Welcome to the art of marketing operations a tailor podcast here you
can grow your knowledge about marketing operations, listen to ideas and
strategies to help you scale, grow and optimize. Your efficiency drive your
speed to market and enrich your work life. Let's get to it.
Welcome to the art of marketing operations, a tailor podcast, I'm
planed, bottomly and to day my guest is Dana Weeks, who is the senior manager
of marketing operations at Crane Communications, an organization that
delivers business news to more than seventy eight million readers globally
with content experts who connect brands to executive level audiences. Thank you
for joining me today, Dan thanks or having me glad, I'm happy to be here.
Well, Dana. As you know, in this podcast we talked a lot about left,
brain and right brain thinking, and I know that when you and I chatted before
you said that you actually have both of those so tell us a little bit about
your left, brain and right brain thinking. So
my left brain right, brain thinking, actually comes into play a lot in my
personal life. I, during the pandemic, I picked up tight eye, which is
something I went down: the Youtube Bradith and saw some tightie and I was
like yeah. This looks really really cool, which is very artistic and but
then there's methodology and there's color theory and
they's thinking about
being strategic in how you're bolding and if I fold it this way, how does it
how what's the outcome going to be, and what's the geometry on that right, so
it's kind of both right, brain and left brain and that it's artistic but you're
also thinking about the problem solving in the geometry related to it. That's
excellent and I think the your comment about problem solving that kind of
segues nicely into in today's topics, and so you know Dana when you started
leading the marketing on a automation team at Crane Communications. I know
that you really felt strongly that you wanted to change the name of that team
from marketing automation to marketing operations. Can you share with our
audience? Why was it important for you to make that departmental name change?
Our team underwent many changes when
over a couple of years, and
part of that was joining the operations team from the previously known team as
audience development, so we're still sort of involved in audience
development and that we're doing the same things that we always did. But I
really wanted to emphasize operational role of the team and then you know
historically at least at our company. The marketing automations team was just
that automating email marketing initiatives that were set out either
corporate marketing brand marketing teams. I really felt that the talents
of the team and expertise that we brought to the conversations needed
more visibility so that we could become better partners and provide tangible
value to the business. A lot of US come into marketing operations through non
traditional venues, our avenues and
my degree is actually in public relations. So, given my public
relations background, rebranding kind of seemed like the natural thing for us
to do
now, and so
really we provide more than just implementation services and automation,
services
and, as the subject mater experts were providing recommendations and
optimization optimization of repetitive tasks: Technical Strategic Direction.
Things like using predictive analysis for journey entry points, waste of
segment or display personal is content and data available, researching and
implementing than we do it with the help of our engineering team through
Apis direct integrations and really. The ultimate goal is to reduce the work
load of our marketing team, so they can focus
coming up with creative revenue, generating ideas being able to do that.
The rebranding was important,
so I really needed to align the team with one with one of our core values,
which is collaboration, and the rebranding was a natural step in that
process. Wonderful, thank you, and you talked a bit about you know your public
relations background and sort of the extensive amount of
experience that you brought to your role, and I know when you and I chatted
before your experience in marketing has been so diverse across multiple
functional areas. You Mention Public Relations, but marketing, multiple
industries, you've worked in multiple product lines, vertical markets, etc.
Can you share some of the highlights from your extensive background that you
have I and describe what you have found to be sort of the common thread for
marketing operations? You know more generally across all of your career
experiences and that what you're bringing to to crane today
sure so as you so thin, I've worked in Propor, profit and nonprofit companies.
I worked
for a beauty spy company where I focused on tin ton, content creation
and writing. I work for an industrial automation which is the complete
opposite side of from the beauty industry, where I focused on public
relations and cross channel marketing and prior to crane. I worked actually
at a medium and heavy duty truck dealership and I was actually the first
marketing person they'd hired. So I was a department of one and
did everything so everything for managing their online inventory graphic
design, newsletter creation and deployment dealership branding, and it
was actually there where I
found my love of marketing operations and automation in the data piece of it.
