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The Marketing Data Platform

Conversion unifies CRM and warehouse data, automates busywork, and simplifies orchestration so MarOps teams can deliver the right message at the right time across the entire lifecycle.

Partnered with the world’s best MarOps teams,
From next-gen startups to established enterprises.

Workflows

Unify CRM and warehouse data in one flexible model

Sync CRM custom objects and bring in product and event data from your data warehouse. Model relationships, append traits, and create the exact schema your GTM team needs.

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Orchestrate workflows from real-time data

Trigger workflows off CRM changes, product events, enrichment, and flexible objects. Build branching logic that stays accurate as your data changes and access powerful AI enrichments.

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Design dynamic emails with drag and drop editing

Design emails fast, then personalize with live CRM fields, warehouse events, and reusable content blocks across every program in a beautiful WYSIWYG editor.

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Take the guesswork out of campaign performance

Connect campaigns to pipeline and outcomes. Break down performance by persona, segment, lifecycle stage, account, and opportunity, with a single source of truth underneath.

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The Case for Conversion

Marketo, Pardot, and Hubspot are stuck in the 2000s. Conversion is built for speed and personalization. Here’s why modern B2B teams are making the switch.

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Speed to launch

Build and ship campaigns in hours, not weeks, with modern tools and flexible workflows.

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Smarter lifecycle orchestration

Turn messy processes into repeatable programs with AI-assisted workflows, routing, and campaign execution.

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Design-first email builder

Create beautiful, responsive, on-brand emails without a line of code.

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Native, Two-way CRM syncing

Sync contacts, companies, opporunities, and custom object fields with a fully configurable sync so marketing and sales always operate on the same source of truth.

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Unified marketing data layer

Turn warehouse events and CRM fields into dynamic audiences and automation without stitching tools together.

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Pay for what you use

Only pay for your marketable contacts at a standard rate. No hidden limits. No dynamic bills.

CUSTOMERS

Trusted by the best MarOps teams

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“With Conversion, we built a campaign we’re genuinely proud of. Fast to launch, easy to maintain, and better performing than anything we ran before.”

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CUSTOMERS

Trusted by the best

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"Conversion plays a key role in how we run persona-based campaigns at scale. We use it to enrich, segment, and personalize every touchpoint more efficiently than we ever could with Hubspot. We use it to enrich, segment, and personalize every touchpoint more efficiently than we ever could with Hubspot."

Read Case Study
Video preview
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“With Conversion, we built a campaign we’re genuinely proud of. Fast to launch, easy to maintain, and better performing than anything we ran before.”

Read Case Study
Video preview
image of a person providing a testimonial

"Conversion plays a key role in how we run persona-based campaigns at scale."

Read Case Study

Templates for absolutely anything

From lifecycle emails to outbound nurture to product launches.
 Browse our full library of plug-and-play templates.

Built for modern enterprises

Create faster. Stay aligned. Scale with confidence. Conversion gives every team the power to automate, personalize, and grow.

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Enterprise Compliance

Give your team enterprise-grade control: granular permissions, comprehensive audit trails, SOC 2 Type II compliance, SSO, SCIM, and premium support.

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Custom Data Models

Bring in data from custom objects, CRMs, event signals, and warehouse. Power GTM automations that adapt to any model — free trials, usage-based billing, or sales-led onboarding.

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Asset Organization

Organize all your marketing activities with Conversion campaigns, bi-directionally sync to SFDC for reporting, and implement global tokens to scale your campaigns.

integrations

One-Click Integrations. Infinite Potential.

Conversion integrates seamlessly with your CRM, data warehouse, CDP, ad tools, and analytics to turn siloed data into coordinated, AI-powered campaigns.

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Relevant resources

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What Is Marketing Operations? Complete Guide for 2026

February 19, 2026
00 Minute Read

What Is Marketing Operations? Complete Guide for 2026

Marketing operations is the function that manages the technology, data, and processes enabling marketing teams to execute campaigns efficiently and prove their impact on revenue. It's the engineering discipline behind modern marketing—less about what to say, more about how to make everything actually work.

This guide covers what MOps teams do day-to-day, the skills and tools required, how to build a marketing operations strategy from scratch, and the team structures that scale with growth.

What Is Marketing Operations

Marketing operations (MOps) is the function that manages technology, data, and processes so marketing teams can execute campaigns efficiently and hit business goals. It sits between strategy and execution by handling the tech stack, analyzing performance, managing budgets, and keeping teams aligned across the organization.

You can think of MOps as the engineering side of marketing. While demand gen runs campaigns and content teams write copy, marketing operations builds and maintains the infrastructure that makes everything work.

The function covers five core areas:

  • Technology management: Administering the MarTech stack, including CRM, email platforms, and analytics tools
  • Data and analytics: Managing customer records, building dashboards, and measuring ROI
  • Process optimization: Streamlining workflows to reduce friction and speed up launches
  • Campaign execution: Supporting targeting, scheduling, and quality assurance
  • Strategic planning: Connecting marketing activities to broader business objectives

Why Marketing Operations Matters for B2B Teams

B2B marketing involves longer sales cycles, multiple decision-makers per deal, and complex handoffs between marketing and sales. Without solid operations, campaigns launch late, data gets messy, and attribution turns into guesswork.

Marketing operations connects activities directly to revenue. When a lead converts, MOps ensures that conversion data flows back to the CRM, updates the lead score, and triggers the right follow-up sequence—all without anyone touching a spreadsheet.

