Revitalizing Your Marketing Engine: Cutting Ops Debt for Lasting Success, Part 2

In Part 1, we explored how marketing operations debt arises when teams take shortcuts to launch campaigns quickly—often by making less-than-ideal decisions about data, workflows, or integrations. We examined how this “debt” builds up over time, sapping resources and causing friction across teams as maintenance tasks pile up, ultimately impacting the capacity to innovate and drive growth.

In Part 2, we’re moving from theory to practice. Here, we’ll dive into tangible strategies to manage and reduce maintenance load so your team can reclaim capacity and focus on high-impact initiatives. 

Maintenance load in practical terms

For instance, if your team of twelve marketing professionals spends 25% of their time on maintenance tasks—like managing existing campaigns, integrations, and data flows—your effective capacity for launching new, high-impact campaigns is reduced to the equivalent of nine full-time resources. Since business leaders are highly sensitive to operational costs, framing the challenge regarding maintenance load can help justify investments to reduce that burden.

Monitoring how maintenance load changes over time provides valuable insight into the long-term health of your marketing operations. A rapid increase in maintenance tasks signals growing friction and potential bottlenecks, whereas stable levels indicate that your processes are well-tuned. 

Strategies to reduce maintenance load growth in marketing operations 

1. Emphasize Rigorous Quality Assurance (QA) Testing of Campaigns and Integrations

Integrate systematic quality checks into every new campaign, integration, and automation. Allocate dedicated time in your project budget for testing, and celebrate when QA tests catch potential issues before they impact live performance. When testing processes become unreliable, prioritize fixing them through team workshops.

2. Establish and Value Comprehensive Documentation

Make it standard practice to document campaign strategies, workflow processes, integrations, and data flows. Allocate time for creating and updating documentation and recognize team members who contribute to this essential resource. Measure the impact of good documentation by comparing the time it takes to resolve an issue or complete a task with and without it. This improves individual efficiency and enhances overall team collaboration and communication.

3. Foster Clear and Proactive Communication

Encourage your fellow marketers to share their strategic choices and significant changes with the team and actively seek and provide feedback. Effective communication ensures everyone is aligned, reduces miscommunication, and helps prevent issues leading to increased maintenance load.

By embedding these practices—thorough testing, detailed documentation, and effective communication—into your daily operations, you can keep your marketing systems agile, efficient, and ready for growth.

Reducing your existing maintenance limit

Of course, keeping your maintenance load from growing any further isn’t helpful—and might be impossible—if you’re already at your maintenance limit now. So, how do we reduce the existing maintenance limit and return to firm footing? The more the maintenance load exceeds your team’s capacity, the harder it becomes to regain momentum. Addressing a high maintenance load in marketing operations demands commitment and a willingness to rethink our assumptions about current processes. Here are some key strategies:

1. Prioritize High-Value Initiatives

Every marketing campaign, tool, or process should earn its keep. Regularly assess the return on investment for each initiative. If a campaign or integration isn’t delivering value, set aside time to optimize or remove it before your team becomes overwhelmed. There may also be initiatives that have been put in place that aren’t being used as expected. For example, if your team was asked to create a complex scoring setup but BDRs still cherry-pick records due to the scoring not working, continuing to pay down debt on specific scoring triggers may not make sense. Would streamlining, simplifying, or altering the setup reduce maintenance load and increase adoption? Often, there’s a conflict between the business wanting very specific and detailed behavior and the reality of setting up and maintaining those behaviors.

2. Empower Your Team to Streamline Processes

Sometimes, simpler workflows and better functionality can go hand in hand—they just require a broader perspective. Give your team the time and space to step back and ask, “How can we achieve our goals with fewer complexities and edge cases?” Skilled marketing operations professionals can often identify opportunities to simplify processes, making them both more durable long-term and easier to manage.

3. Recover and Maintain Institutional Knowledge

In marketing operations, the real challenge often isn’t that your campaigns or integrations are fundamentally flawed—they work, at least for now. The real issue is that, over time, context gets lost. Imagine a campaign that still drives results but whose underlying strategy, setup, and rationale have faded into obscurity. Without clear documentation or shared context, your team may struggle to update or scale these systems, leaving you at risk when adjustments are needed. It’s like owning a treadmill without an instruction manual: it might function, but without knowing its ins and outs, any required changes become daunting.