So we were on boarding a new dealer management and CR system, and I was
responsible to ensure that we had the data structured and connected to
appropriate end points, and that was the first time that I realized
marketing is more
than or can be more
than creative. It can be more than
coming up with a campaign idea and
deploy you know, de playing emails or to playing these letters or
social
content creation right. It there's an operational aspect of it in the data
and the back end that support that, and that was never a thing that I knew
existed and when I went to school it didn't exist so that piece of it for me
was really eye opening. And then I started at crane and moved into
increasingly more technical rules, but when they started it cranes in the
Audience Development Department. So I've been on
on the other side of the stuff that I'm doing now, which is, I think, been a
benefit to me. And what have you found has been the shift in terms of
when you were in audience, development, the responsibilities and how you're
measured? How is that changed from Audience Development to marketing
operations, in terms of how you have how you and your team are then measured
the efficacy of your efforts,
so our so? Our team is more now measured, we're measured more by
velocity and also by accuracy of what we push through and what we deliver to
the corporate marketing team, which is what was previously the audience
development team, and I know you asked about the common, the common thread
between all of all of these things that I've been in, and it's curiosity and
grits.
So when I was on the audience team, I was started at I started and we were
actually in the middle of a
s, P, migration- and I took to that like like a fish water, so cliche, but
that was the moment. I think that I realize too that like this is this is
the piece that I want to hold on to I want. I was the person that was stress
testing our new system. I would put in tickets with
the team that I'm on now, so hey can we do this or how do we do this? And
because it was new to them too, I don't know, let's figure it out so
from there a position opened up and I applied and moved over to the marketing
automation team, which is now marketing operations in the team that I that I
run yeah and then in terms of the creat curiosity and grit. I love those two
words that to me is it really does capture to be successful in marketing
operations? You've got to have that sense of curiosity and endless
curiosity of understanding where the customer is coming from what is
actually going to make this successful and then the grit to actually make that
happen in the determination to just keep going, keep keep moving forward
and understanding and revising and iterating and launching again in that
feedback, loop, etc, and so- and I would imagine that have you have found
that the more that you do that the cycle time the velocity increases, the
more as you go through, that cycle plan do check act, you know, etc, it's you
know, you're doing a cycle and then it gets faster and then it gets faster
because the insights that you're gaining you're able to leverage that
and a that was interesting in this market space. I can now do this faster
and so
two questions. One is: Would you agree with that? Or do you disagree with that
and does your velocity come from another source and then how do you sort
of maintain that sense of cadence once it starts to get that velocity gets so
fast? How do you maintain that cadence with your team?
So I would
sort of agree with that with that sentiment, market operations, so much
of what we do is figuring out things that we've never done before right. So
we may have done something that is part of what we did in a previous project
and it's. This is where ties back to the curiosity and and a grit really and
asking questions and figuring things out, so we may get a new project and it
may be have a slower galact, because we hadn't done that exact thing. So we
have to go back and look and say what have I done that similar? Okay, I
haven't done anything similar WHO's done. Something similar. Can I reach
out to one of the many ferulis marketing operations communities, or
can I talk to?
Can I talk to somebody within the within the company who may have an idea?
We actually work very closely with our technic, our technical teams that work
on our
and our and are actually sites. So,
but it's that credits that it's that keep at it until you figure out what
what the solution is. You know marketing operations in solution. It's
a puzzle
that it is one big puzzle and there are some things that we've solved the
puzzle over and over and over again, and so it just becomes natural yep. WE
HAVE THIS TICKET WE'RE SPINNING UP THE NEW news letter. We know exactly what
we need to do and we can do it now in record time. But then there are new
projects where I don't know. If we can do this or how we can do this, but you
know what it is our job to figure out how we can do this
and
make it happen and and having that greediness to not give up at the first
wrong turn m yeah, and I would imagine
that that the way that you do that is is empowering your team, and I know
that when we've chatted before you had mentioned to me how important it was
for you to uncover each of your team members superpowers, I really enjoyed
how you sort of describe that that each one of your team members they
themselves each have a super power. But can you identify or explain how you
identify for our audience for each of your team members what their super
power is and can you share a success story of when you were able to align
your team and when you were able to deliver just exceptional results?
