The History of Marketing Operations – How it all started?

Marketing Operations is on the rise, with many companies turning to them to make their marketing efforts more efficient and effective.

While Marketing Operations is still a relatively new field, its beginnings stretch back to the 1920s, and its evolution through different marketing disciplines provides insights into its importance, benefits, and increasing popularity. Keep reading to learn all about the hot new field that’s been identified as one of the fastest-growing professions in marketing.

Marketing Operations focuses on end-to-end marketing optimization— from planning and budgeting to execution and analysis. Marketing Operations increases efficiency and drives results in marketing organizations.

It builds a foundation for excellence by reinforcing marketing strategy with metrics, infrastructure, business processes, best practices, budgeting, and reporting. Marketing Operations professionals often are not classical marketers, they often come from analytical or process-oriented roles. Increasingly, Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs) staff includes financial analysts, programmers, project managers, data gurus, and market researchers performing marketing operations functions.

Some may say that Marketing Operations is an injection of left-brain thinking into the typically right-brained-heavy marketing function. This has led to the need for marketers to expand their skill set to include technical and analytical skills in addition to traditional marketing skills. This combination is essential in today’s marketing environment that is data-heavy and offers the opportunity to deliver experiences across an increasing number of channels.

The science of marketing and the digital tools to support its operations has grown exponentially over the last few years. This has increased the operational complexity of day-to-day activities.

Marketing Operations is under the same kind of scrutiny as other parts of the business to increase efficiency, improve processes, execute at higher speeds, and show value to the organization. It is the role to function in a variety of capacities to serve and support each of these stakeholders and their specific goals.

The below Infographic by Wrike sheds much more details on how the marketing operations have started, and how it has evolved to what it is now.