Exploring the Intersection of Marketing Ops & Community Ops

Much like community operations, there are plenty of misconceptions about what marketing operations actually is. A common one? That it’s simply managing marketing automation platforms.

“Marketing operations is so much more than that,” says Mike Rizzo, Founder of MO Pros, a community of marketing ops pros. “In a nutshell, marketing ops is everything that happens behind the scenes to deliver the right messages to your target audience.

“Marketing ops involves setting strategies, optimizing marketing systems, monitoring quality assurance, reporting, and automating processes to create a smooth marketing, sales, and client success funnel.”

A marketing ops pro’s work involves, among other things, analytics and reporting, A/B testing, automation, and customer relationship management. Like community operations, it requires a wide skillset to deal with the variety of tasks an ops pro might perform in a regular day:

• working with different teams and stakeholders, either within your organization or externally
• strategizing the best ways to achieve targets
• identifying the tools needed to achieve these targets
• troubleshooting and making sure your tech stack works as intended
  

Sounds familiar? Marketing ops pros might be trying to achieve different goals, but there are many processes that overlap with community ops. Mike shares some valuable insights that can benefit the workflows used by both marketing and community ops professionals.

1. Automate as many things as possible

With so many tasks and responsibilities to juggle, ops pros will find automating repetitive tasks can free up your time and help you work more efficiently. “The quickest way to find those things you can automate is to start documenting your process,” says Mike. “What are the key steps you take each and every day? As you start to analyze the day-to-day activities you've documented, try to see repetitive patterns. Can they be automated in any way? Tools like Zapier can often improve your efficiency by automating simple things.”

2. Adapt the marketing customer lifecycle to measure community success

“In our State of the MO Pro research, the number two Key Performance Indicator for MO Pros was ‘velocity tracking between lifecycle stages’, which would be an easily transferable metric to pass to CommOps Pros,” says Mike. “If you're following any type of lifecycle model for your community — new joiner, lurker, engaged member, super user — you could measure the velocity with which members move between stages or simply the ratio of entrants to each stage.”

3. Focus on business metrics to communicate the value of community ops to key stakeholders

The community industry is growing but, as our Community-Led Report shows, there’s still work to be done. Community ops pros can use their insights to highlight how the community — and the Community Operations team — impacts the business as a whole and other teams as well.

“Community ops pros should be a bridge between the strategy of the community and the technology that enables it,” says Mike. “For example, if your community aligns to a Client Success metric, talk about how to increase engagement within the community by auditing and measuring the types of questions coming into the community. With such a dedicated focus on these core metrics; you will be able to make recommendations on how to improve the conversations between the customer and the Success team.

“Furthermore, your understanding of these trends can be communicated to teams in a Support and Sales function to address the needs of the customer and prospects. Community ops can achieve these insights and strategic recommendations, but you can't do it if you're only focused on managing and moderating your community.”