Absolutely so really the big thing is
being observant and and sitting back and sort of listening more than
speaking, I think that that's that's very important. It's actually something
that my boss has taught me is in meetings, just sit back and listen and
take it in, but really
observing and noticing what T R, what they're enjoying working on and what
are they gravitating to and what kind of projects get them excited and
that they're really like yeah. I dug into this thing and I lost four hours
because I was just so into it, and it was the thing that I really loved and I
enjoy it. So that's that's number one number two is what types of things do
they excel at yount, just skills
but treats
so you can teach skills traits are innate thing in people things how dely
unto interact with other teams or other stake holders, or you know we talked
about curiosity and grit, that's it something that can be taught and then
third, which is
kind of an oddball one. But what what hobbies do they have outside of work
that might translate to work? So the most recent person that I hired, I had
a solution, roll open
and at that time they were a member of our print production team and they were
helping us out with campaign apparation of sitting up into playing campaigns,
and so we had a
we actually had. We had a virtual because his mid Pan, you know mid
tandem, IC and nobody was going anywhere, but we had a
virtual lunch together to
just talk, and you know my whole my whole team, my whole team of at that
point to and then when we were pert we were borrowing, but we were talking
about our favorite pandemic purchases right. Everybody bought something big
during the pandemic. I have, I have a son, so we bought a pool. We got one of
those one of those quick set pools because we didn't know how long it was
going to last. I couldn't go anywhere and he was going to get bored and we
needed him to go outside for some time, but he mentioned
he purchased a Raspberrypie,
and I said like, as in you're automating your house, we as very pig-
and we actually have automated our house with the Raspberry Pi as well. So
we started talking about what system he was using, some of the automations he'd
set up and in how he was automating his home. That's a transferable skill set.
He came from prpotion. He has a background as a graphic designer, but
this is a transferable skill set fer. You need to be able to think a certain
way and just just figure things out in order to be successful in solutions,
and that was kind of a moment because I had this open roll. I I like recognized
that potential in him and he's great mistake holders and I ended up hiring
him and he's doing fantastic. What is what I find is so valuable in what you
just stated is you know you reach out to get to know people and you want to
understand who they are it's you know I have said before. Business is all about
people and and in reaching out understanding. You know what motivates
someone, what do they enjoy doing, etc. You probably had you not asked the
question you probably wouldn't have have ve learned that about that new
team member, as someone tell me long time ago, that it's better to be
interested than be interesting
and what's fascinating about in the way to be interested, is asking questions
and when in doubt ask another question, because in invariably you're going to
learn something new about someone else. If you're asking a question to be
interested in that other person, rather than yourself trying to be interesting,
it's just it's such a fascinating thing, and I think what you just stated is is
proof positive of that example. Absolutely absolutely- and
I feel like our team is very close and when you
and that's important right because
marketing operations is every piece of it depends on
collaboration that just internally with the team but externally with
stakeholders. But if you don't have a team that works well together,
then it's going to fall apart, and I think that
having a team that works all together, making that happen is doing these
things like having these lunches and getting to know each other and getting
to know the person and kind of the you walk mile. You know you welcome my l
and somebody shoes. You know where they're coming from. If you actually
know the person versus they're just they're, just another person sitting
there they're another co worker
print is a costly and complex investment for every business, but a
necessity. Taylor is the expert in simplifying a stack. You may not even
know exists. Your prince stack from corporate identity products to data
solutions. Taylor provides a personalized marketing solution for
your organization. Prince offers a powerful combination of technologies,
processes and insights, which identifies and eliminates waste in your
marketing operations and print processes drives savings, simplifies
your ordering and allows you more control over your brand Taylor enables
your organization to work faster, smarter and more efficiently, learn
more and estimate your own savings with prince ack by visiting Taylor Com. I
know when we're talking about other CO workers, etc. I know that you feel
really strongly that marketing operations needs to be a
strategic partner to the rest of the marketing team and ultimately to the
rest of the business organization as a whole. So can you share some specific
examples of how you and your team have been successful at making that happen
at your organization? Sure? So what I started doing actually, when I,
when I took over the team, was sitting up by weekly weekly monthly check ends
with stakeholders just to catch up on how things have been going. What do you
