With the right execution of your well-planned strategy, marketing operations can generate mind-boggling profits for your company. It is imperative that you hire a Marketing Operations Manager to lead your internal team and processes Here are a few crucial skills and qualities to look for.
Understanding What “Customer-Centric” Stands For
Your customers’ needs should be at the center of every company decision. When hiring an operations lead, make sure they have a sustainable strategy for data gathering, which, in time, will build towards a better company-customer relationship.
Each data point should bring you one step closer to your customers’ needs, and a good operations manager is well aware of that. So how does that apply to biotech?
Facilitating Change Management
In reality, a Marketing Operations Lead role for the biotech and life sciences fields presents quite a few unique challenges.
The ideal candidate should be both technical and analytical, capable of implementing change into an organization. Most organizations are still old school and tend to enjoy the status quo. Encouraging them to embrace new digital tools, techniques, and processes may prove to be a daunting yet rewarding task.
Skills To Look For In Your Operations Lead Candidate
- They should be able to integrate agile processes into the organization.
- Have excellent communication skills.
- Be accurate, systematic, and methodical.
- Collaborative with strong interpersonal skills as they will work with various people throughout the company.
Applying Design Thinking Principles
Embracing design thinking in regulated industries is another key factor towards success. Here are a few examples:
- Optimizing marketing processes is a proven method to help businesses grow and scale. This entails understanding data mastering methods and ecosystems enabling automation, as well as customer engagement design techniques.
- Designing and creating new operating processes and content modular factories that go through an MLR (medical/legal/regulatory) approval process with the shortest amount of time possible.
- Defining the marketing objectives for each campaign and setting up dashboards for democratization.
- Ensuring campaigns meet standard governance, processes, and quality standards.
- Designing the roadmap and strategy for campaigns based on new products and solutions.
- Implementing automation for any repeatable function.
- Facilitating the design of the campaign promotional testing plan with data marketing sciences, along with a tagging strategy that enables reporting, measurement, and campaign optimization.
Strong Technology Acumen And Governance
Your Operations Lead should possess the skills to evaluate, implement, and manage the many marketing technology systems and integrations required to launch and run campaigns.
Managing the technology stack is a prerequisite task for more and more marketing departments.
Deep knowledge of metadata and tagging for effective tracking of digital marketing campaigns are also key to the upgrade process. Such is optimizing and auditing existing digital systems to ensure they are being used correctly.
Regarding biotech, make sure your business operations candidate benefits from a solid knowledge of pharma patient services. This includes nurse calls, fulfillment, refill reminders, etc. Finally, they should understand how the Salesforce Health Cloud works.
A valuable Operations Lead has an ability to synthesize data to generate insights. That way, they can:
- Define AI next best customer engagement KPIs.
- Build a strategy to support key business decisions leveraging data and insights.
- Learn valuable insights and conclusions for the entire business model.
- Begin analysis with channel-agnostic content performance. Then measure the effectiveness of the specific marketing channels.
- Explain complex concepts clearly to a variety of audiences.
- Make sure marketing data is being collected and properly connected with other systems such as a CRM.
- Manage data cleansing and research new ways to enrich the data.
- Make marketing and data privacy a top priority.
- And, of course, provide insights to stakeholders in the business. Speaking of which…
Budgeting And Governance
Your Lead of Operations will have a word to say concerning spending management and budget reporting — including ROI reporting on activities. Other key responsibilities involve managing risk and compliance, plus ensuring proper Privacy and GDPR regulations are followed.
Hiring a Specialist Operations Lead vs. Hiring a Generalist
Marketing is a very dynamic medium, forever changing, as well as the rules regarding it. GDPR, CCPA, CASL, and other privacy regulations impact data use and storage. All considered, the Biotech landscape is also complex and constantly expanding.
With about one third of marketing budgets assigned to technology, navigating the biotech universe and effectively integrating the tools in your tech stack requires more specialized skills than ever before.
Without being discouraged by the higher price tag, one solution is hiring a higher-level expert for consulting as well as a practitioner for on-the-ground implementation. The good news is several agencies available have the necessary resources and experience to offer applied guidance for your company’s needs.
A professional Lead Operations consultant is well-versed and can execute the required tasks in a shorter time span and with greater accuracy than an already existing employee.
Skills Development Training
Since marketing operations and technology are constantly changing, keeping your team up to date is paramount.
Offer them resources and create a safe place to share experiences and potential additional help needed. This will help the organization evolve its marketing practices and operations management and adopt new solutions. It will also educate the marketing team on technology processes and best implementation practices.
Make sure to further mentor individuals from the marketing teams to integrate this approach into the company’s culture.
Taking The Leap
Do you consider your business has reached that level, and your marketing department could benefit from an Operations Lead? Do not be afraid to bring someone new into the company, but take the necessary time to scout for the best option available.
Not only should your ideal candidate have strong communication skills, be committed and think analytically, but make sure it is someone who shares your vision. Remember, when complementary minds come together, great things can happen!
If you’re not ready to hire in-house yet, and would rather outsource, don’t hesitate to get in touch. We can offer you guidance and advice on any of your life science marketing necessities, help you prepare a global product launch of excellence, or digitally transform your marketing department.
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