The demands on a marketing organization are rapidly changing. The digital marketing era of today is complex and dynamic. There are many channels that require investment and continuous attention. With frictionless communication, trends happen faster and are shorter lived. Without continuous attention, your digital presence decays rapidly. Browsing through corporate websites, it is clear few companies have adapted to effectively manage their digital marketing operations. Branding and messaging are inconsistent, mobile device support is non-existent, and aborted initiatives, such as corporate blogs and social pages, linger as embarrassing reminders of poor follow-through. The problem is that most organizations still see digital marketing as a series of projects: a web redesign, setting up a blog, publishing a whitepaper. They can mobilize resources to complete these projects, but cannot sustain the level of effort necessary to keep a program going. And without that effort, these marketing assets become liabilities. If you want success in digital marketing, your organization needs to operate like a publisher by identifying high value audiences and operationalizing processes to serve them. This means delivering the right content in the right format and getting irrelevant/outdated content out of the way. Known as marketing operations, there is a field whose purpose is to keep content initiatives performing after launch. Marketing operations encompasses a wide array of skills and activities that stand in between the development of a content asset and its consumption by an audience. This includes postproduction for target channels, tagging for targeting, search engine optimization, localization, instrumentation for analytics and performance measurement. Our previous whitepaper, Three First Steps for Operationalizing your Content Marketing Strategy, introduced the concept of marketing operations and recommended some preparatory steps to building a team. This whitepaper will outline the details of how a marketing operations group works.

1. with contributions from Aha Media, LLC Global Marketing Operations
Locally
Optimized.
Globally
Consistent.
A Publication of Lionbridge
Marketing
Operations
program
BUILDING A

2. 2
Share this eBook
globalmarketingops.com
Building a Marketing Operations Program
Introduction
Conclusion
Overview
About the Authors
Governance
Strategy
Create
Analyze
Plan
The Content Lifecycle
Publish and Promote

3. Share this eBook
Building a Marketing Operations Program
globalmarketingops.com
3
The demands on a marketing organization
are rapidly changing.
The digital marketing era of today is complex and dynamic. There are
many channels that require investment and continuous attention. With
frictionless communication, trends happen faster and are shorter lived.
Without continuous attention, your digital presence decays rapidly.
Browsing through corporate websites, it is clear few companies have
adaptedtoeffectivelymanagetheirdigitalmarketingoperations.Branding
and messaging are inconsistent, mobile device support is non-existent,
and aborted initiatives, such as corporate blogs and social pages, linger
as embarrassing reminders of poor follow-through. The problem is that
most organizations still see digital marketing as a series of projects: a web
redesign, setting up a blog, publishing a whitepaper. They can mobilize
resources to complete these projects, but cannot sustain the level of
effort necessary to keep a program going. And without that effort, these
marketing assets become liabilities.
If you want success in digital marketing, your
organization needs to operate like a publisher
by identifying high value audiences and
operationalizing processes to serve them.
This means delivering the right content in the right format and getting
irrelevant/outdated content out of the way. Known as marketing
operations, there is a field whose purpose is to keep content initiatives
performing after launch. Marketing operations encompasses a wide
array of skills and activities that stand in between the development of a
content asset and its consumption by an audience. This includes post-
production for target channels, tagging for targeting, search engine
optimization, localization, instrumentation for analytics and performance
measurement.
Our previous whitepaper, Three First Steps for Operationalizing your
Content Marketing Strategy, introduced the concept of marketing
operations and recommended some preparatory steps to building a team.
This whitepaper will outline the details of how a marketing operations
group works.
INTRODUCTION

4. Share this eBook
Building a Marketing Operations Program
globalmarketingops.com
4
Operational Model Overview
At a high level, a marketing operations team is organized around a content
lifecycle; it is guided by strategy and governed for consistency and
compliance. You can think of marketing operations as the coordination
of purpose, velocity and control. If marketing operations were a road
trip, strategy would be the itinerary, governance would be the driver and
the content lifecycle would be the car.
OVERVIEW