have in the works for the next week month, etc? What's your two thousand
and twenty two road map so that we can get ahead of things, so things aren't
surprised to us when they come up and to give them a chance to talk to me
about any issues that may come up right are their processes that aren't working
for them and what this really does is. It allows us to be proactive and
identify some operational technical challenges that they might have so that
we can address them versus waiting for the state holders to flag an issue. So
it may be something like you know. We send out these event emails all the
time
and we think we might be saturating our audience,
letting them know about all of these upcoming events. Well, maybe we do an
events digest. We do a weekly advanced digest. You talk about all the events
and then it goes to the whole event. Croup Group and then maybe you do more
targeted, said ment, ed, something right I to about the specific events,
so we can to end the up to the end users yeah. So then we can be Perolat
ve, and it also allows us to get our eyes and ears on upcoming initiatives,
which is very, very important before they hi hit our ticketing system, so
that we can provide that guidance up front a lot of times. Things come in
and
they're coming in as high as high important than they are for sure high
importance, but when they come in, we look at them and we could have done
this- maybe another way that would have made things a little more,
a little more easy or simplified or
operationalize for you. So having these meetings up front, these weekly by
weekly monthly chuckens allows us to be able to catch those things and have
those conversations ahead of time where we're not working under three four day
turnaround where we can actually come up with a good solution, moving forward,
which I think gets back to your comment about velocity staying close to the
business, communicating with the business understanding the needs of the
business and your example of, but the events digest. I find that fascinating
that, for example, in the example you use there was some technical issues or
some other needs to the to the business, but the way that you're actually
solving, that is additional content to the end user. So you're continuing to
you, know, sort of replicate and drive your core competency out to your market
and- and one of the ways to you know you know do that is increase engagement
with more content. So I think that's that's really that that sounds like a
really sound strategy and that's what marketing out person brings to the
table right. We bring a different approach or a different view and those
events digest because of how we have- and this is not something that we've
set up yet, but I would love to get to this point- is something that we can
how our marketing animation platform is actually tied into our other systems.
We can actually pull from our websites upcoming events, so we can automate
that we can automate that for you and set it up and send it out and it just
goes out and it's not adding any additional extra work. But it's solving
the problem of we do all of these things manually and we might be
saturating the audience. So we'll do this one and an hypersensitive targets,
the other things that are already existing m. do you think that there's
ever a time where there's too many, when you would talk about hyper target,
would you ever say that it gets too much? You know, because now, if you
hyper target to a certain audience that audience now may actually be a part of
ten different audiences is, is there any risk that you find in your
organization or in business that you run the risk of too many?
So I think I think this is multi faceted there is there is such such a
thing as too much
you can. If you keep going to the same audience in the same people all of the
time- and there is, there is a place for hyper targeting with with events.
Events typically have a specific topic right. So it's let's say it's: one of
our brands is a health as a health care vartical, let's say they're doing it.
This is not an actual event, but they're doing an event that has a topic
of reducing in hospital infections. So we know that we're going to want to
target maybe hospital administrators and
charge nurses, for instance.
We know who these people are. We can target them versus an event that is
more specific to
hr in in a hospital and staffing in a hospital where we would then target
people who who are an HR and in recruiting at the hospital level. So
those types of things make sense to be super hyper, targeted war, no we're not
going to have ten events a year with those specific with those specific
topics and then they'd also get the events digest. Yeah, because your point
is they
it's hyper targeted, but because of that, you actually might avoid any sort
of cross over, because it is hypertatus you're just going to be giving that
audience exactly what they're looking for and the overlap is probably a low
risk, exactly yeah understood and then so, when we think about you know the
activities that your team is doing. Can you give an example of maybe some
recent activities that you've implemented, where you were surprised
at the at the result? We actually had an instance just come up that I was
incredibly surprised about, so we
we're using predictive analysis to determine who should receive specific
offers, and we implemented this when we did a platform migration versus
previously. We were we'd actually selected hand selected the the
targeting, so we moved to using predictive analysis and it's not
performing as well as we thought it would.