For high-growth teams, operational maturity determines how fast you can scale. You might have brilliant campaign ideas, but if your data lives in five different systems and your workflows break every time someone updates a field, growth stalls.

Core Functions of Marketing Operations

Data Management and Governance

Data governance refers to the formal management of data assets—making sure records stay consistent, trustworthy, and properly used. In practice, this means maintaining clean customer records, enforcing naming conventions, and preventing duplicates from polluting your CRM.

Poor data quality cascades everywhere, costing organizations $12.9 million annually. Sales reps waste time on bad leads, personalization fails, and reporting becomes unreliable. MOps owns the systems and processes that keep data clean.

Campaign Management and Execution

This is the day-to-day work: building email campaigns, setting up automation triggers, configuring audience segments, and running QA before anything goes live.

Campaign ops also involves troubleshooting. When an email doesn't render correctly or a workflow misfires, MOps diagnoses and fixes the issue.

Lead Generation and Scoring

Lead scoring ranks prospects based on their perceived value to the business. MOps builds and maintains scoring models that combine demographic data (company size, industry) with behavioral signals (page visits, email engagement).

Once leads hit a certain threshold, routing rules send them to sales. Getting this handoff right requires close collaboration with sales operations.

Reporting and Analytics

MOps sets up the dashboards that show what's working—campaign performance metrics, funnel conversion rates, and attribution models that connect marketing touches to closed revenue.

Attribution modeling, which determines which touchpoints influenced a deal, remains one of the trickiest challenges in B2B marketing. MOps typically owns the technical implementation.

Process Automation and Workflows

Workflow automation uses rule-based logic to execute tasks without human intervention. A simple example: when a contact fills out a demo request form, the system automatically creates a task for sales, sends a confirmation email, and updates the lead status.

More sophisticated workflows nurture leads over weeks based on their behavior, adjusting content and timing dynamically.

Essential Marketing Operations Skills

Technical and Platform Skills

MOps professionals work hands-on with marketing automation platforms like HubSpot, Marketo, or Pardot. CRM administration—particularly Salesforce—is often part of the job.

Basic HTML and CSS help when troubleshooting email templates. Understanding APIs becomes important when integrating tools or debugging sync issues.

Analytical and Data Skills

SQL proficiency opens up direct database access for custom reporting. Advanced spreadsheet skills remain essential for data manipulation and analysis.

Data visualization—turning numbers into charts that tell a story—helps communicate findings to stakeholders who don't live in the data every day.

Project Management Skills

MOps coordinates work across multiple teams with competing priorities. Familiarity with methodologies like Agile or Scrum helps manage complex projects with many dependencies.

Documentation matters too. Clear runbooks ensure processes don't live only in one person's head.

Cross-functional Communication Skills

Marketing operations sits at the intersection of marketing, sales, IT, and sometimes product. Translating technical concepts for non-technical stakeholders is a daily requirement.

Building relationships with sales ops proves especially valuable. Many of the thorniest problems—lead routing, attribution, data quality—span both functions.

Marketing Operations Tools and Software

Tool Category Purpose Examples
Marketing Automation Campaign orchestration HubSpot, Marketo, Pardot, Conversion
CRM Contact and deal management Salesforce, HubSpot CRM
CDP Unified customer profiles Segment, mParticle
Data Warehouse Product and behavioral data Snowflake, BigQuery
Analytics Attribution and reporting Looker, Tableau

Marketing Automation Platforms

Marketing automation platforms handle email campaigns, lead nurturing sequences, landing pages, and forms. They're the primary workspace for campaign execution.

Choosing the right platform depends on your complexity. Simple use cases might work fine with HubSpot. Enterprise B2B with complex lifecycle stages often requires more flexible solutions.

CRM Systems and Integrations

Salesforce dominates B2B with 20.7% market share as the system of record for customer data. The reliability of your CRM sync determines whether marketing and sales see the same reality.

Two-way sync matters here. Changes in the CRM flow to marketing tools, and marketing engagement data flows back. Brittle, one-way integrations create data gaps that compound over time.

Customer Data Platforms

A customer data platform (CDP) unifies customer data from multiple sources into a single view. Teams typically adopt a CDP when data fragmentation becomes unmanageable—when the same customer exists in five systems with five different profiles.

Data Warehouses and Pipelines

Product usage data often lives in a data warehouse like Snowflake or BigQuery. Bringing behavioral data into marketing operations enables more sophisticated segmentation and scoring.

For example, you might want to trigger a campaign when a user hasn't logged in for 30 days. That requires connecting product data to your marketing automation platform.

Analytics and Attribution Tools

Dedicated analytics platforms provide deeper reporting than what's built into marketing automation tools. They're essential for multi-touch attribution and cross-channel analysis.

How to Build a Marketing Operations Strategy

1. Audit Your Current Marketing Operations State

Start by documenting everything: tools, processes, data flows, integrations. Map where data lives and how it moves between systems.

Identify pain points along the way. Where do campaigns get stuck? What manual work could be automated? Which reports take hours to build?

2. Define Marketing Operations Goals and KPIs

Align MOps goals to business objectives. If the company wants to accelerate pipeline, MOps might focus on reducing campaign launch time or improving lead scoring accuracy.

Example KPIs include average time to launch a campaign, data quality scores (duplicate rates, field completeness), and marketing attribution coverage.

3. Map and Consolidate Your Technology Stack

Most marketing teams accumulate tools over time, often with overlapping functionality. Identify redundancies and integration gaps.