Your marketing Sherlock Holmes

This is where what we can call “forensic marketing” analysis comes in—a specialized skill set for uncovering the history and intent behind legacy processes. Think of it as having a dedicated investigator who sifts through historical data, old campaign briefs, integration logs, and scattered documentation to piece together:

• Who was responsible for establishing a process: Not assigning blame, but understanding when and why documentation stopped flowing.
• What the original objectives were: Recovering the strategic goals and assumptions behind a campaign or tool.
• When those decisions were implemented: Tracing the timeline to pinpoint when context began to erode.
• How the process was designed and executed: Unearthing the operational logic hidden in past practices.
• Why certain approaches were chosen: Learning from past constraints and decisions to inform future strategies.

A skilled forensic marketer can step into these “abandoned” campaigns or integrations, recover the lost context, and then communicate their findings to the team. Knowledge-sharing empowers your team to maintain and enhance these systems, preventing future context loss. It ensures critical insights don’t disappear when a team member moves on.

Investing in these skills requires organizational commitment. It means giving your marketing operations professionals the time and authority to conduct deep dives into historical campaigns and fostering a culture where documentation and knowledge sharing are rewarded. 

Create a Culture that Supports Continuous Improvement

For any of these strategies to work, your organization must provide the time and support needed for your team to innovate. Encourage regular reviews, collaborative discussions, and training sessions focused on streamlining and knowledge recovery. When marketing operations and business leaders see the value in reducing maintenance load, it becomes a shared priority.

Applying these principles

Finally, how can we take all of these ideas and practically apply them? In part 1, we talked about an example where we were promoting an event, but bad geodata in the marketing database were potentially causing problems. How would we return to the business to justify and explain some ways to pay down and maintain this marketing operations debt?

1. Think in Terms of Time and Savings

While “show the time you’ll lose or gain” is often the weakest argument for paying down marketing operations debt, it’s also the most straightforward to turn into something tangible. For example, if you had someone maintain a list of all non-standard values that meant “US East Coast,” how much time would that take per month or quarter? How often does this data impact campaign delays? What extra work needs to be done to get postal codes resolved back to states? Are you supposed to see only a city value like “Boston” and discern its location?  Figuring out the scope of the issue helps you provide an estimate the business can work with to understand the problem realistically.

2. Think in Terms of Cost

While the most straightforward way to get to this number is to take the time you calculated in step 1 and multiply that by headcount costs, you can also think about costs around remediating the issue with tools in some cases. In an example like this, you might propose getting some sort of data appending tool or offshore team to do a one-time cleanup, which would pay down the existing debt. You could then select an ongoing tool to manage addresses, keeping the debt stable over time.

3. Consider debt in terms of risk mitigation or potential gain. 

A marketing department may grouse about having correct geodata for targeting messages, but legal counsel must consider the risk of violating state laws on the East Coast. States like Delaware, Connecticut, and Rhode Island have recently enhanced their digital privacy legislation, and the risk of a potential fine or court case might outweigh a marketing budget line item request. Likewise, you can flip this on its head: if you can calculate the economic impact of not reaching specific audiences, leading to less attendance and ticket revenue.

Hitting walls? Try thinking outside the box.

I used the “East Coast event” example in these articles because this situation happened to me early in my marketing career. At the time, any audience segmentation was handled by the company’s Salesforce admin (!!!), who maintained a list of potential values and would add audience members to a Salesforce campaign for use. This process usually took 2-3 days for marketing to receive a list, but despite my arguing that there had to be a better way, there was no appetite for changing the process. I made the arguments that I lay out here: 

• The time saved between campaign production—no waiting!—and having readily available data (“it’s not that bad”)
• The way we could speed up resolving this issue by using USPS APIs to append and update information (“we don’t have the time or money for that”)
• The potential risk of messaging people outside of the area or missing engaged prospects who we didn’t have updated information for (“they can deal with one extra email, no big deal, and they’ll see the event on social anyway”)

I was stumped on how to handle this issue, which was impacting my ability to send appropriate emails and show an ROI on email campaigns. I found a way forward when I went and had a vent session with one of the event planners. She had been sending physical mail invites based on the same data to people on the East Coast. The promotional mailer cost a few dollars to print and send but had a waste cost: if the mailer was returned, we still had to pay for the now-useless piece of mail. The two of us combined our argument to say that regardless of channel—physical or email—having cleaned up data would save time, reduce wasteful spending, and enhance targeting. It ultimately took all of those arguments for the business to take action, and a key skill in marketing operations is figuring out how to make compound arguments like this to improve operations and processing.

Cutting ops debt = lasting success

Reducing maintenance load in marketing operations isn’t just a technical challenge—it’s a business imperative. Ensuring that every new initiative is valuable, empowering your team to simplify and optimize existing processes, and recovering lost context sets the stage for more agile, effective, and sustainable marketing efforts.