How To Run Marketing Like a Profit Center

If your marketing department is missing ROI benchmarks, churning its customers and employees or experiencing other difficulties of scale, a new operations strategy could be the salvation of your success.

There’s nothing like some good old economic pain to help marketers revisit words like process, metrics, accountability and — the mother of all business terms — organizational alignment.

But unlike the recessionary battle cries of the past, organizational alignment actually addresses the elephant-in-the-room space between strategy and execution: a space that is, at long last, being filled by the emergence of marketing operations.

Defined as an end-to-end operational discipline, marketing operations leverages processes, technology and metrics to run the marketing function as a fully accountable profit center. It reinforces marketing strategy and tactics with a scalable infrastructure, as well as a collaborative ecosystem — both within and outside the marketing department — to drive the achievement of enterprise objectives.

But how does a company achieve such idyllic, organizational heights? How do you even know if your company is ready or able to embrace marketing operations and reap its potential benefits? Read the complete article on online…

Posted on Friday, August 1st, 2008 l Permalink l Digg l del.icio.us