Overview
We are living in a time of automation and when you have AI completing tasks and projects in mere seconds, speed matters. How quickly your marketing operations team can set up, build and execute campaigns can have a massive impact on the success of your marketing campaigns as a whole. That’s why marketing operations teams pride themselves on finding the fastest and most efficient ways to complete tasks, from building landing pages to setting up email campaigns.
But how do you know if your team is operating at peak efficiency? That’s where measuring marketing operations build time comes in. By tracking how long it takes to set up and execute different types of campaigns, you can establish benchmarks for your team to work towards and identify areas for improvement.
In this post, we will explore the different types of campaigns that marketing operations teams typically work on and break down how long it should be taking your team to get these campaigns across the finish line. We’ll also discuss when a company should start measuring build times by campaign type and strategies for optimizing build times to improve the success of your marketing campaigns. By the end of this post, you’ll have a better understanding of how to measure and improve the efficiency of your marketing operations team.
The Breakdown
Below is a chart that consists of some crucial campaigns marketing operations deal with on a daily basis. In the center column, you will see a brief description of what the program build consists of, and on the far right is the average time it takes to build and execute.
| Program Type | Description | Average Build Time (including QA) |
| Email Program | This includes email program creation, one (1) email asset build, QA, approvals and edits, target audience build, Smart Campaign progression activation and launch. | 45 minutes |
| Webinar Program | This includes webinar program creation, 3 landing pages (registration, thank you, on-demand), 1 confirmation email, 2 invite emails, 2 reminder emails, 2 follow-up emails, QA, approvals and edits, target audience build, Smart Campaign progression activation and launch. | 3 hours |
| List Import | This includes program creation, scrubbing the list provided, list upload, and Smart Campaign activation. | 45 minutes |
| Nurture Program | This includes engagement program creation, default program creation for each email, email asset builds, Smart Campaigns configuration, stream setup, and activation (nurture audience is separate from the initial build). | 8+ hours |
| Full Event Program | This includes event program creation, 2 landing pages (registration, thank you), 1 confirmation email, 2 invite emails, 2 reminder emails, 2 follow-up emails, QA, approvals and edits, target audience build, Smart campaign progression activation and launch. | 2.5 hours |
| Content Program | This includes program creation, 2 landing pages (registration, thank you), 1 autoresponder email, Smart Campaign activation and launch. | 1.5 hours |
Best Ways to Optimize
There are many factors that go into Marketing operations efficiency that have little to do with how fast your team can work. While speed is certainly important, it is not the only factor. There are several crucial processes that need to be in place for your team to work at its highest capacity.
One of the most important processes is the use of Program Templates. These standardized, clonable versions of programs are used to track and deploy marketing campaigns. By using Program Templates, your team can reduce build time, minimize errors, increase total campaign production, and streamline the QA process, among many others. Without Program Templates, building out campaigns becomes a more strenuous and time-consuming process and is not nearly as effective.
In addition to Program Templates, another way to further decrease build time is by Tokenizing your program templates. Tokens allow you to easily swap out campaign-specific information, such as dates, times, and locations, without having to manually update every instance of that information. This can be a game changer for teams that find themselves always setting up event and webinar programs
Another important factor to consider is whether you have a campaign operations intake process and content submission documents in place. These two things can streamline the build process and help decrease the time it takes to get campaigns up and running. A campaign operations intake process ensures that your team has one place to submit all campaign operations requests, while content submission documents provide a clear and concise way for stakeholders to submit content and assets to be used in the campaign. Having these two in place also minimizes the amount of time spent communicating with stakeholders in third-party channels.
When to Review
So now you have taken some of my advice and want to review how quick your team can be. Here are a few key moments to consider when thinking about when to review:
When launching a new campaign
The launch of a new campaign is the perfect time to review build times. This will give you a baseline to compare future build times to, and it will help you identify any bottlenecks or inefficiencies in your process from the start
At regular intervals
Set a regular interval, such as every quarter of every six months, to review your builds. This will allow you to track progress over time and identify trends or patterns in your team’s efficiency. Having this time laid out will also help with communicating SLAs to your greater marketing team.
After a major process change
If you’ve recently made a major change to your process, such as implementing program templates or a new intake process, it is important to review builds to see how these changes improve efficiency
When experiencing significant delays or errors
If you are experiencing significant delays or errors in your build process, it is important to review your build times to identify the root cause of these issues and make any necessary adjustments.
