The alphabet soup of marketing technology isn't necessarily getting any clearer. We've got SFA, MOPS, MA, MRM, CRM, MCM, just to name a few. But the two terms I see interchanged a lot, depending on the speaker/author, are Marketing Operations and Marketing Automation.
Personally, I view MOPS as the technology to facilitate the "business", or operational side of marketing. It helps streamline certain repeatable tasks and put some good boundaries around the natural chaos of marketing. Marketing Automation (as we Topliners all know) is all about nurturing prospects into customers with amazing, targeted content. But where does the business, "back end" of marketing meet the creative, strategic, "front end" of marketing?
One suggestion I'll throw out is that they intersect at the marketing calendar. What I mean by that is, the best-laid marketing campaign is nothing without content ready for public consumption on a timely basis. You can plan out all of the nurturing campaigns and events you want, but the creative and content in our whitepapers, emails, landing pages, or blogs, etc., HAS to be ready on time, or you've got a major content bottleneck. Clearly-defined processes with timelines, approvals, responsibilities, and budgets are the boring, back-office piece that we marketers love to avoid...at our own peril.
I'd be interested to hear the thoughts of the community. Anyone agree? Disagree?