Month: June 2024

TLDR: Scope creep and burnout are exceptionally common in MOPs. Explain your role’s real value and demands so you get the credit you deserve.

The boom in marketing technology has seen marketing shift from a heavily creative discipline into a revenue engine. It’s increasingly capable of optimizing commercial performance and depicting high-level organizational impact. Marketing ops has assumed the responsibility to steer the ship, but recognition has yet to match the reality.

Does any of this sound familiar? Scope creep, burnout, loneliness. Then this guide is for you.

We’ll characterize the challenges of working in marketing ops so you can confidently speak to leadership about your role’s demands and the value you bring. Whether you want a new role or a helping hand, rewards or respect, it all starts with this conversation.

 

The many shades of MOPs

Few functions are as multidisciplinary (or as misunderstood) as Marketing Operations.

• You’re the custodian of an ever-complex technology infrastructure that must surface clean, accurate data and sync correctly between solutions to support campaigns successfully.
• You’re the analyst that reports on budgets and maintains the performance of systems and campaigns.
• You’re the advocate for processes and products that increase revenue, reportability, and productivity.
• And when things go awry, you’re the engineer that fixes integrations by hand to redeem sunk cost investments.

This list is getting long, and you get the picture. In a nutshell, marketing ops makes marketing work.

 

The big MOPs misconception

The big misconception is that you do this critical work by pushing buttons on platforms and taking orders.

Marketing operations is a highly strategic role at the crossroads of many different corners of the business. It takes an exceptionally well-rounded skill palette and a lot of effort to perform well in Marketing Operations. This fact goes underappreciated by the many departments with whom you interact.

The point to qualify for leadership: In MOPs, the magnitude of this invisible labor is extraordinarily high.

There is no other function in the business facing the pressure to:

• resolve the age old question of marketing and sales alignment
• learn the ins and outs of products and play the role of procurement
• inherit impact reportage from senior leadership, and
• build systems and dataflows in step with IT, data science, and legal.

 

Finding focus

Marketing operations is a constantly evolving space, with thousands of new tools entering the market every year. This growth causes expectations and responsibilities to pile up without a greater appreciation of the value MOPs provides.

You may have spent your first few months owning one particular platform or optimizing unused or ill-fitting tools, creating the impression that executional work is the sum of your job. Friction between sales and marketing might be particularly high in your workplace, where your rationale for qualifying leads and passing them to sales is often disregarded. 

Leadership might note that MOPs isn’t the only function challenged by the complexities of workplace tech (just ask IT). But while IT is typically a broader team with an established status, MOPs is often an island on its own, where a handful or even a single member of staff performs multiple jobs at once.

Your CMO or CFO might ask for numbers, but invisible labor in MOPs is difficult to quantify.

 

The source of out-of-scope work

Every organization has its unique mix of strengths and stressors. A slick data science operation can coexist with a chaotic procurement department.

Because of this, the main sources of out-of-scope work will differ between organizations. But here’s the common thread: as MOPs interfaces with many departments, they’re vulnerable to misunderstandings and dysfunction from all around the organization, inviting excess demands by design.

This is a consequence of a hiring drive in MOPs that has sought generalists for roles designed to do many different things. That many people in MOPs are spread thin, their skills poorly utilized and understood, confirms that this has been an unviable approach to hiring.

 

The silver lining

If you relate, there’s a silver lining: Slowly, the industry is catching up.

As MOPs shifts to a more specialist field, where expertise in particular areas like attribution is becoming more prominent, the case for a role with more focused responsibilities has rarely been so convincing.

If leadership wants to take advantage of your skills and retain your loyalty as an employee, it’s time to give your role the focus and recognition it deserves.

 

Work in progress

Most labor in marketing ops is invisible to others.

• You build complex campaign infrastructure and surface Marketing’s contribution to revenue.
• You fix the flaws in your tech stack and cut through the noise of new solutions to find opportunities.
• You coordinate buy-in between teams for processes with leads, data, and product purchases.

