Marketing Operations Task Based Interview
1) Strategy & Execution: Processes and systems
Context: You will be often tasked with driving operations strategies and overseeing their
execution. You play an active role in the set up, optimization and improvement of all
marketing tasks and systems utilized to properly implement the overarching strategy. At
times, you are also an integral player in driving or determining the strategy during the
planning phase.
Scenario: One of our integrated marketing campaigns, leveraging email, lead gen form, and
paid media, is running for over a month but is not performing as excepted. The user journey
was mapped and designed by the Brand Marketing team.
Task: How would you go about proposing changes? Describe the steps you would take?
1. I would like to address what metrics/KPIs are underperforming for each piece? Is it
CTR? Is it CPL? Wrong audience of leads generated? We have to match the KPI to
the possible campaign change. Copy change? Subject line change? Paid ad
targeting audience? Low ad engagement?
2. Propose A/B or Multivariate testing for solutions
3. Organize the Call-To-Actions in the campaign. Determine what sort of things are we
promoting? Downloads to surveys? Ebooks? Contact us?
4. Analyze ad placements and copy, target audiences of email and copy.
5. For lead gen forms, we could modify copy for certain audiences, use dynamic
content or trim fields/reduce fields for return visitors/progressive profiling
6. For ad placements, UTMs or adobe equivalent can place content tags for different
display ad size, or copy type for audience specifics, We can run what lead gen was
done by a paid ad and see if any negative keywords could be used based on bad
audience leads generated as well.
7. For email, we can segment out specific audiences and try writing specific to
audiences. Either by personalization of text based on data or manual rewrite of
information where data may make a difference. e.g., industry, company type, etc.
8. Look at the data. See if there is a specific approach that works and modify the
campaign in that direction.
2) Organize systems
Context: You will be tasked with overseeing the implementation of the portfolio of marketing
automation systems like Pardot and their features.
Scenario: A new Pardot feature was released, and you have received an abundance of
notifications from the vendor, offering a package update.
Task: Please describe the steps you would take before considering the feature update.
1. First I usually like to check the feature update notification and read about it. I then go
through any estimated time of roll out by vendor, read through any prepared
documentation available that may go over risks, limitations (such as no rolling back
on the feature), etc.
2. Next, I would think of my org goes to market and whether this feature would be
useful. If I think there is an opportunity, I would take it to the internal marketing ops
teams to discuss. Here I believe we would make the various assessments of utility,
work, scope such as any change management to assets or settings we must do.
3. Third, I think we would gauge marketing teams on how they would use this feature.
See how much buy-in there is to enable and use the feature and set out use cases
for executive.
3) Manage Daily Operations: Resource allocation & Campaign Management
Context: Determining project and task prioritization on a daily, weekly, monthly, and quarterly
basis is an important part of this role. Success relies on your ability to properly assign value
to a range of different projects, and drive the operations team offshore to effectively execute
multiple projects simultaneously.
Scenario: Our Marketing Operations Queue in JIRA is piling up with ‘urgent’ requests. It
seems like most of the stakeholders marked their tasks as ‘high priority’ so the due dates are
approaching. At the same time, there is public holiday coming up in India, where most of our
resources are based.
Task: Please outline the steps you would take to address this situation, both with our internal
operations team, and our internal clients (marketing pods/leads).
1. First, I would raise this issue with management and or the entire immediate team to
begin prioritization of tasks.
2. We would likely generate a realistic preview of what can and cannot be done.
3. We would then confer with clients about what is most immediate to them and set
realistic expectations. Ask probing questions around what can be done most
immediate and what can possibly be squeezed.
4. Regroup as a team and see what tasks can be completed and handed off most
effectively around time zone. See if there are opportunities to effectively collaborate
around time zones in order to complete the tasks most efficiently.
4) Contact and Consent Management
Context: You received an Excel spreadsheet containing 10,000 leads from an event we cohosted with a 3rd party vendor a few months back; long enough that those leads'
sales cycle might have gone cold. The file contains information about each lead,
including their personal details, email address, if they registered or attended, have
opted in to receive future communications from us.
Task: How would you manage the import of these leads into the system? Keeping the age of
lead and data privacy policies in mind.
1. First we can effectively import their information into a campaign with all the
appropriate response categories (register/attend). All data privacy policies should
have been obtainable around how we will be processing their data from initial
ingestion.
2. For communication purposes, all addresses who did not opt in would be segmented
out before being imported into Pardot. All EU opt ins would be separated out and
analyze for any inappropriate companies/students/personal info (gmails, etc.).
Companies who opted in and you generally do business with provide a legal basis of
an email despite being cold. Data retention on non reply varies on company policy.
3.
Depending on company policies, determine whether to send out an explicit opt out
based email to these contacts or determine if a cold email is warranted and remove
their information based on a time limit such as 30 days.
5) Analytics: Lead Scoring
Context: You received an Excel spreadsheet with 10,000 leads from a few months back;
long enough that those leads' sales cycle has passed. The file contains information
about each lead/contact, such as their industry, title, company size, and what they
did to become a lead (e.g. downloaded an eBook). Also, the file contains
information as to whether or not the lead closed as a customer, and the value of
their proposal. M
Task: How would you use this information to create a lead score system or threshold?
1. First I would approach this in terms of fit and engagement and use both grading and
scoring in Pardot. Grading would allow us to find the profile of what a buyer looks like
and scoring allows us to gauge interest through engagement with marketing assets.
NOTE: All of these conversations have to be made with BD/Sales to find agreeable
profiles and so that they understand the model they are readiing.
2. I would run against the opportunity conversions and determine various profiles based
on characteristics such as industry, job title (decision makers), company, company
size or various other information we collect specific to the org. You can do this by
calculating close rate by each profile. Compare against the overall close rate, create
categorizations based on these numbers and assign points. This would determine
characteristics for an ideal fit for a buyer.
3. I would also run against negative profiles such as those in regions we dont buy,
students, interns, and any other non-influencer or non-decision makers in typical
buyer groups.
4. For lead scoring on the FT CTA information, I would first generate a close rate of
leads in our database.
5. Based on first touch info, I would generate a model in which I determine the close
rate based on the various CTAs
6. I would determine a score based on a proportion of each CTAs close rate compared
to the orgs close rate and assign a weighted score proportional to the others. The
number shouldn't matter so long as it is proportional. e.g., a webinar closes at 10%,
an ebook closes at 15% compared to the orgs 5% close rate. I could assign 20 points
to webinar and 30% to ebook. If we wanted to get a bit more dynamic with this level
of scoring, I would look at the sheets revenue generation and consider boxploting the
opportunity amounts, and weighting them based on quartiles of a boxplot. In the end,
I would really discuss all of this with Sales to determine what is going to make the
most sense for them.
7. Create a model of negative scoring based on inactivity e.g, 30/60/180 days, a lead
being disqualified by sales and invalid information such as email bounces.
8. Collect data, and analyze model through regression. First, we could set up analysis
milestones based on volume maybe 100, 1000, 10000 leads collected next. Place
scores in a column, code grades as a number and whether a conversion happened in
another column. Use regression analysis to see whether our model is statistically
significant and a positive correlation between the two measures in attaining
conversions. Decide on a comfortable coefficient on whether or not the model works.
Typically this is between .05-.1. Talk to Sales. Explain analysis.