Revitalizing Your Marketing Engine: Cutting Ops Debt for Lasting Success, Part 1
In today’s busy marketing world, it’s easy for different teams to see operational challenges differently. Marketing operations is all about managing the behind‑the‑scenes work—keeping our campaigns, integrations, and data flows running smoothly. We call the extra effort needed to maintain these systems “marketing operations debt.” It’s a bit like technical debt in software, where upkeep costs build over time.
We often incur marketing operations debt, similar to taking on financial debt, when we need to introduce initiatives rapidly despite limited immediate resources such as cash, time, or tools. This urgency sometimes forces us into suboptimal decisions in data management, workflow design, or system implementation that we plan to improve later. It can also signal that our current processes or technology are outdated relative to our future goals, leading to a growing backlog that keeps marketing professionals in a constant state of maintenance. This type of marketing debt—reflected in setbacks like unreliable, non-standardized data—directly affects critical growth metrics, including Acquisition, Activation, Retention, Referral, and Revenue (AARRR).
But when you look closer at what operations debt really means, you start noticing how each team feels the pinch in its own way. The marketing ops crew might say that others just don’t get the behind‑the‑scenes hustle, while other teams juggle endless priorities.
Different perspectives add to the mix. For example, the marketing operations team might say, “Other marketers don’t realize how much effort goes into keeping everything running. Every task has its own pace—you can’t force it to finish faster.” Meanwhile, the marketing department might complain, “We can’t roll out great campaigns because every urgent request from executives pulls us in too many directions. When everything is a priority, nothing gets done right!” Executives might wonder, “Why is marketing moving so slowly? I’m missing opportunities because our systems are overcomplicated. We don’t need a palace—just a solid, straightforward structure to generate revenue and support growth.”
When something goes wrong, boiling it down to a quick fix is tempting. It sounds like a magic bullet: throw enough time or money at it, and you’re done. But when it comes to marketing operations debt, especially as it ties into what we call “marketing debt,” the fix isn’t that simple.
For example, imagine you’re promoting an event on the East Coast and need to target local audiences. If your location data isn’t regularly cleaned and standardized, your team might face three choices:
- Tackle the problem permanently, which could lead to unexpected campaign delays.
- Apply a quick patch that gets the job done temporarily but adds to long-term marketing operations debt.
- Settle for “good enough,” risking mistargeted campaigns and lost opportunities.
Because each option has its own trade-offs that can ultimately hurt your overall performance, whether it’s a delayed campaign launch, acquiring new leads, or generating revenue, marketing teams can feel stuck. Instead of leaning on a one-size-fits-all fix, digging into the root causes behind marketing and marketing operations debt is important to build a sustainable, effective approach.
Ultimately, both marketing ops and marketing debts are business debts. The obstacles faced by ops professionals and marketers alike affect the broader business. Therefore, when advocating for improvements, it’s essential to frame these issues as business liabilities and prioritize them based on their overall impact on company performance.
We set the stage for a more sustainable approach by framing marketing challenges as business debts. Instead of chasing an unattainable ideal of perfection at launch, we recognize that our systems require constant nurturing. This commitment to ongoing maintenance and adaptability safeguards against the erosion of operational efficiency, ultimately ensuring that our investments contribute positively to long-term business outcomes.
If we believe buying or building a “perfect” marketing platform will eliminate marketing operations debt, we risk neglecting the need for ongoing upkeep. We might assume there’s no need to revisit, document, or test our campaign workflows and integrations because they’re “good enough” at launch. Fast forward a year, and we find ourselves mired in the same issues, scrambling to adapt to new channels or data sources.
To effectively address these challenges, we need a measurable way to assess the health of our marketing operations. One practical metric is maintenance load—the ongoing effort your team spends keeping existing campaigns, integrations, and data flows running smoothly instead of focusing on new initiatives. Every marketing tool, process, or integration you add increases this operational upkeep. Maintenance load reflects the hidden cost of sustaining your marketing ecosystem by considering not just the quality of a tool but also how long it has been in use and the practices used during its implementation. Ultimately, it measures the continuous effort required to maintain your marketing strategies and technologies.
From a practical perspective, how do we measure maintenance load and proactively manage it over time to decrease your existing marketing operations debt? Stay tuned for Part 2 of this article, where we’ll break down how to think about maintenance load, how to actively clear your backlog over time, and how to make the best argument to the larger business about understanding marketing’s ongoing needs in a language they understand.