This work takes more time and expertise than outsiders assume. As a result, MOPs are spread thin, applying a mix of skills to fulfill unviable expectations.

Despite the progressive energy of the MOPs space, there’s a poor understanding of what it takes to successfully hire and design these roles.

If you’re struggling with excessive invisible labor, it doesn’t necessarily reflect your professional abilities. This causes frustration for many people in MOPs and a look at the active MOPs communities will show that you’re not alone.

Explaining to leadership the true demands and value of your role is the start of you taking charge of your career direction and gaining visibility and respect around your organization.

For advice with defining your role or managing excess work demands, Revenue Pulse is here to help.

In this guide, we’ll show you how to use GPT-4o for better email personalization directly within your Marketo instance!

The recent release of GPT-4o came with a long list of new features and improvements over previous models, but the ones most relevant to email personalization are its enhanced language understanding and improved natural language processing.

In short, GPT-4o understands context and nuance better than any previous architecture.

This means more accurate and engaging copy for your emails, enabling more personalization at scale without losing quality.

And the real value lies in integrating GPT-4o directly into Marketo, allowing us to utilize enhanced email personalization with more efficiency.

Here’s a step-by-step walkthrough on how to set it up.

Step 1: Accessing ChatGPT-4o API

First, we need to gain access to the ChatGPT API. Start by heading over to the OpenAI Platform and log in or sign up.

Keep in mind, API access is not included in the ChatGPT Plus Subscription. APIs are billed separately, with a price breakdown provided here.

Once you register, you will receive API keys and the necessary credentials needed to integrate GPT-4o.

If you’re new to using OpenAI’s APIs, there is a comprehensive FAQ here.
 

Step 2: Refine Your ChatGPT Prompt

Next, we must craft an effective prompt for generating high-quality email content. If you don’t have access to ChatGPT-4o directly in your browser, you can use the previously acquired API right in Google Docs to test out different prompts.

To set up the AI in Google Docs, head over to Extensions -> Add-ons -> Get add-ons. This will open the Google Workspace Marketplace. Here, search for “GPT for Docs Sheets Slides” developed by Qualtir (as shown in the screenshot below).

Using this add-on, we can refine our prompt through trial and error using the ChatGPT API.

We’re going to need 2 separate prompts here:

1. Email Body Prompt: This should include specific instructions regarding format and context to ensure the output is suitable for immediate use in Marketo.
2. Email Subject Line Prompt: This will be for generating personalized subject lines. Make sure they are relevant to the content of the email itself.

Be sure to experiment and iterate until you land on an output that you’re satisfied with.
 

Step 3: Creating Fields in Marketo

Now, we need to head over to Marketo to create fields that will store the content we’re generating with ChatGPT.

We’ll need to create 2 fields, one for the email body and the other for the email subject line:

1. Email Body Field: Create a “Text Area” field to store the email body content. This field type has a larger character limit of 65,535 characters – more than enough for your email copy.
2. Subject Line Field: Create a “String” field for subject lines – this one will be limited to 255 characters.

 

Step 4: Creating Webhooks in Marketo

This is where the real magic happens. We have content ready to be pulled from ChatGPT through the API (Step 2), and we have a field to store the content in Marketo (Step 3).

Now, we’ll send the content from OpenAI to Marketo using webhooks. Once again, we’ll need 2 of them:

1. Webhook for Email Body: Set up a webhook to request ChatGPT-4o. Then, in the response mapping, populate the email body field.


 

2. Webhook for Subject Line: Set up another webhook to request ChatGPT-4o. This time, in the response mapping, populate the subject line field with the content.

 

Step 5: Creating a Script to Hedge for Errors

There is always a chance that ChatGPT’s API will run into an error and return the value “N/A” in place of your subject line.

To hedge against this, we need to implement email script tokens that automatically catch these incorrect subject lines and stop those emails from going out.