5. Share this eBook
Building a Marketing Operations Program
globalmarketingops.com
5
Governance – Know the Limit
When building the operational capacity of your marketing organization,
the first things to consider are standards and constraints. Inconsistencies
and poor quality control are more visible when your output increases.
Potentialforwastegrowsifprioritiesaren’tproperlyset.Mostorganizations
have guidelines and other constraints to ensure consistency, quality and
regulatory compliance – few fully operationalize them. Examples of
constraints include:
Style Guides
Style guides help to ensure a cohesive user experience across channels
and provide direction on language and branding imagery use, as
well as voice and tone. Complying with a style guide strengthens the
relationship between the message and brand.
Budget
Organizations with limited budgets need to have realistic expectations
and accept the challenge of maximizing cost-effectiveness.
Prioritization will ensure that important initiatives are supported before
new ideas are considered.
Regulatory Compliance
Companies in highly regulated industries need to accommodate
increased scrutiny for compliance. Everything published may require
legal review and could be obligated to support several official
languages. If that is the case, plan for the additional cost of translation
when publishing.
Internal Policies
Social media policies may restrict what can be done on these networks.
Maintaining a Facebook page could be difficult if access is prohibited,
unless exceptions are made on your network.
Collectively, adhering to these rules is called “governance” and should be
a pervasive element in all phases of an operational model. Companies
with solid governance look more professional and consistent and provide
a consistent user experience across all channels.
GOVERNANCE

6. Share this eBook
Building a Marketing Operations Program
globalmarketingops.com
6
Strategy – Set your Sites
A content marketing strategy addresses fundamental questions about
who you are trying to reach and how you will connect with them. This
helps you decide what kind of content to produce, the languages required
and the distribution channels and formats.
Your content marketing strategy must support your organizational goals,
such as building brand awareness, facilitating the sales process with
product information, building customer loyalty, or reducing support
costs. All of these goals can be achieved with effective use of content.
Once your goals are in place, the next step is to figure out what audiences
will help you achieve them.
STRATEGY
Identify your Audiences
Your audience is the reason businesses
create content. Content serves, informs
and influences people important to your
business; and is capable of educating and
motivating them to take action. The more
your company understands its audience,
the better the content will be.
While a firm can’t personally meet every
single member of its audience, it can
build models of important segments.
These models, called “personas,” are
fictitious characters that represent a
particular audience member a company
aims to target. It’s unnecessary to write
a biography for each persona, but it’s
helpful to empathize with them and
look at your content through their eyes.
This includes understanding how they
make decisions, the information they are
looking for and what formats are most
accessible for them. Would they find
an email newsletter useful, or do they
already see their inbox as overwhelming?
Hit your Targets
Once you understand your audience,
the next step is to develop a strategy for
reaching them. This should be organized
along three dimensions: the target
audience segments (as illustrated by your
personas), the topic (what your business
wants to say), and the format (blog posts,
microsites, marketing emails, videos,
webinars). An effective content marketing
strategy will support audience segments
in all phases of the buying and customer
lifecycle. Managing Content Marketing
by Robert Rose and Joe Pulizzi outlines
a great approach to targeting personas
with content.
This can feel intimidating when
considering the devices and networks
today’s consumer is accustomed to. Base
priorities on your understanding of the
audience and the contexts they are likely
tofavor.Byclearlydefiningandprioritizing
your personas and understanding how
they access and consume content, you
have won half the battle.
Callout: Who is Involved
When developing a content marketing strategy, you should involve two
types of stakeholders: business owners who can represent the business
strategy and “customer advocates” who have the closest connection with
the various audiences. Customer advocates are usually people who work
in various sales and support groups and regularly interface with customers.

7. Share this eBook
Building a Marketing Operations Program
globalmarketingops.com
7
THECONTENTLIFECYCLE
The Content Lifecycle
Constraints and strategy set the context, but execution is the engine.
Many companies have a brilliant content marketing strategy languishing
in PowerPoint or staining whiteboards, but few are executing well.
Execution is a process that requires sustained commitment and
continual learning.
The process involves four phases: plan, create, publish and promote,
and analyze. It is iterative. Some organizations use the word “campaign”
for an iteration, others borrow the agile software development term
“sprint.” The advantage of working this way is that you focus on a set
of net term objectives and are more conscious of their results. At the
conclusion of each cycle, the learning is applied to the next iteration.

