Those who attended Chief Marketer’s “Powering Past Friction to Smarter Marketing” webinar walked away inspired to modernize their marketing operations (MO).

My discussion with fellow speakers Liz Kaufman from Covalent Marketing and Carey Sherrell from SunTrust offered many actionable takeaways. For example, when it comes to eliminating marketing friction, sunlight is the best antiseptic. If you can see where operations are inefficient, you can fix them.

Carey drove home the point that MO is truly a strategy and discipline that makes your organization “better, faster, and smarter.” Leveraging technology is a key way to challenge an organization to evolve past legacy “business as usual” marketing processes.

But how do you make a business case for marketing operations? And how do you optimize the software to ensure you squeeze every available benefit out of it? That’s what this blog is all about.

Business Case for Marketing Operations

A marketing operations platform saves time, money, and enables you to get more campaigns in market. Once you get a technology in place, you can automate… and once you automate, you’ll want more automation. This automation — down to daily tasks — will immediately yield savings: first, in soft-dollars and then in hard dollars.

An organization can save time, money, and resources by automating actions that were once done manually. MO removes points of friction—such as bottlenecks, silos, and compliance concerns—to free an organization to find a flow, be more productive, and gain agility by reallocating resources in real time.

But first things first: You can’t change unless you evaluate where you stand today. So the first step toward activating a marketing operations platform is to perform a marketing maturity assessment. This defines where you are and creates a clear-cut path to where you want to be. (Aprimo offers this service, and its marketing strategy consultants walk you through the entire process.)

Emerging Marketing Operation Roles

Carey summed it up during the webinar, “Gone are the days of ‘batch and blast [in marketing].’” Today, it’s all about being customer-centric. To successfully focus on your customers, you need to leverage technology, leverage technology, leverage technology. It can’t be said enough. MO is a must-have in today’s climate. But how can you optimize this software to ensure you realize every benefit? Just make sure someone owns it.

Within the last ten years, MO roles have been created (and are still emerging) to assign ownership and modernize the governance models within marketing organizations. These enterprise-wide experts help companies focus on the customer across business units and product lines.

These emerging roles will power your marketing operations:

• Customer Segment Owner ensures that customers are understood and products align with their needs.
• Content Marketing Chief spearheads a content strategy that attracts audiences by adding value.
• Marketing Operating System (MOS) Leader is a marketing operations expert who runs marketing as a fully accountable business.
• Customer Experience Manager works with lines of business and/or product teams to align communication efforts across enterprise departments to support the customer journey.

Missed the live webinar? View the on-demand webinar here.