Consolidation reduces complexity and cost. Fewer tools means fewer sync points to maintain and fewer places for data to break.

4. Establish Data Governance Standards

Define naming conventions for campaigns, fields, and segments. Document who owns which records and how conflicts get resolved.

Set hygiene rules: how often to dedupe, what triggers a data quality alert, who reviews and merges duplicates.

5. Document Workflows and Processes

Create runbooks for repeatable processes—campaign setup, lead routing, report generation. Anything that happens regularly deserves documentation.

Good documentation reduces key-person risk and speeds up onboarding for new team members.

6. Measure Results and Iterate

Track your KPIs consistently. When something underperforms, dig into why. Marketing operations management is a continuous improvement cycle, not a one-time project.

Marketing Operations Team Structures and Roles

Centralized Marketing Operations Model

A single MOps team serves all marketing functions. This structure ensures consistency in processes and strong governance over data and tools.

The tradeoff: centralized teams can become bottlenecks when demand exceeds capacity.

Embedded Marketing Operations Model

MOps specialists sit within other teams—demand gen, product marketing, customer marketing. They develop deep expertise in their area's specific workflows.

Speed improves, but consistency can suffer. Different embedded specialists might solve the same problem in different ways.

Hybrid Marketing Operations Model

A core central team handles governance, tool administration, and standards. Embedded specialists handle day-to-day execution within their teams.

This model attempts to balance consistency with agility. It works well for larger organizations with diverse marketing functions.

Marketing Operations Best Practices

Maintain Clean and Unified Customer Data

Regularly dedupe records and standardize field values — 37% of CRM users report losing revenue from poor data quality. Ensure bidirectional sync between your CRM and marketing systems so both stay aligned.

Modern platforms built around contact-centric data models can simplify this challenge by unifying Salesforce and warehouse data in one place.

Automate Repetitive Marketing Tasks

Identify manual work that follows predictable rules. Lead routing, campaign triggers, report delivery, and data enrichment are all candidates for automation.

Every hour saved on manual work is an hour available for higher-value activities.

Align Marketing Ops with Sales Operations

Establish shared definitions. What exactly qualifies as a marketing qualified lead? When does ownership transfer to sales?

Document SLAs for lead follow-up and create unified reporting that both teams trust.

Document Processes and Runbooks

Thorough documentation reduces dependency on specific individuals. When someone goes on vacation or leaves the company, work continues without disruption.

Measure Marketing Operations Performance

Track MOps-specific metrics: data sync reliability, average campaign launch time, data quality scores. Metrics like these prove the team's value and highlight improvement opportunities.

How Data Integration Transforms Marketing Operations

The industry is shifting from brittle point-to-point integrations toward unified data platforms. Instead of maintaining dozens of individual connections, teams consolidate around platforms that handle sync complexity.

Real-time data matters more than ever. When a prospect visits your pricing page, you want that signal available for segmentation immediately—not after a nightly batch sync.

At Conversion, we've built our syncer to handle this architectural challenge. The system processes millions of records daily with built-in retries and reconciliation, ensuring marketing and CRM data stay aligned even when individual syncs fail.

Building a Unified Marketing Operations Platform

The ultimate goal is consolidating fragmented tools into a cohesive system. High-growth B2B teams benefit especially from platforms that unify Salesforce data and product data into one flexible model.

When your segmentation, campaigns, and reporting all run from the same data foundation, you eliminate the sync gaps and reporting discrepancies that plague stitched-together stacks.

Book a demo to see how Conversion can help you build a unified marketing operations platform.

FAQs about Marketing Operations

What is the difference between marketing and marketing operations?

Marketing focuses on strategy, messaging, and creative—deciding what to say and to whom. Marketing operations manages the technology, data, and processes that execute those strategies at scale.

What are the four pillars of marketing operations?

The four pillars are platform operations (technology infrastructure), campaign operations (execution and monitoring), marketing intelligence operations (analytics and insights), and marketing development operations (process improvement and team enablement).

What does a marketing operations manager do daily?

A typical day involves overseeing campaign execution, troubleshooting integration issues, maintaining data quality, building or updating reports, and optimizing workflows. The mix varies based on team size and organizational structure.

How does marketing operations differ from revenue operations?

Marketing operations focuses specifically on marketing technology and processes. Revenue operations (RevOps) is broader, spanning marketing, sales, and customer success to optimize the entire revenue lifecycle.

What does a marketing operations consultant do?

A MOps consultant audits existing systems, recommends technology and process improvements, and often implements or migrates marketing automation platforms. Consultants bring outside expertise to solve specific challenges.

What should I look for in marketing operations software?

Prioritize native CRM integration, data warehouse connectivity, flexible segmentation, and reliable two-way sync. The platform should adapt to your data model rather than forcing you into rigid structures.

What Is Marketing Operations? Complete Guide for 2026

February 18, 2026
00 Minute Read

What Is Marketing Operations? Complete Guide for 2026

Marketing operations is the function that manages the technology, data, and processes enabling marketing teams to execute campaigns efficiently and prove their impact on revenue. It's the engineering discipline behind modern marketing—less about what to say, more about how to make everything actually work.

This guide covers what MOps teams do day-to-day, the skills and tools required, how to build a marketing operations strategy from scratch, and the team structures that scale with growth.

