gathering and analysis, campaign management, and more. This position is responsible for managing the end-to-end life cycle of a marketing campaign, from definition to post-launch measurement and optimization.

The Marketing Operations Manager serves as the primary point of contact for all marketing operations activities at the company level. In this role, the Marketing Operations Manager will be expected to develop strong relationships across various functions within the organization such as product development, IT and business development.

Tomáš Javůrek

Tomáš Javůrek

Co-founder

A passionate marketer from 2009. Co-founder of Storymkrs.

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