Marketing Operations (MOPS) Characteristics You Should Screen For
As an industry, Marketing Operations talent is only more and more in demand every year. According to research done by Adobe and Knack, The 2022 State of the Marketing Operations Professional, 80%+ of companies have a dedicated marketing operations individual or team. This statistic is up 15% in the previous year alone from 65% in 2021.
It’s no secret that as a top MarTech staffing agency, we work closely with hiring managers looking for Marketing Operations (MOPS) talent. The top three concerns we hear from hiring managers searching for MOPS experience are:
Constantly looking for help with an integration and current employees do not have said technology experience.
The rest of their marketing team is dedicated to other projects/staff augmentation.
Not a large talent pool of candidates that have experience with the proper tech stacks
With MOPS consistently growing as a field yet having a relatively small talent pool, Sloane Staffing has you covered with Marketing Operations characteristics you should screen for.
Tech Stack
One of the most common pain points we hear from hiring managers looking for MOPS talents is that there is not a large pool of talent with proper tech stack experience. Experience with marketing tools such as Marketo, Eloqua, Pardot, Salesforce Marketing Cloud, HubSpot, etc. make all the difference when it comes to managing software tools, integrations, workflows, naming structures, and other technical aspects of marketing.
Amongst MOPS professionals from the The 2022 State of the Marketing Operations Professional, Marketo Engage is the most popular marketing automation platform, and Salesforce is the most popular CRM.
We ask questions such as:
What does their tech stack look like? Which MarTech platforms do they have experience working with? (i.e. Marketo, Eloqua, Pardot, Salesforce Marketing Cloud, HubSpot)
Does your potential MOPS talent have any marketing automation platform certifications?
What experience do they have with integration work across different platforms?
Platform specific criteria. For this example, we’ll use Salesforce.
Do they have experience working with data in Salesforce (i.e. understanding fields, implementing new fields)?
Do they have any Salesforce certifications?
Industry & Background
Marketing Operations responsibilities can vary from industry to industry. If your potential MOPS candidate comes from a B2C background and is transitioning to your B2B company, their previous knowledge might not be adequate to handle the tasks of the role. If they come from a cybersecurity background, will they be able to delegate the MOPS duties of an e-commerce company?
We ask questions such as:
What does their professional background look like?
Which industry do they have experience in? Saas, Cybersecurity, E-commerce, Affiliate Marketing, etc.?
Is their experience in B2B, B2C, or both?
In their previous role, were they an individual contributor or a manager?
Campaign Building and Strategy
Your MOPS candidate will be responsible for the overall strategy and individual campaign strategies of your company’s marketing departments- from themes, to budget, to channels, schedules, etc. They will need the skills to manage campaigns and keep the creatives of your marketing team on track. Helping plan, execute, and report on marketing campaigns is a crucial part of their role, and Sloane Staffing makes sure MOPS candidates can deliver on all campaign building and strategic objectives.
With a long list of responsibilities, how do they prioritize and decide which tasks are most important?
We ask questions such as:
Do they have hands-on experience building out marketing programs? And at what scale?
What is their experience in deploying and/or building various types of marketing campaigns?
How do they build and pull data for reports?
Data & Analytics Driven
Like we said earlier, marketing creatives are focused on being…well, creative. That’s where Marketing operations comes in to understand and report on the data. Marketing operations should rely heavily on metrics to measure the success of your marketing campaigns.
Marketing automation platforms are not the only tools MOPS candidates should be familiar with. Do they have experience with analytics platforms such as Tableau, and are they able to evaluate pipelines?
Coding skills can come in handy when integrating different platforms or adding tracking code to the backend of landing pages. Popular coding languages amongst MOPS talent typically include HTML, CSS, Javascript, and sometimes Python. Your MOPS candidate won’t need to know how to code an entire landing page, however understanding a bit of coding language can assist in troubleshooting, automation, and data management.
We ask questions such as:
