The strategy guides our steps in making business decisions. Although it is not enough, it needs to complement the tactical approach. This is what operational marketing deals with, which is based on strategic marketing and data and comments collected in the field to implement concrete actions that help meet the company’s objectives in this area.
Operational Marketing – Role And Responsibilities
Operational marketing is beneficial for monitoring an organization’s marketing program and campaign planning. The fieldwork that is carried out daily makes it possible to collate the information that inspired the strategy and to introduce the adjustments that will make it possible to optimize its performance while avoiding failures.
In addition to performance measurement and reporting and data analysis; The effective adaptation that is achieved thanks to this function is critical—a fundamental contribution to achieving that focus on the consumer who makes the difference today.
Even though strategic marketing, which defines a general direction and long-term objectives, cannot be dispensed with, without the vision of operational marketing, it would not be possible to break down the goals into specific short-term action points or adjust them to the reality of the moment.
Based on the performance of actions and the feedback received, marketers can tailor activities over time.
Operational And Strategic Marketing Challenges
The strategic challenges require time to establish a mindset change, and it takes time to mature in people’s minds. However, the challenges related to operational marketing are the ones that take the most time.
Finding the balance in the resolution of one and the other is the key to success. Thus, to cite some of the most frequent, it should be noted:
- Change your mindset. Sometimes it is necessary to adapt business models to align them with customer needs. In this chaos, building new team structures and dividing the vision and strategy into operational objectives, projects, and responsibilities may be required.
- Build trust and interaction with the customer. When the plan moves away from the person, the results worsen. It is necessary to recover that focus and promote exchange, closeness and participation. This can be done through listening, learning, studying trends, and analyzing data.
- Lack of information. The first step is identifying the data you need, followed by harmonizing the data. Today, the marketing area has structured, and unstructured data, raw and aggregated data, information hosted on-premise in its systems and data from the cloud. The complexity is unquestionable, but all this knowledge must be centralized, normalized, cleaned, and enriched to avoid biases, duplications, and quality problems.
The goals to be achieved are ambitious concerning the brand and its perceived value, but, fortunately, there are many tools available to carry out operational marketing actions that optimize the approach included in the strategy: direct marketing, advertising, digital marketing, inbound marketing and even more traditional, one-way methods like polling, advertising, and telemarketing. Everything can be combined to achieve the objective that our products or services are at the top of the mind of the clients.
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