8. Share this eBook
Building a Marketing Operations Program
globalmarketingops.com
8
Plan
The plan phase is when you decide what elements of your content
marketing strategy to work on next and sort out the execution
detail. Planning encompasses all the groundwork for deciding
what types of content to produce in the current publishing cycle,
who will create them and when. The planning process typically
has four inputs:
Your overall content marketing strategy, including
your target audience segments and how you intend
to serve them.
Business intelligence gained from earlier iterations
through the execution lifecycle.
Hypotheses that you want to test to further refine
your strategy.
Your constraints such as budget, regulatory
compliance, and internal policies.
Out of this process should come an editorial calendar of content
projects. Some of these projects may be assigned to internal
resources and others may be outsourced to design agencies. The
plan should align with events in the business calendar (product
launches, external events, etc.), and every project has a committed
owner who has the time, resources and skills to complete it.
THECONTENTLIFECYCLE
1
2
3
4
continued »

9. Share this eBook
Building a Marketing Operations Program
globalmarketingops.com
9
THECONTENTLIFECYCLE
Plan
New content initiatives, such as like a new blog or a Facebook
page, should consider the viability of a long term commitment,
how to measure the results of the initiative, the limit of effort you
will put into promoting the initiative and how to adjust or wind
it down if the base assumptions were flawed. For example, if
you are creating a CEO blog, you might consider a contingency
of turning posts into other types of assets if the blog doesn’t
work out. It’s good to experiment, just have a plan to adapt
experiments into programs that can be maintained or discretely
eliminated.
Callout: Who is Involved
Your planning process should include business owners who can
represent strategic priorities and deadlines and leads for the
create, publish and promote, and analyze phases described below.

10. Share this eBook
Building a Marketing Operations Program
globalmarketingops.com
10
THECONTENTLIFECYCLE
Create
Out of this process should come an editorial calendar of content
projects. Some of these projects may be assigned to internal
resources and others may be outsourced to design agencies. The
plan should align with events in the business calendar (product
launches, external events, etc.), and every project has a committed
owner who has the time, resources and skills to complete it.
New content initiatives, such as like a new blog or a Facebook
page, should consider the viability of a long term commitment,
how to measure the results of the initiative, the limit of effort you
will put into promoting the initiative and how to adjust or wind
it down if the base assumptions were flawed. For example, if
you are creating a CEO blog, you might consider a contingency
of turning posts into other types of assets if the blog doesn’t
work out. It’s good to experiment, just have a plan to adapt
experiments into programs that can be maintained or discretely
eliminated.
Callout: Who is Involved
Your planning process should include business owners
who can represent strategic priorities and deadlines and
leads for the create, publish and promote, and analyze
phases described below.

11. Share this eBook
Building a Marketing Operations Program
globalmarketingops.com
11
THECONTENTLIFECYCLE
Publish and Promote
Up until publication, your brilliant content has the impact of a tree
falling in an empty forest: It is silent. Effective publishing is more
than making content available, it is getting the content in front of
audiences where it can make a difference. We bundle publish and
promote together because they happen concurrently and are so
interrelated. Unlike the old days of broadcast publishing, content
is now a medium of a bi-directional conversation. To keep the
conversation going, you need to respond to your audience and
encourage a healthy dialogue.
Publishing is more than data entry into social networks and content
management, email and advertising systems (although that alone
can be challenging). Effective publishing maximizes the reach of
your content by improving search engine result placement and
increasing the likelihood of sharing.
There are five areas to consider when you publish and promote
your content:
Metadata and keyword optimization to ensure content is rich with
terms a customer uses to search. If you are publishing in multiple markets,
you need to optimize differently: thismeans localizing text and adjusting
for the search engines most popular in that area. Personalization logic
also relies on metadata. If you get your metadata right, your sophisticated
publishing system will be able to achieve its desired effect of getting the right
content to the right customers.
Adapting and testing on your target platforms (different browsers you
support, mobile vs. tablet vs. full experience). You should have a list of
platforms that you want to actively support. For each of these platforms,
make sure that your content is compelling and useful and all of the
interactive functionality is operational.
continued »

12. Share this eBook
Building a Marketing Operations Program
globalmarketingops.com
12
On- and off-site promotion. This includes cross-linking and featuring
content on landing pages. If your publishing platform supports it, promotion
can involve configuring personalization or multivariate testing functionality.
Gain the biggest impact from offsite promotion on Twitter, Facebook,
YouTube, Storify, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Google+ and any other sites that your
audience segments use. Pay special attention to niche networks like forums
dedicated to your industry.
Shareability. Make sure your content can be easily shared and looks good
when people do so. This includes having content that is directly accessible
through a URL and making it accessible to anonymous users (at least a
teaser page if you want to collect leads). Also be aware that sharing sites like
Facebook and Google+ can grab an image and description when people
share a link. Program the link so the image and description that appear help
improve click through rates.
Instrumentation. Tag your content and create links to track content
consumption and behavior. For every piece of content, revisit the goals and
what outcome you desire. Then apply the appropriate analytics codes and
configure your analytics package to measure the results.
While these activities are not as glamorous as the creative process,
they are arguably just as important. Your content could be brilliant
and compelling but it will have no impact until it is in front of your
target audiences.
After the content is live, the conversation starts. There is no “set it
and forget it” when it comes to content. If you want your audience
to engage with your content, you need to stay engaged as well. If
you see audiences embracing your content, encourage them by
recommending related content. If you see signs of rejection, you
need to adjust. Look for signs that the content is driving desired
behaviors like conversion to higher levels of engagement.
Publish and Promote
THECONTENTLIFECYCLE
continued »

