The Truth About Marketing Ops Most People Miss

Full transcript

So welcome back to the podcast guys, today we're joined by Mike Rizzo. Mike, welcome to the podcast. thank you for having me. I appreciate it. It's always fun to talk shop with other experts in the industry. So thanks for having me. also thank you and let's get into it tell me more about what you guys are up to what have you been building Sure, sure, yeah, happy to share more. I'm the CEO and founder of an organization known as marketingops.com. And what that is at the end of the day is a professional community for people who are integrating usually B2B marketing technology solutions. We have about 3,500 people hanging out in our Slack chat environment and another 15,000 or so people that are. subscribed to our content, newsletters and the like. And we also host a conference each year called Mopsapalooza. It's a bit of a mouthful, but it's a space where our community members can share what they're working on and um how they're impacting their organizations, but it's very community focused, practitioner focused. And ultimately what we're working on is uh achieving what... What might be familiar to some of your audience is the PMI of the PMP certification. And so we look to become a certification body for these practitioners to establish what it truly means to be a certified marketing operations professional. And then ultimately allowing them to uh achieve two new layers of certification and becoming go-to-market product managers and go-to-market product architects. And so we're really excited about that, but yeah, that's. That's my daily life. get to basically serve at the will of the community and try to build the things that help them grow in their careers.

Wow, uh impressive numbers. That's the first thing that I want to say. Also, like how did you go from building user communities at Mavenlink to founding marketing ops? Yeah, thanks. It's a fair question. um When I was at Mavenlink actually the first time around, I was their marketing operations manager and uh I served on the demand gen team. So I ran a lot of field marketing events as well. The long and short of that is that I was generally a team of one in the marketing operations side of things, dealing with challenges that no one truly understood. And I started a blog post and Slack channel when Slack was very new in 2017 to say, Hey, as I meet these people at these conferences that I'm going to, who do what I do for a living, I would love to stay engaged with them in this, in this community, in this Slack chat environment. And, uh, Over time, people started to find that. And in fact, at the time that we started to grow was the time that I had actually come back to Maven Link to help them build their very first customer community and advisory board programs. And so uh it was really just, uh I don't know, like luck of the draw. I was in a community focused role. uh My community of practice, which is now known as marketingops.com. uh was growing as well. And so I got to sort of experiment with a customer community versus a community of practice and which types of programs work in which environment. I was very fortunate to be given an opportunity to go work for another company known as Stackmoxie. And they empowered me to go focus on the marketingops.com community with about a third of my time, because they believed in what we were working on. so really it was just sort of like a passion project and focused on delivering value to our members. And I was just all in after my first opportunity to kind of spend a lot of my time on it.

And when you look at the marketing operations industry, what's something that most people get wrong over and over? ah I would say a couple things. At least one thing is they tend to think that marketing operations just means uh sending emails. And uh it's just not. It's just not that. um It's so much more than that. I actually did a post, uh I think coming up on two years ago now, where I said marketing ops isn't marketing. And it created a little bit of a ruffle in some people's feathers because they're like, well, the word marketing is literally in the name. And I was like, well, think about it for a minute. Marketing by definition follows product, price, positioning, placement, the traditional four Ps. And marketing operations is really a management function of a go-to-market tech stack. And your job is to translate the sort of unique hypothesis of someone's go-to-market motion. Maybe they like paid ads. Maybe they like... inbound marketing and content. Maybe they think social media is the right approach. Maybe they think events is the right approach. Maybe it's a mix of all of those things and you have to say, great, I understand what it is that you're trying to do. And I understand how technology works. And I have to now try to fit those two things together in a way that's unique to your business. And I need to act as that translation layer for you. So I think people tend to get it wrong that, that these folks are just like sending emails in a database. It's actually integrating a product to the unique. business model of any organization that they serve.

Could you tell us Mike a bit about the framework or some kind of method from marketing ops that you are particularly proud of? yeah, I mean, I think, I think when it comes to building a community, if you were ever entertaining the idea of doing such a thing, uh you can sort of, can, it's not my framework by any stretch. ah It's a framework that's popularized out in the market by an organization known as CMX and it's called Spaces. And it helps you try to understand what type of community are you trying to build and who is it for? What are sort of goals around that? I'm very proud of what we've done with some of the framework that they've provided us and establishing programs like our Chairperson Program when we first got started, our Ambassador Program. And today we have uh chapter leaders as well. And so I'm super, super honored to have partnered with some of the most amazing people out in the world that are passionate about this category and creating sort of career growth for all of their local communities. But yeah, I'd say, I'd say just like, go subscribe to try to look at what that, that model is if you're trying to build a community yourself.

AI is currently a hot topic, Mike. uh How are you guys using it to enhance your community-driven model? Ah, that's a great question. are right, as many organizations are, I'm sure, right at the cusp of starting to use AI in very uh purpose-driven ways. And the thing that I would say uh before you ever jump into using AI is just slow down so you can understand. how it can be effective in your particular organization. And for us, that means continuous optimization of our content so that we can maintain a healthy and uh searchable site for large language models and agents alike. uh It's also taking our first party information, our proprietary research uh and data and making that available to our members through agents on our community platform. uh And then just really working hard to stitch together some of our internal sort of operation layers to create a better experience for our customers or in our case, our members. uh And so yeah, I'm really excited about giving our members access to more information in ways that are just more natural, right? It's not just download the research. It's maybe have a conversation with the research, right? So that's kind of where we're headed right now.

Yeah, so making it more interactive is what you're saying. Yeah, yeah, to a degree, right? And just, you know, you can have a conversation with an agent that's, you know, got five years of research history underneath it and say, hey, you know, I'm thinking about asking for a raise. uh What are, what does the latest research say about teams of my size and how much compensation should I be seeking relative to what marketingops.com is suggesting from their, from their research, right? And ah that's unique to us and something that we can offer our members as a value add. There's many other things we could certainly ask of the research as well, like what technologies are the other members investing in, et cetera. But that's what we're looking to do is like create a more interactive set of tools for the community to benefit from. Your company's name is Marketing Ops. So let's talk more about marketing. Like how are you guys currently finding new clients? Is it mostly referrals? What has been the best strategy?

I appreciate the question. um Actually, have spent, if you were to look at the sort of financials of our organization, uh there aren't dollars spent on marketing and sales costs. uh What we did is we focused on our experience for our members. And so we've actually grown by organic word of mouth almost entirely. Now, You can make the argument that our big conference is a way to uh generate eyeballs and customers and things like that as well. But it wasn't built for the purpose of filling a lead database for us. It was built to service the needs of the organization, the needs of the community members themselves, that is, because they wanted a place to share their knowledge. so... ah While you can make that argument, it wasn't built for that intention and we certainly didn't think of it as a marketing asset in that way. ah But the thing that's worked the best for us is just focusing on what is most valuable to our members and doing more of that. And then I guess it turns into referrals, right? Wow that's impressive so you've never ran paid ads or any sort of...

No, I mean, we might have like when I say never, it's probably like one or two times we tried to do something, but it was never never for a period of time that was substance substantive enough that would, you know, be considered an experiment, truly. So we don't we don't have any paid advertising running uh almost ever. Okay, Mike, wrapping this up, uh I have an interesting question. If you had a time machine and you could actually go back to the beginning of your journey, what's one thing that you would do differently with the knowledge that you've gained the past years? Yeah, great question. I would start by establishing a value to our membership right away. We started as a free community. We had lots and lots of folks in there. In fact, it was up to 6,500 before we started sort of cleaning up the database a little bit and making sure that we kept people in who were actively engaged. And so I would start by at least establishing a value to it, even if I made it I would at least let people know that it was worth some amount of money um so that they could engage in a way that um people value what they pay for. And on top of that, when you do charge for any level of product or service access, not only do your customers want to engage more because they've spent money on it, It also protects the nature of an organization like ours, right? So it doesn't let the wrong kind of folks in unless of course they decided to pay and then you just continuously monitor for making sure that the community guidelines are adhered to. But generally speaking, uh it puts a nice little protective barrier in place. So I would definitely go backwards in time and say, hey, this is worth money. You should think of it as that even if you're here for free.

you know, let's go grow this thing together because we exist for you at the end of the day, you know, our members. Great, do you think that it's the best tactic to start as a free group? uh From my own experience, the things that I don't pay money uh aren't as valuable and by me aren't perceived as valuable as the ones that I actually pay money. I spend more time on the things that I pay money for than... on the free resources. Yep, yep, that's exactly right. um no, I would make the argument that you should charge money for the things that you're working on, even if it's a smaller dollar figure at first, or at least anchor your customer's mind on the idea that... that there is a fee for this service or this environment that you have access to. And so, you can become a media entity that has a large database of people that subscribed, right? And there's a lot of those types of organizations out there. ah And that there's a monetization model, right? There is a business model behind that. But I think in our case, we valued what the members wanted more than what our sponsors wanted. ah And so we needed to make sure we focused on the value for them before anything else. So, yeah.

Yeah, that's great that you are actually tailoring and satisfying the needs of the people that are inside of the community. I really think that a lot of communities don't pay a big attention to that. thumbs up for you and Mike, where can people find you? uh I am most active on LinkedIn. So you can find me. Mike D as in David Rizzo, R-I-Z-Z-O is my handle. So Mike D Rizzo, and you can look me up or you can come join us in the community if you're interested in learning about how to integrate marketing automation systems and manage uh attribution, you know, models and all kinds of things. So. Okay, well uh thank you for joining the podcast Mike and we'll see you in the next one. Awesome, thank you for having me, I really appreciate it. Alright, so what are your thoughts? That's great. Thank you. They're great questions. Easy to answer, sort of layups, so to speak. But I think in general, uh you're asking some good thought provoking things and your listeners on the other side will probably appreciate hearing different perspectives over and over again. And I think that's great uh move.

Well, thank you for that and like regarding the podcast that you guys are running, what kind of hosts are you guys inviting? um We typically