Does Campaign Operations typically fall into the responsibilities of Demand Generation or Marketing Operations?

Campaign operations and demand generation are part of the same value chain of campaign creation, so it depends on the size and scale of your teams as well as the specialization you chose to prioritize. Often in startups, you have demand gen and ops in one person, as the org scales, you begin to introduce specialization. On the other end of the spectrum, I’ve seen roles and responsibilities of ops, in particular, go as far as to be divided into 6 different specializations. For our team at Morningstar and consistent with my experience at other organizations we have the campaign architecture and channel selection live in demand generation and the actual build and measurement lives in operations.

Based on my experience, campaign operations usually fall under marketing operations. However, this may largely depend on the stage of the business. For startups, it may make more sense to include this under demand generation until the company scales. For enterprises, it may be more appropriate to establish a dedicated campaign operations department. This team would focus solely on the coordinated execution of campaigns across all departments, ensuring deadlines are met, and tracking performance across the campaign.

I recommend assessing the needs of your organization based on your current stage and near-future goals. Then, consider restructuring the team as necessary to accommodate evolving needs during scaling.

From my experience, campaign operations fall under marketing operations except with smaller teams such as startups. For example, I work at a startup and drive the majority of the campaign operations as they are needed for my programs. Since I have experience in this it actually works in my favor.

For larger organizations, I’ve worked with MarOps teams where they define and execute what is needed and I am just informed. In this scenario, it allows campaign operations to be centralized and uniform for reporting.

So from my perspective, this is determined by the size of the company and the capabilities of the individual.

Typically, I've seen this fall under marketing operations. There have been cases where marketing operations owns more of the tech stack, integrations, and programs like scoring and database management, and campaign operations + execution sits within the demand generation teams. I've seen a decentralized model work well for global organizations, where you need coverage across different time zones and for different channel and campaign needs. In general, if you can have more than one person on Marketing Operations, I would recommend having one person focused on tech stack, and another focused on campaign operations. It can be hard to have one person responsible for both.