13. Share this eBook
Building a Marketing Operations Program
globalmarketingops.com
13
Callout: Who is Involved
To execute the Publish and Promote phase, you need people who
are power users on your publishing systems (your web content
management system, your email management system, etc.). Most
companies are woefully understaffed in this area. No matter how
“user-friendly” these systems are, occasional users will not reliably
do a thorough job with metadata entry and multiple platform
testing. They will also not effectively use advanced features that
your platforms support. Publishing often requires some graphics
skills for post-production work like turning Photoshop mockups
into search engine friendly HTML that fits in your CMS templates
or scaling and cropping images.
Publish and Promote
THECONTENTLIFECYCLE

14. Share this eBook
Building a Marketing Operations Program
globalmarketingops.com
14
THECONTENTLIFECYCLE
Analyze
Throughout the publish and promote phase, you should have
been collecting data. You might have made some intermediate
observations and reacted accordingly, but the analysis phase
is when you really make sense of the data you collected. Most
companies do not go beyond the superficial level of watching
trend lines of page views and unique visitors. The companies
who go deeper have a tremendous advantage of knowing what is
working and why. Raw traffic doesn’t tell you much because there
is a huge difference between converting a qualified customer and
a general page impression generated by a curiosity visit.
Advanced features like traffic sources and entry pages will tell you
how visitors found you. Configuring funnels and goals will tell you
how effective individual pieces of content are. Armed with this
information, you can learn what attributes make content assets
compelling to your audience. These attributes could be anything
from the topic of the content, to the wording, to the use of imagery
and layout, to your channels. Most importantly, this information
will help you increase the accuracy of your personas and help you
refine your content marketing strategy.
Callout: Who is Involved
You don’t have to be a quantitative analyst to get more out of your
analytics package, but it is worth your while to get training and
read up on its advanced features. Consider bringing in an analytics
expert that can help you set up your system and develop a program
that you can follow.

15. Share this eBook
Building a Marketing Operations Program
globalmarketingops.com
15
While having a good marketing strategy is
important, you will not get the results you
seek without strong execution.
Having the right content will not achieve your overall business goals
without publishing and promotion to put it in front of the right audience.
Developing good content requires knowing the audience on individual
(anecdotal) and quantitative (statistical) levels. Publishing and analysis is
hard work requiring a committed team and effort.
Successful marketing organizations have operational capabilities that are
strategy driven and well governed. They are realistic about constraints,
know what programs are working and stick with them. They have an
iterative publishing cycle that is tuned to continuous improvement.
Through sustained effort, these high performing marketing teams have a
clear understanding of how to engage their target audience.
Get in touch
To learn how Lionbridge can help optimize your content and marketing
operations, visit us online at
www.globalmarketingops.com
or, contact us.
CONCLUSION

16. Share this eBook
Building a Marketing Operations Program
globalmarketingops.com
16
Seth Gottlieb has 15 years of experience using, implementing, and
reviewing content technologies. As an integrator and consultant,
he has helped businesses large and small improve the efficiency
and effectiveness of their content management and publishing.
As an industry analyst, Seth has earned a reputation for integrity,
technical knowledge, and writing ability for his reports on content
technologies.
Seth manages solutions for Global Marketing Operations at
Lionbridge Technologies. Lionbridge supports customers at
every stage of the Global Customer Lifecycle, helping them raise
their online search profile, engage their global customers with
locally-relevant content, and translate and test their products and
applications.
Ahava R. Leibtag has more than 15 years of experience in writing,
messaging and marketing. Her unique specialty is creating
marketing campaigns designed to reach your end-user, no matter
how intricate your subject matter.
Ahava is the Principal and owner of Aha Media Group, LLC, a full
service Web consulting firm that has been in operation since
October 2005. Clients include Johns Hopkins Medicine, Wake
Forest University Baptist Medical Center, Washington Cancer
Institute, Georgetown University Hospital, Franklin Square Hospital
Center and Montgomery General Hospital.
ABOUTTHEAUTHORS