What Is Marketing Operations

Marketing operations (MOps) is the function that manages technology, data, and processes so marketing teams can execute campaigns efficiently and hit business goals. It sits between strategy and execution by handling the tech stack, analyzing performance, managing budgets, and keeping teams aligned across the organization.

You can think of MOps as the engineering side of marketing. While demand gen runs campaigns and content teams write copy, marketing operations builds and maintains the infrastructure that makes everything work.

The function covers five core areas:

  • Technology management: Administering the MarTech stack, including CRM, email platforms, and analytics tools
  • Data and analytics: Managing customer records, building dashboards, and measuring ROI
  • Process optimization: Streamlining workflows to reduce friction and speed up launches
  • Campaign execution: Supporting targeting, scheduling, and quality assurance
  • Strategic planning: Connecting marketing activities to broader business objectives

Why Marketing Operations Matters for B2B Teams

B2B marketing involves longer sales cycles, multiple decision-makers per deal, and complex handoffs between marketing and sales. Without solid operations, campaigns launch late, data gets messy, and attribution turns into guesswork.

Marketing operations connects activities directly to revenue. When a lead converts, MOps ensures that conversion data flows back to the CRM, updates the lead score, and triggers the right follow-up sequence—all without anyone touching a spreadsheet.

For high-growth teams, operational maturity determines how fast you can scale. You might have brilliant campaign ideas, but if your data lives in five different systems and your workflows break every time someone updates a field, growth stalls.

Core Functions of Marketing Operations

Data Management and Governance

Data governance refers to the formal management of data assets—making sure records stay consistent, trustworthy, and properly used. In practice, this means maintaining clean customer records, enforcing naming conventions, and preventing duplicates from polluting your CRM.

Poor data quality cascades everywhere, costing organizations $12.9 million annually. Sales reps waste time on bad leads, personalization fails, and reporting becomes unreliable. MOps owns the systems and processes that keep data clean.

Campaign Management and Execution

This is the day-to-day work: building email campaigns, setting up automation triggers, configuring audience segments, and running QA before anything goes live.

Campaign ops also involves troubleshooting. When an email doesn't render correctly or a workflow misfires, MOps diagnoses and fixes the issue.

Lead Generation and Scoring

Lead scoring ranks prospects based on their perceived value to the business. MOps builds and maintains scoring models that combine demographic data (company size, industry) with behavioral signals (page visits, email engagement).

Once leads hit a certain threshold, routing rules send them to sales. Getting this handoff right requires close collaboration with sales operations.

Reporting and Analytics

MOps sets up the dashboards that show what's working—campaign performance metrics, funnel conversion rates, and attribution models that connect marketing touches to closed revenue.

Attribution modeling, which determines which touchpoints influenced a deal, remains one of the trickiest challenges in B2B marketing. MOps typically owns the technical implementation.

Process Automation and Workflows

Workflow automation uses rule-based logic to execute tasks without human intervention. A simple example: when a contact fills out a demo request form, the system automatically creates a task for sales, sends a confirmation email, and updates the lead status.

More sophisticated workflows nurture leads over weeks based on their behavior, adjusting content and timing dynamically.

Essential Marketing Operations Skills

Technical and Platform Skills

MOps professionals work hands-on with marketing automation platforms like HubSpot, Marketo, or Pardot. CRM administration—particularly Salesforce—is often part of the job.

Basic HTML and CSS help when troubleshooting email templates. Understanding APIs becomes important when integrating tools or debugging sync issues.

Analytical and Data Skills

SQL proficiency opens up direct database access for custom reporting. Advanced spreadsheet skills remain essential for data manipulation and analysis.

Data visualization—turning numbers into charts that tell a story—helps communicate findings to stakeholders who don't live in the data every day.

Project Management Skills

MOps coordinates work across multiple teams with competing priorities. Familiarity with methodologies like Agile or Scrum helps manage complex projects with many dependencies.

Documentation matters too. Clear runbooks ensure processes don't live only in one person's head.

Cross-functional Communication Skills

Marketing operations sits at the intersection of marketing, sales, IT, and sometimes product. Translating technical concepts for non-technical stakeholders is a daily requirement.

Building relationships with sales ops proves especially valuable. Many of the thorniest problems—lead routing, attribution, data quality—span both functions.

Marketing Operations Tools and Software

Tool Category Purpose Examples
Marketing Automation Campaign orchestration HubSpot, Marketo, Pardot, Conversion
CRM Contact and deal management Salesforce, HubSpot CRM
CDP Unified customer profiles Segment, mParticle
Data Warehouse Product and behavioral data Snowflake, BigQuery
Analytics Attribution and reporting Looker, Tableau

Marketing Automation Platforms

Marketing automation platforms handle email campaigns, lead nurturing sequences, landing pages, and forms. They're the primary workspace for campaign execution.

Choosing the right platform depends on your complexity. Simple use cases might work fine with HubSpot. Enterprise B2B with complex lifecycle stages often requires more flexible solutions.

CRM Systems and Integrations

Salesforce dominates B2B with 20.7% market share as the system of record for customer data. The reliability of your CRM sync determines whether marketing and sales see the same reality.

Two-way sync matters here. Changes in the CRM flow to marketing tools, and marketing engagement data flows back. Brittle, one-way integrations create data gaps that compound over time.

Customer Data Platforms

A customer data platform (CDP) unifies customer data from multiple sources into a single view. Teams typically adopt a CDP when data fragmentation becomes unmanageable—when the same customer exists in five systems with five different profiles.

