How can you use self-reflection to improve your Marketing Operations?

Understanding your own unique talents (strengths) is, in my opinion, one of the best things you can do for your career in marketing operations (or any career!). Taking a reputable strengths assessment like the CliftonStrengths® assessment, will provide you so much awareness around how you naturally think, feel, behave, and work. A quick way to know if you are working in your strengths or not is to reflect on how an activity makes you feel - does it light you up or drain your energy? Was it the peak of your day or the pit of your day? Knowing your strengths will help you to better appreciate who you are and allow you to better leverage them in your role.

Self reflection is important from strengths and weakness perspective. However, it is important to conduct an honest assessment of performance of past campaigns. Data can be massaged to give any message that the marketing head wants to give to senior management but it is the responsibility of the marketing operations head to look for micro trends within campaign analysis and come up with what went well and what could have been improved

Working with a mentor can be very impactful to your personal and professional career growth. This could be your manager, but oftentimes, it is someone else who you look up to. Seeking guidance from a mentor and having your mentor provide you feedback on your work, your skills, your strengths, etc. can be a great learning opportunity to continue expanding your growth.

An alternative goal-setting model if you have had enough of STAR, is the CLEAR model - offering a different approach to drive improvement. C - Challenging: Set goals that challenge your team to reach new heights, but be mindful of feasibility. L - Learning: Think about what you can learn from reaching the goal and how can you grow your or your team's skills. E - Engaging: Ensure goals captivate and inspire your team: goals that resonate with individuals lead to sustained efforts and creativity. A - Adjustable: Allow goals to evolve with changing circumstances, encouraging adaptability and resilience. R - Reflective: Integrate reflection into goal-setting. Regularly assess progress, celebrate achievements, and learn from setbacks.

Allocate specific time intervals for self-reflection within your marketing team's schedule. Encourage team members to reflect individually and facilitate group reflection sessions to collectively review and revise strategies. Evaluate key metrics of past marketing campaigns, such as conversion rates, ROI, engagement metrics, and sales attribution, to understand what worked well and what needs improvement. Analyze successful aspects of campaigns and initiatives, as well as areas that didn’t meet expectations. Understand the reasons behind both successes and failures to extract valuable insights for future planning. Gather insights from diverse perspectives within the team to identify areas for improvement or potential innovative ideas.

This is super important, in MOps everything constantly changes so you need to constantly learn and be up to date with new tools and best practices. Try see what you miss and learn about it. There are so many online resources about everything that it is easy to deepen our knowledge on any subject if we want to.