My current role is an entry-level job where I take requirements from marketers and build their campaigns in Marketo. It’s extremely easy. Since it is easy, and has little to no overlap with any other teams/projects, I’m having a hard time figuring out how I want to move up. I don’t consider this “marketing” experience, because the strategy and creative are complete by the time I join the process. How do I position myself to move on eventually without making another lateral move? I’ve looked into trying to pivot to data analyst, business analyst, project manager, program manager, product manager, product owner…. It’s just very frustrating to work every day knowing I’m not gaining any experience or growth that is leading to something more. TC: 98k
How many years of exp do you have in marketing? How many years have you been doing marketo implementation?
I have 3 years of experience doing this job. 2 years of Adobe Campaign and 1 year of Marketo.
Are you trying to move away from marketing in general? Alll the titles you listed aren’t marketing titles as I am sure you know. I think what you’d be looking at if staying in your current role is marketing operations manager which does play an important role in tech companies. It usually sits closely if not in demand gen so you could make a move into demand gen. Big tech companies also have dedicated (large) groups of marketing operations leaders and ICs. I would assume it possible to make a lateral move into other parts of marketing, especially within your same company for example, get into product marketing which eventually can lead you to product or program management. All that said, I do think it will be somewhat difficult for you to transition directly into the roles you listed given the different functions, marketing vs product/engineering.
If you stay in martech, you could always take the sales, consulting or solutions architect path from here. Having practitioner experience is very helpful as it helps you deeply understand how some strategies fail downstream at the activation stage. Plus it buys you legitimacy and trust with the more technical people in the room. All should pay more and offer a better/more clear career path. If interested I can elaborate further.
I’ve been doing Marketo/MOPs for 10 years. I really enjoy it. Next step is to look into sales ops or look to merge marketing ops with sales ops (revenue ops)
I was in MOPs and email marketing for over 5 years. Eventually got tired of it and pivoted to campaign management where you strategize what channels and tactics you want to use for a marketing campaign. Having Marketo experience is tremendously helpful as the others have mentioned. You have the foundational knowledge which is a plus when it comes down to lead management and processes, you know what is possible (or not) from a system stand point. If you want to stay within Ops, highly recommend getting salesforce certified as well. You can also show value by giving feedback to the marketers if their copy suck, or ways to improve engagement metrics (shorter subject line, ab testing, segmentation). Unless there’s an actual email marketer that does the above and you’re purely the executor.
I’m purely the executor but this was still really helpful. A subteam within my larger team is in charge of email optimization and it’s a role I think sounds interesting for a possible pivot eventually if I stay in the marketing space. They definitely are the ones that make those recommendations you mentioned to improve campaign performance.
Marketing operations manager
Is that heavily skewed towards managing people?
Not necessarily