Data Warehouses and Pipelines

Product usage data often lives in a data warehouse like Snowflake or BigQuery. Bringing behavioral data into marketing operations enables more sophisticated segmentation and scoring.

For example, you might want to trigger a campaign when a user hasn't logged in for 30 days. That requires connecting product data to your marketing automation platform.

Analytics and Attribution Tools

Dedicated analytics platforms provide deeper reporting than what's built into marketing automation tools. They're essential for multi-touch attribution and cross-channel analysis.

How to Build a Marketing Operations Strategy

1. Audit Your Current Marketing Operations State

Start by documenting everything: tools, processes, data flows, integrations. Map where data lives and how it moves between systems.

Identify pain points along the way. Where do campaigns get stuck? What manual work could be automated? Which reports take hours to build?

2. Define Marketing Operations Goals and KPIs

Align MOps goals to business objectives. If the company wants to accelerate pipeline, MOps might focus on reducing campaign launch time or improving lead scoring accuracy.

Example KPIs include average time to launch a campaign, data quality scores (duplicate rates, field completeness), and marketing attribution coverage.

3. Map and Consolidate Your Technology Stack

Most marketing teams accumulate tools over time, often with overlapping functionality. Identify redundancies and integration gaps.

Consolidation reduces complexity and cost. Fewer tools means fewer sync points to maintain and fewer places for data to break.

4. Establish Data Governance Standards

Define naming conventions for campaigns, fields, and segments. Document who owns which records and how conflicts get resolved.

Set hygiene rules: how often to dedupe, what triggers a data quality alert, who reviews and merges duplicates.

5. Document Workflows and Processes

Create runbooks for repeatable processes—campaign setup, lead routing, report generation. Anything that happens regularly deserves documentation.

Good documentation reduces key-person risk and speeds up onboarding for new team members.

6. Measure Results and Iterate

Track your KPIs consistently. When something underperforms, dig into why. Marketing operations management is a continuous improvement cycle, not a one-time project.

Marketing Operations Team Structures and Roles

Centralized Marketing Operations Model

A single MOps team serves all marketing functions. This structure ensures consistency in processes and strong governance over data and tools.

The tradeoff: centralized teams can become bottlenecks when demand exceeds capacity.

Embedded Marketing Operations Model

MOps specialists sit within other teams—demand gen, product marketing, customer marketing. They develop deep expertise in their area's specific workflows.

Speed improves, but consistency can suffer. Different embedded specialists might solve the same problem in different ways.

Hybrid Marketing Operations Model

A core central team handles governance, tool administration, and standards. Embedded specialists handle day-to-day execution within their teams.

This model attempts to balance consistency with agility. It works well for larger organizations with diverse marketing functions.

Marketing Operations Best Practices

Maintain Clean and Unified Customer Data

Regularly dedupe records and standardize field values — 37% of CRM users report losing revenue from poor data quality. Ensure bidirectional sync between your CRM and marketing systems so both stay aligned.

Modern platforms built around contact-centric data models can simplify this challenge by unifying Salesforce and warehouse data in one place.

Automate Repetitive Marketing Tasks

Identify manual work that follows predictable rules. Lead routing, campaign triggers, report delivery, and data enrichment are all candidates for automation.

Every hour saved on manual work is an hour available for higher-value activities.

Align Marketing Ops with Sales Operations

Establish shared definitions. What exactly qualifies as a marketing qualified lead? When does ownership transfer to sales?

Document SLAs for lead follow-up and create unified reporting that both teams trust.

Document Processes and Runbooks

Thorough documentation reduces dependency on specific individuals. When someone goes on vacation or leaves the company, work continues without disruption.

Measure Marketing Operations Performance

Track MOps-specific metrics: data sync reliability, average campaign launch time, data quality scores. Metrics like these prove the team's value and highlight improvement opportunities.

How Data Integration Transforms Marketing Operations

The industry is shifting from brittle point-to-point integrations toward unified data platforms. Instead of maintaining dozens of individual connections, teams consolidate around platforms that handle sync complexity.

Real-time data matters more than ever. When a prospect visits your pricing page, you want that signal available for segmentation immediately—not after a nightly batch sync.

At Conversion, we've built our syncer to handle this architectural challenge. The system processes millions of records daily with built-in retries and reconciliation, ensuring marketing and CRM data stay aligned even when individual syncs fail.

Building a Unified Marketing Operations Platform

The ultimate goal is consolidating fragmented tools into a cohesive system. High-growth B2B teams benefit especially from platforms that unify Salesforce data and product data into one flexible model.

When your segmentation, campaigns, and reporting all run from the same data foundation, you eliminate the sync gaps and reporting discrepancies that plague stitched-together stacks.

Book a demo to see how Conversion can help you build a unified marketing operations platform.

FAQs about Marketing Operations

What is the difference between marketing and marketing operations?

Marketing focuses on strategy, messaging, and creative—deciding what to say and to whom. Marketing operations manages the technology, data, and processes that execute those strategies at scale.

What are the four pillars of marketing operations?

The four pillars are platform operations (technology infrastructure), campaign operations (execution and monitoring), marketing intelligence operations (analytics and insights), and marketing development operations (process improvement and team enablement).

What does a marketing operations manager do daily?

A typical day involves overseeing campaign execution, troubleshooting integration issues, maintaining data quality, building or updating reports, and optimizing workflows. The mix varies based on team size and organizational structure.

How does marketing operations differ from revenue operations?

