The biggest challenge of any marketing operations team is the documentation process, which has become more difficult since the pandemic. Maintaining and analyzing customer data has always been a crucial part of digital marketing. But the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic has increased the digital footprint, thus boosting global online content consumption. Managing data is highly important, especially when running your marketing operations remotely based on virtual communication and collaboration.
This change has made keeping track of interactions and maintaining relevance in consumers’ lives more difficult for marketers. With so many kinds of data to interpret and understand, businesses need to collect consumer data from all online and offline sources and across every device.
With the rapid development of technology and customers of every sector inclining more towards e-commerce, there is an overflow of unsaturated data in every industry. Since the entire marketing business depends entirely on the amount and quality of data collected, companies try to gather as much data as possible. But at the same time, it is also essential to saturate the data to leverage its real power. In this digitally driven world, relevant data has become the most valuable asset of any organization, and to survive the modern economy, companies need to understand the importance of documentation.
But aligning marketing goals to documentation through different functions and keeping track of the progress can be challenging. Thus, here are a few methods that can help you fix marketing operations challenges using documentation:
Document Every Step of the Marketing Process
Companies need to create documentation to reduce the risks and the effect of the skill gap caused by the deficit of talent and employee turnover. The documentation process should include documenting everything involved in the marketing operations process and contributing to achieving the marketing goals, including ongoing programs, previous programs, program templates, and operational programs. There are various benefits of creating this documentation.
What to Include in Your Documentation?
Here is a list of things that you need to keep track of:
- The location of the program in the marketing systems and the exact name
- An overview of the program and why it was set up
- Detailed technical design of all the programs and campaigns, including granular details and smart campaign logic
- Changes made to the build and the rationale behind it
- Date and time stamp when the changes were implemented
- Every specification about the marketing operations
- Links to the marketing systems
- The purpose and goal of every marketing program
- Technical details on smart lists, all the assets
- Date and time of every change made to the program
- Guidelines on how to test the programs
Keep Modifying Your Data Policies
The rising amount of data along with ever-changing technology adds a new set of risks. Thus, you need to regularly modify your data policies and procedures to protect your data to which any third party has access. Organizations that outsource offshore development or customer support centers to complement onshore staff should be more careful about this point.
Incorporate On-premise Cloud Solutions
With workers worldwide seeking a collaborative environment with the freedom to work from anywhere and with the COVID-19 pandemic, remote working is the new normal. And to build a dynamic work environment, you need to follow the trend. But with remote work culture and employees using personal devices to access company data, there is a high scope for a breach into your database. To avoid such a situation, you can incorporate on-premise cloud solutions and other advanced IoT devices with robust cybersecurity services.
Schedule Data Management Health Audit
You should schedule a quarterly or biannual data management health audit to keep the security, lifecycle, quality, and flow of your documents under check. This will ensure quick and easy data access for the authorized members, speeding up your workflow.
Integrate API
If your organization has a dynamic work environment with several teams, you need to make your valuable data shareable among teams. Thus, ensure that the data integrates between applications without code or development but without any plausible security risk as well. Integration of APIs allows you to give selective access to data to third parties by restricting access to only relevant data.
Organize Your Data
Document company data in data dictionaries, readme files, and embedded metadata to provide users with a guideline and context to the data. This will help your vast workforce understand and interpret the data while solving business problems. And to keep your data organized, you can archive your old data that is important but is not of use at the moment.
If you want your organization to have streamlined marketing operations, the way you follow the documentation process plays a huge role in it. Relevant data helps collect business analytics, depending on which companies make future decisions and actions. Complete, accurate, meaningful, and actionable data enables organizations to have a better vision of their business perspective, framing a business strategy accordingly.
This entire documentation process – data creation, storage, maintenance, and destruction- is vital for organizations to develop their documentation process.
