The article written by Maria Velasquez, Chief Growth Officer and Co-Founder of the Cybersecurity Marketing Society, is an excerpt from the 2024 Cyber Content Annual: Everything Old is New Again. The Cyber Content Annual not only houses a variety of articles about cybersecurity content marketing, content marketing strategy, and content in general, which we will be sharing here over the next month, but also features our Cybersecurity Content Marketing Report: The Good, the Bad, and the Wildly Dangerous.
If your marketing operations team is playing clean-up, you may be doing it backward.
As a marketer with years of experience in demand generation and growth marketing, I firmly believe that having the right resources for marketing operations and campaign support is crucial for enhancing marketing and sales efforts. More often than not, we see the leadership team buying every tool under the sun for the sales team, while the marketing team struggles on legacy platforms, spending days building one email template or launching a new campaign landing page.
Equipping the team with the best technology stack is critical for improving our efficiency in building campaigns and understanding marketing spend ROI across channels. Most importantly, if you want true sales and marketing alignment, stop splitting the funnel and revenue goals between them. Make it a team effort or they’ll fight over lead sources and deal attribution like toddlers.
Most growing companies address staffing only as it becomes critical, especially when it comes to supporting roles like marketing or human resources. After all, who needs a marketing team and an HR director when it’s just three of you in a rented conference room trying to grow a cyber company?
For marketing, the first need is almost always a designer. You need a website, brand, and social media assets. Then, you’ll want to find someone who can clean up the mess of words on the website — maybe even write a few thought leadership pieces while they’re at it.
But that may be backward thinking for the needs of most growing companies. In my experience, starting with a marketing operations hire and trusting them to build the right marketing team is the most effective way to see sales alignment and messaging momentum.
Otherwise, when it’s time for your first Marketing Operations strategist to start, they will spend more time mopping up messes than marketing operations.
The Importance of MOps
I’m a strong advocate for what I call a ‘MOps first culture’ within marketing teams. Too often, I see CMOs hiring five, six, and sometimes even ten specialists for every marketing operations person or starting with specialists before considering operations. That imbalanced or backward approach can lead to inefficiencies and bottlenecks.
It’s the operations side of the marketing team that keeps the wheels turning and absorbs a lot of the tasks that marketing specialists (especially creatives) would rather not do. But without defined marketing operations and a guiding strategy, your designer, copywriter, and other marketing specialists are committing random acts of marketing (and often getting burned out along the way).
It’s a mess
Efficient marketing operations lead to faster initiative execution, better data hygiene, actionable analytics, intentional resource allocation, and future planning.
MOps Can Build Marketing Foundation
For early-stage startups, I recommend hiring a marketing operations specialist before content creators. This approach ensures proper infrastructure setup, effective data collection and analysis, and a solid foundation for future marketing strategies. Even a part-time contractor can help establish these crucial building blocks if budget is an issue.
The best part about starting with a marketing operations strategist is their ability to build strong systems on a budget that will then scale as the company grows.
Build Systems that Scale
Without an eye to the future, data infrastructure, marketing strategies, content management, brand strategy, and lead management systems will need to be rebuilt for each new growth stage. But when scalable, systems can simply grow without the time and costs required to start from scratch.
Marketing operations staff can establish policies and systems, coordinate with sales and media, and maintain a team of contractors. These are the jobs of a skilled operations professional to organize that information, not a copywriter or graphic designer.
And when it’s time to finally grow your marketing headcount, your marketing operations pro can build a marketing team already aligned with the company’s vision and ready to begin executing.
Build Teams on a Budget
If you’re thinking, “That’s great, but I don’t have the budget to hire three people, and right now I need a designer,” don’t worry. Your marketing ops hire should have a list of talented design contractors they already have experience working with, like email marketers, demand gen specialists, webinar experts, and creatives. In fact, “Do you have a community of trusted specialists you contract with?” is a great MOps job interview question.
Do you want your first marketing hire to be an overwhelmed specialist with little experience reporting to executives or someone well-versed in setting culture and building teams?
With your data accessible, strategy outlined, and team assembled, executing the marketing strategy will be smooth, consistent, and on deadline.
MOps Bridges the Sales and Marketing Feedback Loop
One of the biggest obstacles to efficient business operations is the disconnect (and sometimes resentment) between marketing and sales. But it doesn’t have to be that way.
The disconnect is rarely intentional and almost always a result of miscommunications.
That’s where marketing operations step in. One of the first things I (and many of my peers) do is coordinate with sales to see how marketing can better align its messaging to the messages that are already working for the sales team.
The two business functions must work in tandem; otherwise, they will work against each other, compromising the customer experience.
With an empowered marketing operations position in your marketing team, you can maintain better feedback loops, update messaging based on customer feedback, and provide sales with the tools and resources they need to do a better job faster.
Build Trust with Your Sales Team
What better way to build trust than with proof? Part of the role of marketing operations is to find the metrics and KPIs that are crucial to departmental and overall business goals and then monitor those metrics for trends and opportunities. Without marketing ops, copywriters report on organic traffic, social media specialists report on impressions, and sales make assumptions about lead generation and deal attribution.
Marketing operations breezes past vanity metrics and offers actual analysis of the data points that matter most to each business function.
Without a clear vision and an operational strategy, departments can feel threatened and have an adversarial relationship with marketing. But, with common goals and good communication, interdepartmental collaboration can drive business growth.
Leverage Sales Insights for Marketing
Sales happen best at a one-to-one level, but for marketers, one-to-one communication is a rare luxury. But, with an operations team that can interview sales leaders and draw insights from customer data, successes at the one-on-one level can be scaled into mass marketing communications.
This happens best in marketing teams with marketing operations staff embedded in the sales department or at least regularly checking in and monitoring calls. Finding a marketing champion within sales is also an effective way to leverage these insights.
Align Marketing Language with Sales
In a perfect world, marketing primes the audience with questions and brand-specific language. Once in the sales funnel, the sales team is already prepared to respond and should have battle cards, buyer guides, consistent product descriptions, website resources, or explainer videos to share with curious customers.
To ensure consistency between marketing and sales messaging, agree on a shared audience or target account list, tailor marketing efforts to support sales initiatives, and create “air cover” for sales teams through strategic marketing campaigns.
Embrace Diverse Marketing Tactics
Finally, every marketing specialist sees their specialty as the ultimate solution to every problem. Directors think videos work best. Writers think reports answer every question. Designers think infographics are the answer. Sales teams just need more leads, and they’ll do the rest.
Someone with a diverse background and no allegiance to any particular media or modality can more easily compare opportunities to the marketing strategy and business goals without being influenced by their preferred method.
The media and modality agnosticism that comes with marketing operations is also helpful in diversifying the overall marketing content portfolio.
I advocate for a balanced approach to marketing, including brand-building initiatives, direct response campaigns, and lead generation efforts. Believing in the “invisible magic” of brand-building is important, even when direct attribution is challenging.
Prioritizing marketing operations and fostering strong sales and marketing alignment are key to creating effective, data-driven marketing strategies in the cybersecurity industry.
Interested in reading more from the Cyber Content Annual or checking out the 2024 Cybersecurity Content Marketing Report, click here to join the list to receive your copy in December.
