Overview
What is a campaign QA process? Why is it a mission critical process? When should a company implement a QA process? How can a company adopt a QA process that ensures quality for the marketing it’s producing?
What is a marketing operations QA process?
A marketing operations QA process is a repeatable, standardized process for assuring the quality of marketing operations related campaign builds before they go live.
Why should companies implement a marketing operations QA process?
Companies should implement a marketing operations QA process so that quality can be assured for all related builds. Quality builds result in a positive user experience. A QA process also helps adherence to best practices; they can be incorporated into the QA process.
Companies should catch errors before campaigns go live, but without a repeatable, standardized QA process, it will be difficult to consistently monitor, catch and fix those mistakes. Mistakes corresponding to marketing operations related builds can impact the perception of trust towards a company, how seriously a company is taken or even the company’s reputation.
Marketing operations builders can easily lose track of what has or has not been updated when working on multiple projects with different stakeholders at the same time. It is also easy to overlook mistakes when marketing operations builders have been working on something over an extended period of time. Companies can work around these inevitable scenarios by having a marketing operations QA process in place to make sure nothing is missed prior to going live.
When should a company implement a marketing operations QA process?
Ideally, a company should implement a marketing operations QA process before anything marketing operations related goes live on behalf of the company. If anything has already gone live, then implementing a marketing operations QA process should be done as soon as possible. This process can be tweaked/updated while it is in use as feedback comes in or other factors change with time.
How should a company implement a marketing operations QA process?
Companies should implement a repeatable, standardized process for marketing operations related builds that SLAs take into account. The time needed to perform a QA needs to be recognized in SLAs so that QAing does not become optional due to time related limitations.
To implement, companies should create documentation for the marketing operations QA process, a QA brief and a QA checklist template. The documentation should include everything the marketing operations team should know about the QA process. The QA brief is a series of questions the QA requestor needs to answer to provide all necessary details to the QAer to conduct the QA. The QA checklist is a list of line items the QAer should go through to check off if each line item passes QA or document anything that needs to be flagged to the requestor as actionable feedback.
The marketing operations QA Process documentation can include (but not limited to) information around the following topics:
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The QA brief can ask (but not limited to) the following:
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The QA checklist template can include (but not limited to) line items around the following topics:
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After the QA process has been created, to implement, a walkthrough of the process should take place with everyone who will be responsible for requesting QAs and conducting QAs. This walkthrough of the process should be recorded for anyone who comes on board in the future.
Who should implement a marketing operations QA process?
Ideally, the implementation of a marketing operations process should be handled by someone in the company who works closely with overseeing marketing operations. However, not all marketing operations teams are created equally. The person responsible for implementing a marketing operations process may differ from company to company. It would also be ideal that the person that implements, enforces the process moving forward and is the decision maker for any future adjustments that may be necessary to the QA process. This person can also decide, if they’d like, who else should be involved in the creation of the process to gather feedback or delegate related tasks.
Conclusion
A marketing operations team without a marketing operations QA process is a recipe for a company’s audience to witness countless errors when campaigns go live. This can result in a loss of trust in the company’s brand and tarnish the perception towards the company. Having a marketing operations QA process in place will keep your marketing operations efforts at a high level of quality as well as keep the QA process consistent.