Aside from that, there is another unique problem we ran into when it comes to line breaks in your email body copy:

Essentially, ChatGPT will send content with “
” tags to indicate line breaks. The problem is, When “
” exists, the JSON breaks and Marketo won’t be able to read it.

A workaround we came up with is to create another email script token that converts all “
” tags to “ is an arbitrary placeholder, you can use anything you want). Now Marketo will be able to read the content, and we can instruct it to turn those arbitrary “” tags back to “
” tags to reimplement the line breaks so the email is formatted correctly.

This is a bit of a tedious workaround, but it’s the reality of how these systems currently communicate with each other.
 

Step 6: Testing Phase

This final step is pretty self-explanatory but very important.

It’s essential that you test your emails rigorously to make sure everything is working properly before sending anything out to your list.

The enhanced language understanding and improved natural language processing that GPT-4o brings to the table streamlines the creation of more engaging, contextually accurate personalized emails.

And integrating it directly into Marketo allows us to leverage these capabilities with even more efficiency and speed at scale.

Knowing how to utilize GPT and integrate it into your systems will only become more important as it continues to improve over the coming months and years.

If you need help with any of the steps above, or if you want to know more about how Revenue Pulse can implement AI solutions for you, reach out to us here.

TLDR: If you’re considering a new marketing automation platform, learn the processes, goals, and challenges to plan around before you make a firm decision.

No matter your organization’s maturity, implementing a new marketing automation platform is a significant undertaking.

There’s a tendency for C-Suite to believe that getting off the ground with a new platform is as straightforward as flicking a switch. In reality, there are processes, goals, and concerns your marketing team should establish before deciding on a platform and continue to account for during the implementation process.

In this guide, we’ll break down the considerations and challenges that arise at different stages of the process. We’ll will help you talk with your CMO and encourage them to:

• arrive at clear motivations for implementing a new platform
• get a sound grasp of what the implementation process demands, and
• establish realistic performance expectations.

 

Weighing your decision

As a growing business, making the leap to a marketing automation platform can provide powerful features and data management capabilities for scaling upwards.

For established organizations, the decision to implement a new platform can correct the course of a tech stack mismatched with your strategy.

A new marketing platform is a reasonable step forward if you’ve:

• reached a point of momentum where you need to attribute the value and ROI from marketing activities, or
• found it difficult to consolidate data from disparate sources and act on insights with your current platform.

Still, it’s crucial that leadership thoroughly understands the current state of your marketing machine and what you’re looking to gain by onboarding a new platform.

Beyond the financial cost of running a platform, the real investment here is time.

Once marketing activities, data, and integrations start flowing through the platform, it becomes increasingly difficult to untangle yourself over the years.

With that in mind, your CMO needs to have full confidence in your chosen platform’s trajectory.

While it’s challenging to predict how you’ll use the platform in five years, leadership should at least be able to identify how it supports your marketing team’s current and near-future ambitions.

Encourage them to set out how platforms with good momentum or established status in the market can help the marketing team to address its performance needs.

 

Getting off the ground

All tools come with a learning curve and marketing automation platforms like Marketo have particularly steep gradients to conquer. We wrote a whole post to help you explain Marketo to your CEO.

Besides pushing for additional help and support from the vendor, your marketing team should meticulously plan all that you’ll use the platform for.

Processes ultimately underlie every decision you make to get off the ground.

Make leadership aware that, before you really get up and running with the platform, your marketing team needs to clearly establish how to improve existing processes.

As an example: if your team has been sending lead lists manually to sales, marketing and sales need to agree on a point in the lifecycle where sales can take over before automating the handover.

 

Define processes centrally

Organizationally, your CMO should be prepared to define processes centrally.

Each member of your marketing team doing their own thing without a consistent methodology or shared set of definitions can scramble your reporting. When processes are disparate or data potentially missing, it’s difficult to verify the efficacy of your data or insights.

It can be as simple as standardizing fields and fonts in list uploads, but having your CMO advocate for clear and established ways of using the platform can help to preserve the integrity of your data and encourage clarity in the team.