Marketing operations focuses specifically on marketing technology and processes. Revenue operations (RevOps) is broader, spanning marketing, sales, and customer success to optimize the entire revenue lifecycle.

What does a marketing operations consultant do?

A MOps consultant audits existing systems, recommends technology and process improvements, and often implements or migrates marketing automation platforms. Consultants bring outside expertise to solve specific challenges.

What should I look for in marketing operations software?

Prioritize native CRM integration, data warehouse connectivity, flexible segmentation, and reliable two-way sync. The platform should adapt to your data model rather than forcing you into rigid structures.

Marketing Operations

Marketo vs Salesforce Marketing Cloud: Complete 2026 Comparison

February 18, 2026
00 Minute Read

Marketo vs Salesforce Marketing Cloud: Complete 2026 Comparison

Choosing between Marketo and Salesforce Marketing Cloud is one of those decisions that shapes your marketing operations for years. Get it wrong, and you're stuck with workarounds, brittle integrations, and campaigns that take twice as long to launch.

The platforms solve fundamentally different problems despite both carrying the "marketing automation" label. This comparison breaks down where each platform excels, what they actually cost, and how to decide which fits your team's specific requirements.

What is Marketo Engage and how does it work

Marketo Engage and Salesforce Marketing Cloud are both enterprise marketing automation platforms in a market projected to reach $16.81 billion by 2032, though they solve different problems for different types of businesses. Marketo is generally superior for B2B marketing, focusing on complex lead nurturing and sales alignment. Salesforce Marketing Cloud excels in B2C scenarios with multi-channel customer journeys and high-volume personalized messaging.

Adobe acquired Marketo in 2018, so you'll often see it called Adobe Marketo Engage. The platform runs on a centralized lead database, meaning every contact lives in one place. This makes segmentation straightforward compared to more complex data architectures.

Marketo started as an email-first platform and that DNA still shows. The core strength is behavioral tracking and lead scoring—watching what prospects do, assigning points based on engagement, and handing off qualified leads to sales at the right moment. Additional channels like SMS and push notifications exist, though they typically cost extra.

  • Core function: Email automation and lead nurturing for B2B sales cycles
  • Data model: Single centralized lead database
  • Primary strength: Native Salesforce CRM integration and sales alignment
  • Ownership: Part of Adobe Experience Cloud since 2018

What is Salesforce Marketing Cloud

Salesforce Marketing Cloud (often called SFMC) takes a fundamentally different approach. Rather than focusing on lead nurturing for long sales cycles, SFMC was built for orchestrating customer journeys across multiple channels at once.

The platform stores customer data in Data Extensions, which are essentially flexible database tables you query using SQL. This architecture handles high-volume data well, though it demands more technical expertise than Marketo's simpler lead database.

Journey Builder sits at the heart of SFMC. It lets marketers create visual workflows spanning email, mobile push, SMS, social advertising, and web personalization. For B2C companies sending millions of messages daily, this multi-channel orchestration matters.

  • Core function: Multi-channel customer journeys across email, mobile, social, and web
  • Data model: Flexible Data Extensions requiring SQL knowledge
  • Primary strength: Scalability for high-volume personalized messaging
  • Ecosystem: Deep integration with Salesforce CDP and CRM products

Marketo vs Salesforce Marketing Cloud quick comparison

The core difference comes down to use case. Marketo excels at B2B lead nurturing with simpler setup. SFMC excels at B2C multi-channel orchestration with more complexity.

Criteria Marketo Engage Salesforce Marketing Cloud
Best for B2B with long sales cycles B2C with high-volume messaging
Data model Centralized lead database Data Extensions (SQL-based)
Ease of use Moderate learning curve Steep learning curve
Primary channels Email-centric True multi-channel
CRM integration Native SFDC sync Native Salesforce ecosystem

Who uses Marketo

Marketo fits B2B companies where deals take weeks or months to close and multiple stakeholders influence buying decisions. The platform's lead scoring and nurturing capabilities become valuable when you're tracking engagement over time rather than driving immediate conversions.

Account-based marketing programs work particularly well in Marketo. The platform tracks engagement across multiple contacts within a single account and helps coordinate outreach accordingly. Teams already running Salesforce CRM benefit from Marketo's native bidirectional sync, which keeps lead and contact data consistent between systems.

Common use cases include lead scoring for MQL handoff, drip nurture campaigns, webinar follow-up automation, and sales alert workflows.

Who uses Salesforce Marketing Cloud

SFMC makes sense for B2C or B2B2C companies with high message volumes and genuine multi-channel requirements. If you're sending transactional emails, mobile push notifications, and SMS messages as part of coordinated customer journeys, SFMC provides native support for all of these.

The platform rewards technical investment. Organizations with dedicated SFMC administrators who can write SQL queries and AMPscript (Salesforce's scripting language for dynamic content) get significantly more value than teams expecting a purely drag-and-drop experience.

Retail, e-commerce, financial services, and travel companies frequently choose SFMC for its ability to personalize at scale.

How Marketo and Salesforce Marketing Cloud features compare

Campaign automation and workflow capabilities

Marketo's Smart Campaigns use trigger-based logic. When a lead takes an action, the system responds automatically. You define triggers, filters, and flow steps in a visual interface. This works well for B2B scenarios where you're responding to specific behaviors like form submissions or email clicks.

SFMC's Journey Builder visualizes the entire customer journey as a canvas instead. You map out decision splits, wait steps, and channel touchpoints across days or weeks. For complex B2C journeys with multiple branches, this visual orchestration is powerful.

