Decentralize work in Marketo, without compromising quality
Of the many business lessons that have emerged so far in 2020, none have been more significant to our team than how marketing must be human-centered. When you treat prospects as humans, you may see better outcomes, but this certainly comes with its own challenges. Working with teams at the enterprise level, we saw first-hand how difficult this can be.
How do you turn a giant ship moving at great speed in just weeks or even days? What if the ship needs to turn right and left at the same time?
Part of the reason it is difficult for marketing operations at scale to be adaptable, ready to respond to unique situations (i.e. local markets or regional requirements), is because they were specifically created not to.
What does that mean exactly? Well, centralized MOPs processes allow for speed and quality through efficiency and uniformity. Limiting decisions reduces risk and ultimately accomplishes more over a large amount of time.
But we also know that if Marketing is to be “human” then the output of Marketing Ops, like copy and campaign flow, must be just as flexible as the world is uncertain. Decentralization can accomplish this by empowering non-technical teams to build, proof, and approve their own campaigns.
“But this is a resourcing issue”
Organizations that reach for a resourcing solution— additional hires, redistribution, or prioritization—will find that problems with delivering valuable content will linger or even grow. This is in-part because resourcing alone does not eliminate handoff, wait, or rework steps that cause delays. It also does not change the high-level governance that holds all requests in line. Satellite teams will still find their unique business needs at odds with this governance and in this conflict, customer experience will suffer.
Adaptability within reason
We would never argue to transform your MOPs processes into the wild west. How can you ensure that everything is launched up to your organizational standards and how do you mitigate the risk of opening your Marketo instance to dozens or hundreds of employees?
Embracing these ideas will put you on the path towards success.
- Shift where the governance happens within the process. Use your MOPs team to set up an environment unique to your organization’s needs. Lock down branding elements of a handful of vetted templates while giving access to update only things like images, content, or copy.
- Build for exceptions. Exceptions are in the eye of the beholder. According to centralized processes built to be accomplished by the few, unique requests are interruptions or bad precedent. But if your process is built for the many, uniqueness becomes the new standard and the new standard can be – governed.
- Provide instant asset review. How long does your marketing technologist spend pulling, labeling, and uploading proofs? For one asset maybe minutes, but over hundreds of assets this can become a serious amount. Allow any team to see their update requests in real time, eliminating the back and forth and collapsing handoff and wait steps in seconds.
- Automate Quality Assurance. Utilize automated quality assurance tooling to maintain confidence that your standards are in place without spending hours on manual QA. Add it to a pre-flight check list, document the errors and rebuild the process using these learnings.
- Use tooling to empower non-technical employees. Solomon created a UX to accomplish all these items for non-technical marketers. We believe that decentralizing the MOPs process empowers satellite teams, as well as MOPs teams, to envision a more strategic relationship and a more personalized customer experience, even at scale.
For more information and to try the product for yourself visit the ScaleMX product page, or drop us a line for information on a custom product for your organization.