Breaking down the sweeping task of implementation into smaller, achievable goals is crucial to see success from the platform.

You can make this argument to your CMO to incentivize them to work with the marketing team and define action items at various intervals of time, for example:

• day 1
• day 30
• day 90, and
• year 1.

These action items should be need-based yet realistic, so while leadership might have their eye on a new lead scoring model, you’d be wise to prioritize the likes of creating templates for emails and webinars and lead lifecycles for SQLs.

After you work towards your chosen milestones on Day 1, take stock of whether you met them. If not, it’s likely because the experience of using the platform is more complicated than you thought.

If your CEO’s expectations are still riding high, remind them that the demo viewed during the selection process presents a simplified version of using the platform, where the technicalities are already fine-tuned.

For your marketing team to develop a comparable level of efficiency, it’s going to take time using the platform to really optimize your processes and understand how to optimize different features.

 

Continual improvements

For the ways that a marketing automation platform can make your life easier and improve your performance, “automation” is somewhat of a misnomer.

There is always more work to do.

You’re never going to flip a switch and have everything run like clockwork, and years into using a platform, your marketing team will still be learning on the go.

Through consistent processes and realistic goal-setting, each milestone will see your Marketing team achieve more with your platform.

For any additional guidance with implementing a new platform, Revenue Pulse is here to help.

 

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TLDR: Marketing aims to invest in the campaigns and channels that offer the most significant returns. This doesn’t mean assigning credit so much as investment optimization. Discover why multi-touch attribution is vital for making those decisions.

Here’s a puzzle for you: Someone visits your website. Weeks later, a blog post shared on LinkedIn brings them back to your site, and they register for a webinar. Several emails down the line, this person becomes a customer. (Congrats 🎉)

Now, the BIG question is: What data can you take from that journey to optimize and accelerate future marketing engagements?

The prevailing view in B2B on attribution is to credit one single touchpoint for driving revenue. But we’re big advocates of multi-touch attribution because most customer journeys comprise multiple interactions with your brand. We’d love to be able to make it a ‘credit’ and ‘magic bullet’ conversation, but that’s not the reality of how customer journeys work.

What’s in this article for you? In this guide, we’ll help you explain to your team why multi-touch attribution is essential for accurately measuring campaign impact. You’ll learn the:

➡️ Types of multi-touch attribution models that allow marketers to tailor their strategies based on specific goals.

➡️ Importance of choosing relevant metrics besides cost-per-lead to help optimize campaign effectiveness.

➡️ Difference between single source and multi-touch attribution models.

 

Choose your attribution model

It’s important to note that single-source and multi-touch attribution methods have unique advantages and limitations.

The choice between them often depends on the specific goals and business circumstances. We outline the strengths of each below.

 

Single-touch attribution

 
What is single-touch attribution? Single-touch attribution associates pipeline and/or revenue to one touchpoint (e.g., an ad click or webinar registration) that a customer had with a brand before converting.

It helps you answer particular questions about campaign performance, for instance:

👉 First-touch attribution: Details which campaign sparked initial interest.

👉 Lead-creation attribution: Identifies which campaigns get people into your database.

👉 Last-touch attribution: Pinpoint which campaigns convert the most leads to opportunities.

Each method is effective at evaluating performance against KPIs, but no one interaction accounts for the sum of marketing activities that influence revenue.

A lead could have anywhere from 5 to 50 interactions with your company on their journey. Limiting your analysis to a single or handful of interactions means the vast majority of your activities have impacts that you’re not even measuring—and if you don’t measure it, you won’t optimize it.

 

Multi-touch attribution

 
What is multi-touch attribution? Multi-touch attribution associates pipeline and/or revenue to multiple touchpoints along the customer journey. It allows for a more nuanced understanding of how different touchpoints contribute to a conversion.

 

“It responds to reality because there’s no one correct answer for where to spend your budget.”

 

It responds to reality because there’s no one correct answer for where to spend your budget.