Email design and multi-channel messaging

Both platforms offer drag-and-drop email builders, though neither feels particularly modern. Marketo remains email-centric, and adding SMS or push requires additional modules and costs.

SFMC includes multi-channel capabilities at higher pricing tiers. Mobile Studio handles push and SMS natively, while Advertising Studio connects to social platforms. If you genuinely need channels beyond email, SFMC provides them without bolting on separate tools. However, neither are noted for their email editor.

Lead scoring and qualification

Lead scoring is where Marketo shines. The platform was built around scoring leads based on demographic fit and behavioral engagement, then routing qualified leads to sales—critical given only 27% of leads sent to sales are actually qualified.

You can create scoring models that decay over time and respond to specific actions.

SFMC can implement scoring through Einstein AI or custom development, but it's not a core strength. B2C companies typically care less about lead qualification and more about customer lifetime value and engagement metrics.

Segmentation and audience building

Marketo's Smart Lists use a visual query builder with AND/OR logic. Most marketers can create segments without technical help, though complex queries sometimes hit performance limits.

SFMC's segmentation runs on SQL queries against Data Extensions. This approach is more powerful and flexible, but it requires someone who can write SQL. For teams without that expertise, basic segmentation in Email Studio works, though you'll miss the platform's full capabilities.

How much does Marketo cost vs Salesforce Marketing Cloud

Neither platform publishes transparent pricing, and both require conversations with sales teams. The pricing models differ significantly, though.

Marketo prices primarily on database size - the number of contacts you're marketing to. Tiers include Growth, Select, Prime, and Ultimate, with features unlocking at higher levels. Additional channels and advanced analytics require add-on purchases.

SFMC uses modular pricing based on which capabilities you select. Email Studio, Mobile Studio, Journey Builder, and Advertising Studio each carry separate costs. Entry prices tend to be higher than Marketo, though you get more channel flexibility at upper tiers.

Hidden costs catch many teams off guard on both platforms:

  • Implementation services: Professional setup and configuration
  • Training: Getting teams productive on complex platforms
  • Add-on channels: SMS, push, and advanced features beyond base packages
  • API call overages: Charges for exceeding integration limits
  • Third-party integrations: Tools to fill reporting and analytics gaps

Ease of use and implementation complexity

Marketo is generally easier to set up and manage, while SFMC is more complex to learn but more powerful for data handling. This trade-off appears consistently across user feedback.

Marketo implementations typically take 8-12 weeks for basic setup, assuming clean CRM data. The interface feels dated but functional, and most marketing operations professionals become productive within a few weeks of training.

SFMC implementations often stretch to 3-6 months, particularly when data architecture requires planning. The platform demands upfront decisions about Data Extension structure that are difficult to change later. Teams without SQL expertise often hire consultants or dedicated administrators.

Marketo to Salesforce CRM and data integration

Marketo's native Salesforce integration is a genuine strength. The bidirectional sync runs every few minutes, keeping lead and contact records consistent between systems. Field mapping is configurable, and most standard use cases work without custom development.

That said, sync conflicts happen. When the same record updates in both systems simultaneously, merge logic doesn't always behave as expected. Marketing operations teams spend meaningful time troubleshooting sync issues.

SFMC connects to Salesforce CRM through Marketing Cloud Connect. Since both products are Salesforce-owned, the integration is native, though it still requires configuration and has different sync patterns than Marketo's approach.

Where both platforms struggle is connecting to data warehouses and product usage data. Modern B2B companies often want to segment based on product signals—feature adoption, usage patterns, billing status—that live in Snowflake or BigQuery rather than the CRM. Neither Marketo nor SFMC handles this natively, which leads to brittle sync architectures and duplicated data. Platforms like Conversion address this gap with native warehouse sync and a unified contact model designed for B2B complexity.

When to choose Marketo over Salesforce Marketing Cloud

Marketo makes sense when your primary use case is B2B lead generation and nurturing. If you're running account-based marketing programs, want sophisticated lead scoring, and prioritize tight sales alignment, Marketo delivers on those requirements.

Teams with limited technical resources also benefit from Marketo's more accessible interface. You don't need SQL expertise to build segments or create campaigns, though marketing operations knowledge certainly helps.

Existing Salesforce CRM investments pair naturally with Marketo's native sync. While SFMC also integrates with Salesforce, Marketo's bidirectional sync is more mature for B2B lead and contact workflows.

When to choose Salesforce Marketing Cloud over Marketo

SFMC wins when you need true multi-channel orchestration at scale. B2C companies sending millions of messages across email, SMS, push, and social advertising benefit from having these channels unified in a single platform.

Organizations already invested in the Salesforce ecosystem—particularly those using Data Cloud, Commerce Cloud, or Service Cloud—get deeper integration benefits from staying within the family.

If you have technical resources available and complex personalization requirements, SFMC's flexibility rewards the investment. AMPscript and SQL-based segmentation enable use cases that Marketo simply can't match.

Modern alternative for B2B teams: Conversion

Marketo and Salesforce Marketing Cloud were built before warehouse-first GTM stacks became normal. Today, a lot of the data that actually matters lives outside the MAP: product usage in Snowflake or BigQuery, billing state in Stripe, enrichment vendors, intent tools, and custom objects in Salesforce.

Conversion is built for that reality.

