SEO Paved My Path to MarOps
OPERATIONS - time to talk ops!
Have you ever pulled and presented a regular report on the progress of your work?
Congrats - you’ve done ops!
After running a record-breaking ad campaign to ad pros in Nashville area using emerging tech and digital promotion tools, it was sort of a wrap for me. The wheels were turning and my organized, methodical, impact-hungry eyes had landed on the nascent practice of Social Media Marketing.
It soon became clear that Social Media was more than “word of mouth,” and leveraging the impact of Social Media activity would take more than spontaneous or accidental viral hits, orchestrated by wildly popular internet personalities.
Social Media is the Brand entry point for so many organizations - strategy is crucial!
The flourishing practice of SEO bridged the gap between monitoring and leveraging the mostly text-based SMM channel that was quickly becoming a mix of creative, skill, and empathy. This is where I, along with my fellow early cohort of emerging digital marketers, activated our passion for data-guided strategy.
Driving the whole show for a good decade? The thriving SEO community.
The accumulated knowledge of the Search Engine Marketing community provided crucial strategy guidance for digital campaign structure, marketing KPIs, and revenue conversion expectations.
Search Engines used to be a main avenue where digital campaign effectiveness could be tracked, due to websites being the primary destination for consumers who were ready to spend their money. What a perfect environment for hands-on inbound marketing education among rising experts.
Part art, part science, part community. Marketing Ops is where the feedback loop connects and plugs into the Marketing Strategy.
Enter Marketing Ops: Strategy survives through planning, process, and progress.
Finally, the many channels and platforms contributing to Digital Marketing attracted enough executive interest and measurement opportunities for CRMs to become an industry norm. And I’m talking throughout the business ecosystem from SMB to Enterprise, public, private and non-profit, social clubs to athletic teams and beyond.
Digital Marketing pros, meet the Sales & BizDev teams. You’ll be working closely from now on.
KPIs evolved along with the digital channels and platforms, and the organizations using them. Tech began to lean into pattern recognition, lead scoring and nurturing, and revenue path mapping.
The basic KPIs of brand mentions and website visits gave way to value-stacked entrances, user actions across several digital channels, and sticky site traffic — all of which data increasingly successfully attached to specific users and identifiable sales leads.
Soon enough, we had a whole MarTech evolution serving social media in addition to multi-channel campaign data management needs. Hi Hubspot, Salesforce, Mailchimp, etc!
MarTech Boom: what used to be simply measured is now enhanced.
It only took around 15 years for a totally organic interest sprinkled around the internet to become a multibillion dollar industry fueled by ops-natured marketers like me, who love when a plan comes together. Again, and again, and again.
Through it all, organizations with large budgets raised a crop of professionals with an ever-changing menu of platform management and data analytics credentials.
Meanwhile, their budget-strapped counterparts keeping up in fierce marketplace competition, achieving impact through the use of scrappy diy planning, tracking, and evaluation workarounds.
Hi, it’s me.
The ops-minded marketing pro who kept the ever-expanding demand for campaign execution in-flow, producing results on-target, and providing sharper forecasting with every iteration.
