As someone who has worked in marketing ops most of my career, I’m used to being seen as the person who knows how the systems and data work. One of my favorite parts of the work is in educating others and helping them understand what’s going on behind the tech and tools.
Yet too often I notice marketers stay too much in their lane when it comes to diving into the data. They view it as another team’s responsibility. Valuable, certainly, but something to request rather than seek out themselves. This is a shame, because perhaps the most marketable skill for a marketer in 2019 is a data-driven approach, and most marketers besides the “techy ones” treat this as an afterthought.
There’s still a bit too much emphasis on subjective opinions and conjecture rather than truly data-guided decisionmaking. And that’s something any marketer can shift to. It’s just a matter of them taking the time to dig a little deeper, and get a little more curious.
If you’re a marketer in a non-ops function, spend more time with your ops counterparts to learn the ropes and become more self sufficient. It’s easier than you might imagine, and your team will appreciate having another informed person to bounce ideas off of.
And if you’re an ops person – consider that part of your responsibility should not be just in maintaining the systems and the data, but democratizing that information as well. Building education and processes for others to take advantage of what you’ve built more easily. It shouldn’t be seen as a threat to your role or responsibility – but as a necessary step to building a more informed, thoughtful marketing team.