With these types of operations jobs, managers utilize technology, assess process, and utilize people to form an overall marketing operations management strategy. Companies focused on marketing increasingly use marketing operations management to improve the efficiency and performance of marketing departments and initiatives undertaken by those departments.
Job Duties
As a marketing operations manager, you basically oversee the entire marketing department as a sort of micro-business, where you streamline and make the department's processes and systems efficient and effective so that excellent performance is consistently achieved. You may also develop new processes to achieve higher revenues and to reduce waste.
- Make sure objectives and execution work together.
If you have any changes in marketing objectives for your department, this means that your communications must also change. Those in your department need to know any changes that have occurred as far as new market trends, competition, or market share.
- Create a central location to store data on past failures and successes in your marketing.
This will allow your staff to see what has happened in the past and what has succeeded and failed, so that previous mistakes are not repeated and previous successes are built upon.
Becoming a Marketing Operations Manager
When you begin, you will usually first need a bachelor's degree in business or a related field. Many operations manager jobs, at least at present, are being created as this return on investment is needed, and so it may be that you will simply be promoted from another marketing manager position into an operations manager job when the time is right. However, if you have had five or six years of relevant marketing experience, and have the requisite business degree, many companies are now looking to really focus their marketing departments' operations as a means to save money, especially with the recent economic downturn.
Changes in Marketing Operations Management Jobs
In addition, because the Internet has become so central to marketing operations in general, especially in recent years (about the past decade), the marketing operations manager really has great resources available to him or her to make sure the marketing team overall stays in contact with each other and does not duplicate each other's efforts or make mistakes someone else has already made and could advise others on. It is therefore up to the marketing manager to make sure that staff stays in continual contact with each other so as to streamline the processes as much as possible.
- Organizing Efforts
Because many businesses are nationwide or even global, oftentimes, marketing processes can be streamlined so as to cover different sectors all at once. What does this mean? Previously, if a business's marketing assets were in Georgia and a company needed to access that information in Los Angeles, this could be very difficult. However, by streamlining the process and putting all of this valuable information in a repository that everyone can access (such as through a Web server), this both streamlines the process so as to make it faster and makes it less costly to get the information, too
Because a company's marketing plan can include many different ways to market besides the traditional venues, such as Internet resources like blogging, it is a marketing operations manager's job to decide which marketing strategies can be included in the marketing program. In most cases, it's not going to be a good idea to focus on just one or two traditional venues to the exclusion of some of the more broad-reaching, Internet-based technologies that can be even cheaper to use and more effective than traditional venues.
Freedom to Experiment
With all of this talk about streamlining processes and making sure your marketing efforts have a return on investment, it is still a marketing operations manager's job to make sure the team itself has the freedom to think in new ways, outside the box, so to speak, without worry of repercussion because it is going to cost too much to experiment.
Other Necessary Skills
Because you will be working to basically organize your team to work at its most efficient, you need to oversee your budget and make sure that it is used most efficiently. You will have to make sure your team knows each individual's role and to allocate work among your team members, again, making sure that efficiency remains the main focus, along with getting the job done right and maintaining creativity.
This requires good management skills in general. You are going to have to be able to resolve conflicts among your team as necessary, and you are going to have to be able to work well with people to see whether certain areas may be lacking and need to be bolstered.
Looking for Work
There are a variety of marketing operations jobs available on the Internet at various job sites. It should be quite easy to find one in your location in your area of expertise, as long as you have the necessary experience.
Outlook and Compensation
Compensation for operations management jobs varies by experience, sector, and location, but in general, these types of jobs paid about $80,000 a year as of 2007.
