What is Marketing Operations?

Marketing Operations Definition

According to Hubspot, Marketing operations, sometimes referred to as MOps, is an umbrella term that describes the people, processes, and technology that power a business’s overall marketing strategy and increase chances of success. It's a soup to nuts role with the goal of making their marketing teams shine by achieving real impact.

The Four Pillars of Marketing Operations

Because the expertise needed for Marketing Operations is so vast, it's become common to to explain the role in terms of having four pillars.

The Original Four Pillars of Marketing Operation by Edward Unthank

The original four pillars of marketing operations were:

• Platform Operations: The implementation and management of Marketing Technology
• Campaign Operations: Any backend, technical setup that a marketer might need implemented to run a campaign
• Marketing Intelligence: Reporting and analysis of that data
• Marketing Development and Engineering: The implementation of custom tools and processes needed by the marketing team

The New Four Pillars of Marketing Operations by Darrell Alfonzo, et all.

In 2024, Darrell Alfonzo, MarketingOps.com, and a powerhouse team of Marketing Operations thought leaders created the New Four Pillars of Marketing Operations to expand on the original four pillars. They are:

• Technology and Data Management: Helping Marketers to achieve their goals with data and technology management
• Strategy Operations: Playing a key role in Marketing Strategy, such as financial planning, due to their deep immersion in every aspect of the Marketing function 
• Enablement and PMO: Any tasks necessary to keep marketing campaigns running and marketing teams happy
• Marketing, Business Intelligence, and Insights: Making recommendations and informing decision making with the analyses that they do. This pillar is closely tied to the Strategy Operations pillar.

How is Marketing Operations different from other Marketing Functions?

Marketing Specialization Examples

Like most fields, Marketing is an extremely broad term, with many areas of speciality. Just as Science has subsets such as Biology, Physics, Zoology, and Chemistry, so does Marketing.

A marketer will specialize in more than one area, and what is included the area or specialization can be broad, narrow, and sometimes overlap with other functions.

Here's a list of some specialized areas of marketing:

• Content marketing
• Public relations
• Webinar Marketing
• Social media
• Branding
• Event Marketing
• Email Marketing
• SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
• SEA (Search Engine Advertising) and Paid
• ABM (Account Based Marketing)
• Product Marketing
• Marketing Operations

Marketing as a Restaurant

As it pertains to Marketing Operations, it can help to think of Marketing as a restaurant that can be separated into Front of House and Back of House.

In a restaurant the front of house is the servers, hosts, and bartenders that are the face of the restaurant. In Marketing, the front of house often is responsible for campaign ideation, creation of the campaign briefs, writing of the emails, writing articles, and more.

In a restaurant, the Back of House may include of the chefs, sous chefs, and dishwashers. In Marketing, you have Marketing Operations. We may create or edit the email template html and CSS that an email marketer uses to craft their emails. If a gated asset is created, marketing operations is responsible for configuring the form utilized to collect information. Most marketing initiatives go through Marketing Operations in some way.

Final Thoughts: Elevating Your Marketing with MOps

Over my career, I have been honored to have been able to work with some of the best webinar, events, paid, and SEO marketers in the world. Working with these experts has made me a better, more well rounded marketer.

In MOps, curiosity is your best friend. Keep exploring, keep questioning, and you'll always be on the cutting edge.

MOps bridges the gap between strategy and execution. Keep learning, keep growing, and your operations will thrive.