Marketing Automation Operations Roles and Responsibilities

So you’re thinking about dipping your toe into marketing automation (MA), but you want to make sure you have the right foundational team in place?

Kudos to you for thinking about your team’s structure before installing a technology solution. All too often marketers have a false belief that marketing automation will be a cure-all for their company’s business needs. However, a tool without a strategy behind it is simply a tool! At Mambo, we recommend implementing a marketing automation readiness program to prepare your team and ensure that you’ll come out of the gates swinging to make the most from your system from day one.

When establishing your Marketing Automation Operations department, it’s vital to start with well-defined roles and responsibilities. The composition of the department will largely be dependent on available resources. We recognize that smaller marketing teams will often wear more than one hat, but it’s helpful to have an understanding of the business needs and ongoing tasks of each respective role.

Marketing Automation Administrator

This individual is a platform evangelist. They are a certified expert of the marketing automation tool and develop company-wide best practices across the implementation of various activities including technical integration, lead generation, and marketing strategy. MA administrators often come from a technical background and are comfortable with sophisticated technologies. They should also have a deep sense of curiosity that drives them to develop and implement creative solutions.

Lead Nurture Manager

(Sometimes known as Demand Generation Manager): This team member has an understanding of the entire customer lifecycle journey and develops messaging and positioning to inform the content manager with the overarching marketing strategy. They have a deep understanding of the buyer personas and work closely with the content manager to plan and develop workflows for each respective persona to map their needs to content.

Content Manager

This individual is able to craft a content strategy and coordinate with the content team to develop content that will resonate with their core target audience at each respective stage of the buying funnel. They have a deep understanding of analytics, and are able to dig into which content pieces are having an impact and which content pieces are not, to further refine/optimize their strategy.

Analytics Expert/Data Scientist

While all roles need to have a familiarity and understanding of analytics, the sheer volume of data that is produced from a marketing automation tool can be daunting. Many organizations have realized great success by dedicating resources to an individual in charge of not only looking at the data, but being able to translate that data into actionable recommendations. The data scientist works across departments to provide the information that each respective business unit needs, and also ensures data integrity across integrations of multiple systems. They are very comfortable working with both the company’s marketing automation tool and their customer relationship management (CRM) tool to pull the data that is needed as well as develop dashboards and reports to communicate that information.

Sales Role

 This team member is deeply familiar with the buyer personas and works closely with both the lead nurture manager and the content manager to ensure that the content that is being published is appropriately “teeing off” sales for a deeper qualifying conversation. Successful businesses know that gone are days of marketing and sales operating in silos. In order to achieve success, both teams need to work to be stronger together. Alignment can be achieved by establishing feedback loops between marketing and sales. Sales should encourage open communication about their needs in order to be successful and what marketing can do to make sure the first conversations with the sales team are of high value and positioned as trusted advisors.

Not all teams have the luxury of having one dedicated individual for each role, but hopefully this helps to provide a deeper understanding of the skills, personality traits, and expertise required within a marketing automation team to be successful.

Contact us if you’d like to know more about successful Marketing Automation practices.