How do your marketing activities adapt to your company’s growth or changes? What’s your strategy?
Maybe you have an excellent marketing operations (MOps) team member, but they don’t have the specific abilities required to expand your firm into new regions. Perhaps you’re asking what the ideal plan is for assembling an integrated MOps team following a merger.
If you identify yourself in a similar situation, you’re likely to be confused about how to organise your marketing operations team. Should your organisation establish a centralised marketing operations team to handle all marketing operations, demands, servicing, and updates for the entire organisation? Should you decentralise MOps so that individuals or teams can help the departments they are most familiar with?
Centralised: MOps are handled by a single centralised team across the entire firm.
Decentralised: Multiple decentralised teams deliver MOps to specific business units or departments.
A quick Google search will reveal that whether to use a centralised or decentralised method is determined by the needs of your firm. The decision will have significant consequences for the future of your company, including scaling, governance, training, cost, as well as job satisfaction. So, selecting the best selection for your team and company is critical.
How do you determine which technique is best for your business? To help you navigate the process, we’ve compiled a list of the advantages and disadvantages of each technique.
Centralising marketing operations involves establishing a single “Centre of Excellence” (COE) team to oversee all marketing operations. Because marketing operations demand extensive knowledge, the key advantage of centralising is having committed professionals who can assist in managing time- and bandwidth-intensive projects. Below, we’ll examine some of the benefits and drawbacks of forming your own in-house COE team.
Scaling is probably high on your list of priorities, and establishing a centralised MOps team can help you scale efficiently and fast. A centre of excellence strategy promotes cross-team collaboration. Rather than finding data and resources in different departments, centralised MOps allow you to access everything in one place throughout your entire organisation, making scaling more effective.
Maintaining your brand is critical as your business grows. Consistent branding can enhance revenue by up to 33%. A centralised staff makes it easier to maintain a high degree of branding and identity as your business grows.
Bottom line: regardless of how large your firm becomes, a centralised team makes it much simpler to control and implement changes.
A Centre of Excellence strategy ensures that campaign activities are managed in a single marketing automation framework with a written email data governance policy. Data, integration, control systems, communication, and design will all come from a single, integrated process, reducing the company’s potential for compliance violations.
As previously indicated, MOps are challenging. Who trains your team, and what roles are each member trained on? Training is greatly simplified with a centralised team managed by experienced MOps personnel. Team building is faster and more efficient. Furthermore, it is much easier to identify a career path, which may improve staff motivation and satisfaction.
For at least 30% of employees, growth possibilities are one of the most significant aspects of job satisfaction (outperforming earnings by 20%!). Building a centralised MOps team allows employees to develop and advance in their preferred field of work, which may be an important component in keeping employees in the long run.
While scaling has advantages, there are also disadvantages. If your MOps team fails, your entire business could suffer. Scaling may also cause bandwidth issues. If a single team is in charge of all of your company’s marketing operations, it may get overloaded with responsibilities.
Perhaps the most significant obstacle to constructing a COE is the cost. MOps personnel, as you might expect, require extensive training and expertise to perform their duties effectively – and this does not come cheaply.
In many circumstances, organisations will invest in a professional and highly competent leader while developing internal employees for lower-level positions. This could potentially save costs, but external recruitment costs and expansion periods may outweigh any savings from this strategy.
Unlike centralised teams, a decentralised strategy requires less investment in professionals and training. Instead, teams across your organisation gain some of the necessary skills, with support from a manager of operations or smaller operations team. Here are some of the Pros and Cons of a decentralised strategy.
Scaling is frequently cheaper and easier using a decentralised team. Each department is given the training required to carry out marketing operations. Because the department already has experience familiar with the topics, this is frequently a simple addition of a few tasks scattered throughout the company. Scaling is reduced to a matter of teamwork with this technique; you can train initially to improve skills gradually.
In a decentralised model, distant teams can be adaptable and build campaigns that match their department’s objectives as needed. Teams are in charge of managing their respective department’s contacts in the company’s marketing automation platform and managing the lead funnel.
With a decentralised approach to MOps, smaller teams may require individuals to take on numerous responsibilities. Some employees may regard the new responsibilities as a burden rather than an opportunity for progress. That may be discouraging to employees who believe they are learning sophisticated systems, technology, and processes for no benefit.
While Martech tools can help with governance, it is critical to exercise caution and maintain an organised framework among decentralised teams. Permissions, paperwork, access, and quality control will be significantly reliant on specific departments. One of the most significant disadvantages of software governance is consistency. While a well designed MAP and email data governance strategy can help, the more people that handle data, the greater the potential of error.
Your business’s needs will determine whether you use a centralised or decentralised approach. However, there is a third option that can significantly reduce costs while providing in-depth experience, smart guidance, and streamlined governance.
Creating a hybrid team, in which MOps responsibilities are split between an in-house staff and an external agency, provides the best of the two. It keeps prices cheap while including highly trained specialists. It may also minimise recruitment and training costs.