Building A Marketing Operations Function: Regional Considerations

Marketing operations is a subfunction within marketing that works to improve productivity to effectively operationalize the CMO’s strategy. Marketing operations’ core priorities are to provide data-driven decision-making, facilitate the development of the marketing plan, and enable the plan’s execution. Global marketing operations and regional marketing operations each have owned responsibilities and shared responsibilities within six core priorities.

Marketing operations has evolved from a tactical reporting and troubleshooting role into a more strategic role that often serves as the CMO’s chief of staff. To support this expanded role, large organizations (those with more than $1 billion in annual revenue) normally have a global marketing operations team supported by regional marketing operations teams. This arrangement works best if both groups understand which responsibilities they own and which responsibilities they share. In this report, we outline marketing operations’ six core responsibilities and break them down into distinct owned and shared roles for global and regional marketing operations.