These models assign dollars across different touchpoints, and by doing so, the analysis leads to insights that a single factor can’t explain.

Revenue from pipeline or bookings or realized revenue are allocated based on percentages assigned with each model.

Define your motivation: Are you using these models to try to describe credit between marketing and sales, or are you trying to maximize your campaign operations? How you set up the model ultimately determines the data that comes out of it.

This means you need to set up the model to support the conversation you want to have after the fact. Whether it’s a conversation about optimizing campaigns, measuring ROI, or ascribing credit to specific teams in your organization.

Here’s a rundown of what insights some common multi-touch attribution models can tell you:

✅ U-Shaped: Allocates a larger portion of pipeline and/or revenue to the first touch and the lead creation touch and an equal allocation to all other touches.

✅ W-Shaped: Similar to U-Shaped but includes the touchpoint just before opportunity creation. All other touchpoints share the remaining allocation based on all other interactions a customer had with your brand.

✅ Full-Path: Allocates pipeline and/or revenue to all touchpoints in the customer journey. Full-path can be equally weighted or custom-weighted depending on the type and maturity of the full-path model.

✅ Sourced (or Even Weighted Up To Opportunity): Focuses on pre-opportunity creation touchpoints and equally associates pipeline and/or revenue to each touchpoint.

✅ Accelerated: Looks at post-opportunity creation at any marketing touchpoints that may have helped to close deals.

✅ Influenced: Allocates pipeline and/or revenue based on the entirety of the customer journey, including pre- and post-opportunity creation touchpoints.

✅ Time-Decay Allocates pipeline and/or revenue to all touchpoints in the customer journey, but the allocation percentage is weighted more for touchpoints closer to time of conversion and less to touchpoints that occur further away in time.

The takeaway for your marketing team: Both single- and multi-touch attribution have their place in your game plan, but multi-touch leads to various discoveries that help you double down on campaign success.

 

“As a marketer, you’re a revenue driver.”

 

As a marketer, you’re a driver of revenue. One of the most important decisions marketing makes for the business is to allocate campaign dollars to the places that give you the highest return on investment.

Your company’s invested in martech to make sense of the data, but if you’re making that call without multi-touch attribution, you’re spending in the dark.

Your marketing manager is probably focusing on cost per lead when making spending decisions.

If you pump more money into the sub-channels where you get cheaper leads and get more leads for your money. By that logic, organic SEO wins every time, then platforms with the next-lowest spend, and that’s where you’ll invest.

When you take a more gradual approach to the analysis and let lead data play out until you can calculate cost per deal.

Estimate revenue based on deal size, and you might see the picture shift.

Platforms like Google Ads and LinkedIn may be more expensive per lead but more efficient per deal, bringing in sales at much higher values than sub-channels with cheaper leads.

 

“Not all leads are created equal.”

 

This is where ROI really comes from—revenue vs spend—and it produces a different decision than if you’d focused on cost per lead. The lesson for marketing here is that not all leads are created equal. If you reduce spend based on leads, you could lose out on deals in the long run.

Multi-touch attribution takes figures from across your brand activity and tells you what’s creating deals and ROI. That lets you double down on your strategy and determine how to max out spending at multiple levels:

• channels (e.g., social, display)
• sub-channels (e.g., LinkedIn, Facebook), and
• tactics (e.g., whitepapers, webinars).

This is the essence of how attribution helps your marketing team succeed — from your CMO setting growth targets and strategic aims to your marketing manager running campaigns.

 

Drive better decisions

Multi-touch attribution connects the dots between marketing interactions and revenue, letting you accurately measure and spend on impact.

That understanding puts everyone on the same page about what campaigns really boost your bottom line, and it gives Marketing a more effective way to think about and surface value.

If you’re facing pressure to optimize right this second, just remember: this is an engine for long-term success. Take time to handle your modeling with care and collect the data you need as campaigns progress; you have more of both on your side than you think.

For any advice on succeeding with attribution, Revenue Pulse is here to help.

Contact us to start a conversation.