Ep: 48 - Effectiveness Over Efficiency: Finding Balance in Marketing

These days, Martech provides marketers with plenty of time-saving tools that promise to free them up to spend more time on the human aspects of their job. 

The problem is: If you aren’t careful, Martec may as well translate to “doing it wrong, faster.” 

And that’s where Laura Patterson, best-selling author and President at VisionEdge Marketing, says Marketing Ops can step up to help. She joins the show to dissect this, and other crucial roles Marketing Ops plays in modern business.

We cover:

• How Marketing Ops can help make your marketing more efficient without sacrificing effectiveness 
• Brand authenticity and the importance of understanding the entire customer journey
• The strategic role Marketing Ops plays and the challenges it faces in today’s environment

How Marketing Ops builds efficiency without sacrificing effectiveness

At the heart of every business is its processes — and when it comes to your marketing efforts, this should be a top priority. 

There are plenty of time-saving tools in the Martech world that save marketers lots of time by allowing their processes to be done more efficiently, but this doesn’t necessarily mean that they are being done more effectively. 

This is where Marketing Ops comes in.

While utilizing Martech can be beneficial for your organization, a strong Marketing Ops team can oversee marketing efforts and ensure the best tools are being used — or skipped altogether. It’s important to sort out your processes first and then choose which technology bests enables them. The improper match between tools and processes spells inefficiencies just as well as a lack of tools.

“If we just chase shiny toys and build out MarTech, we lose our opportunity to bring other capabilities to the organization. Without a fully functional Marketing Ops team with the right skills, an organization will suffer,” says Laura.

Leaving your marketing efforts all to technology takes away a lot of opportunities to customize and individualize your processes. Plus, it's important to bring people onto your team that bring talent to the table that software could never mimic. 

Brand authenticity and understanding the customer journey

As a marketer, your goal is to make sure your customer wants to keep coming back for more. But just as important, you have a goal to attract new potential customers to join your community. 

To be successful, it’s important to understand the entire customer buying journey, including physical touchpoints. This is essential to your brand authenticity, keeping and growing the value of customers. 

Knowing what channels your customer is looking at, what links they’re clicking and keeping in mind the physical marketing components of the relationship with your clients can put you leaps and bounds ahead of your competitors. In-person lunches, on-site visits and invaluable face-to-face touchpoints are still an important part of the customer journey — even post-pandemic. 

“By understanding the touchpoints and the channel, you can see marketing, online and offline, have to work together,” says Laura.

People do business with people. Your marketing efforts can’t be solely digital. Make sure you’re delivering the promises of your brand and remaining authentic to build trust with your customer. Ensure them that they can rely on you to provide what they are looking for.

The role and challenges of Marketing Ops today

According to Laura, a successful Marketing Ops team can ‘Find, Keep and Grow’.

Finding, keeping, and growing customers requires a focus on data and customer value. 

Marketing Ops teams should be looking at market opportunities, customer hierarchy and processes for retaining and increasing customers when building best practices. 

Keeping quality data and knowing how to analyze it will give your Marketing Ops team the recipe for organizational growth.

The real challenge of creating a top-notch Marketing Ops team is finding a balance. 

“Marketing Ops is a strategic function within marketing and as such, we're also an enabler — the right hand of leadership and the marketing organization,” says Laura. “So we need to be thinking strategically and have good business acumen to support the success of the function, and that's beyond technology.” 

Laura urges marketers not to get pulled into the Martech vortex, giving into any new technology solely for its newness and capabilities. Make sure the tech you are investing in supports the processes you have in place, increasing the efficiency of your already effective marketing efforts. 

Want to learn more about why effectiveness is more important than efficiency and how a strong Marketing Ops team can help you accomplish both? Listen on Apple Music, Spotify or wherever you find your podcasts.