However,
at first glance we look at this and we go if this is mat, this isn't
performing. We need to. We need to change something we need to pull the
plug on the marketing operations seem part of what we, what we do is we go
okay, we can just take this
at face value right, we're on a new platform. We changed a whole bunch of
stuff. We really need to dig into the data to see what is the cause of this
right. So
we've made a change in who we were excluding from receiving those sens. we
made a change in the timing, also needing to look at direct versus
indirect attribution. All of those things
play a part, so
we are still actually digging into this, but it looks like it's not necessarily
performing as poorly as we thought it was at first at first blush, but you
know that's part of what we do also is really dig into the date and dig into
the results, and they is this actually a problem
or is it? Are we seeing different results because we
we change something and it's not a problem, because
those people that we may have been targeting in the previous system are
now being picked up by another effort. Yeah Yeah. I understand because there's
those unintended consequences you make a change. You make a twig to an email
campaign to you know an up on marketing campaign. What have you and then, like
you say, then there's the feedback that you get from the market? What did the
click through show? What did the data show, and so what I'm hearing from you
is. Is that to your point, it's important to dig in to not only
understand what you're seeing but don't necessarily get fooled by what you're,
seeing because there could be other factors in other explanations than
maybe what the surface data initially show. You correct it absolutely and
that's it that's that kind of curiosity piece of that now we can take things at
face value, but really asking the questions like is this? Is this really
giving me the whole story when I look at these numbers at face value yeah I
like that, and then do you feel that do you feel that investment resources can
that help that you know, for example, if you had, if you had ten times the
budget that that you have right now, you know what would you spend it on? Do
you? Do you think that by spending more would give you a higher level of
accuracy or do you think that you know it would not you know? So what would
you spend it on? You know if you, if you'd had much larger budget? I
absolutely love this question and I'm sure that almost every single
marketing operations person that you talk to will probably have a very
similar answer to me. Absolutely at head count, one hundred percent and how
I would spend this, as I would add, a dedicated analyst that would provide
dashboards, Kpis reporting to be able to undercover trends and flag any
issues as we're seeing them
that way
we can be proactive instead of instead of reactive yea. My team is small. It's
me and I have three employees on my team and they're amazing.
We have a lot of volume, and so I don't have anybody WHO's. A dedicated analyst
on my team, specific to marketing operations, work and functions, and
then the other piece of it that I would love to do is actually set up a way to
have a dedicated solutions, yeah and also an implementation and campaign
aversions person for every four brands. So we have many verticals many many
publications, many brands to be able to have a
three person team or even a two person team dedicated for every four brands
would be amazing because they would know everything about that. Those four
brands they would own them. They would have those relationships
and
for sure, would definitely help with accuracy would help with velocity,
whereas now,
no because we work on so many brands,
we don't know in them inside and out which I would love for us to be able to
know. We know a lot about them, but there's always little nuance to every
single brand. Everybody does things a little bit differently and
if I could have a
dedicated group for each for every four brands, I would be like to the auld be
amazing, yeah yeah. Well- and I you know your focus on the super powers
that we talked about earlier. You get another individual on to the team. They
bring their own set of super powers and extend the power and the strength of
your team to observe, what's happening in the market and and move from there.
So I think that's excellent. So before we wrap up today's episode Dina, what
would you say is the main takeaway that you would want to leave the audience
with an understanding the challenges facing marketing operations executives
to day. So I would say that the number one challenge and and take away for
people right now that we're facing is, is resourcing and making sure that we
have enough resources to
manage the velocity in the volume, but that come through people that they've
spoken to in the industry in marketing operations. All we all feel the same,
the same pain as that marketing initiatives, keep increasing marketing
operations, team stay the same size and
we just have to figure out
how we can be create. This gaspacho create creativity and grit. How can we
be creative and how we're managing the work load? We have to think outside the
box. What can we do differently so that we can manage that work load if we know
that our team sizes are not going to grow, and I
think that
heart of it is looking at other people within the company, for instance, we we
borrowed and then ultimately
tired somebody from our print production team
to help us out with campaign deployments. That was an initially the
plan. The initial plan was to have him help out with these campaign
deployments
and then hire somebody else, and so it just worked out for the better and but
being creative in finding ways to get the work done m. well, that's that's
excellent advice and recommendations for our audience for sure. Well that
wraps up this episode of the art of marketing operations. Thank you so much
for adjoining us today, Dana and until next time, stay safe, take care and
thank you all for listening.
Thank you for listening to the art of marketing operations brought to you by
Taylor. Don't forget to hit subscribe in your favorite podcast player. If you
enjoyed this episode, please rate review and share until next time. I