Instead of treating your CRM as the only source of truth, Conversion unifies Salesforce data with warehouse and product signals in a flexible data model, then lets MarOps teams orchestrate campaigns and workflows on top of that unified layer. You get two-way CRM sync, native data warehouse sync, and campaign orchestration that does not depend on brittle middleware or one-off pipelines. The result is faster segmentation, cleaner data governance, and lifecycle automation that can actually react to product and revenue signals.

Use Conversion when your team needs B2B-grade orchestration across CRM + warehouse data, not just email execution.

Book a demo to see how Conversion approaches these challenges with native warehouse sync and a data model built for modern B2B complexity.

FAQs about Marketo and Salesforce Marketing Cloud

Is Salesforce sunsetting Marketing Cloud?

No. Salesforce continues investing in Marketing Cloud, with Marketing and Commerce Cloud generating $5.28 billion in FY2025 revenue. They've consolidated branding by renaming Pardot to Marketing Cloud Account Engagement. The core SFMC platform remains actively developed.

What is Marketo now called after the Adobe acquisition?

Adobe Marketo Engage is the official name following Adobe's 2018 acquisition. The platform is part of Adobe Experience Cloud alongside other marketing and analytics products.

Can Marketo integrate with Salesforce CRM natively?

Yes. Marketo's native bidirectional Salesforce sync is one of its core strengths, automatically synchronizing lead and contact data between the two platforms every few minutes.

What are the main competitors to Marketo and Salesforce Marketing Cloud?

Key competitors include HubSpot, Pardot (Marketing Cloud Account Engagement), Customer.io, Iterable, and Braze. For B2B teams wanting native warehouse integration and unified CRM data, Conversion offers a modern alternative built specifically for these requirements.

Use Cases

Inbound Lead Scoring & Enrichment

November 23, 2025
00 Minute Read

Introduction

As your business scales, managing inbound volume quickly becomes a frustrating challenge. Legacy MAP such as Marketo, Pardot, or Hubspot also introduce operational complexities – fragmented data, manual upkeep, and rigid workflows that prevent your team from scaling. 

Your CRM may be getting crowded with spam/low-intent leads, AEs are getting the wrong/low-quality leads, data is missing, and people are falling off forms. 

Marketing teams at Adaptive, MyOutdesk, and Hockeystack have set up AI-native inbound marketing funnels on Conversion that scales with them:

  • Form Creation
  • Spam Check
  • Data Enrichment
  • Lead Scoring
  • Lead Routing

For this workflow, you’ll need a form that’s either built in Conversion or hooked into Conversion via iframe.

Trigger

Most inbound workflows start by triggering off a form submission. You can simply set this up in Conversion by selecting an Engagement -> Form Submission for your trigger. You can choose multiple forms using the OR operator if you have multiple forms hosted throughout your website. 

Spam Check

A fundamental issue with inbound workflows comes from the amount of spam that enters through forms. Your CRM ends up getting populated with tons of records that look like ai-master-3024@wewilltakeovertheworld.com

Using a magic enrich node, you can prompt AI to filter out any emails that may look spammy by inserting the email and domain variable.

Lead Scoring Form Submissions

Right after a prospect fills out a form, you’ll want to identify how strong of a lead they are with lead scoring - one of Conversion’s most powerful features. Traditional MAPs use a point-based system to keep track of lead activities, demographic fit, and behavioral intent. 

With Conversion, you can prompt in natural language to score leads and identify who your most likely buyers are. These prospects typically deserve higher budget ad campaigns, more personalized email nurture sequences, and high-touch outreach from the sales team. 

Using a magic enrich node, you can write a prompt instructing AI to score your leads. There are 2 types of lead scoring you can do in Conversion. As a baseline in both these types, include examples of what a good lead looks like, what an average lad looks like, and what a poor lead looks like. You want to give AI as much context as possible to make informed decisions. You may have to tweak the prompt a couple of times to get it right but once it’s set up correctly, you’ll never have to touch it again!

Demographic 

For demographic lead scoring, you can pull in factors like company domain, industry, job title, seniority, and employee count to assess how good of an ICP fit the lead is. For Conversion, Directors of Marketing Operations at a 200+ employee B2B SaaS company is our perfect ICP. 

Behavioral

You can also behaviorally lead score in Conversion to assess how high-intent certain buyers are and prioritize getting them over the finish line. Instead of demographic variables, you can bring in engagement variables such as “Number of site visits”, “Form Submitted”, “Webinar attendances", “Sales Meetings Attended”, etc.

Here’s an example of a well-written prompt for lead scoring in Conversion.

Given [Job Title], [Number of Employees], [Industry], and [Company Domain], and available data from the website, assign a lead score from 1–10 (10 = highest intent/fit). Include a short rationale focused on fit for a data analytics solution.

Examples:
"Lead Score: 9 — Business Intelligence Lead at a 500-person B2B SaaS company actively hiring data engineers."
"Lead Score: 6 — Finance specialist at a medium sized nonprofit; fit is moderate due to limited scale."
"Lead Score: 10 — Director of Product at a fast-scaling consumer software company actively launching regional campaigns."
"Lead Score: 2 — Sales person at a local service business with limited digital data."

Return ONLY a number between 1 and 10.

Routing & Post-Form Submission

Now that you are effectively lead scoring your form submissions, you can perform a host of actions in Conversion. 

If a lead score is greater than a certain number, you can assign account owners in Salesforce, create tasks, enroll people in nurture sequences, or send Slack notifications. 

Turn Every Form Fill-Out Into Your Next Customer

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