Marketing Operations Assistant

A Marketing Operations Assistant keeps the machinery behind marketing running: the email platform, the CRM (customer relationship management system - the database of customers and prospects), the campaign tracking and the reporting. Rather than writing adverts or creative copy, you build and schedule campaigns, keep data clean and accurate, and produce the numbers that show what marketing actually achieved. You typically support a wider marketing team - demand generation, content, events or product marketing - and sometimes sales teams who rely on the same data.

Starting salary: £24k–£30k
Live graduate jobs: 1 open now
Main way in: Direct application to an entry-level marketing operations…
They usually ask for: A degree is commonly asked for but the subject usually does not…

Approximate graduate salary

Typically around £24,000–£30,000 to start, though this varies widely - London and technology or SaaS employers tend to sit at the upper end or above it, while smaller regional businesses, charities and agencies often start lower. Pay in this area tends to rise noticeably once you have a couple of years of hands-on platform experience.

What you'd actually do

Building and scheduling email campaigns in a marketing automation platform - loading copy and images into a template, setting up the audience list, testing links and how it renders on mobile, then sending or scheduling it
Cleaning and maintaining data in the CRM: merging duplicate records, fixing badly formatted entries, uploading lists from events or webinars, and checking that new contacts have recorded consent under UK GDPR rules
Setting up tracking so campaigns can be measured - adding campaign tags to links, creating landing pages and forms, checking that form submissions flow into the right place
Pulling together weekly or monthly reports in spreadsheets or a dashboard tool: how many people opened an email, clicked through, filled in a form, and how many of those turned into sales enquiries

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Answering requests from the rest of the marketing team - 'can you send this to everyone who attended the webinar', 'why has this report changed', 'can we add a field for job title' - and triaging which are quick fixes versus bigger jobs
Testing and troubleshooting when something breaks: an email that bounced to the wrong list, a form that stopped passing data through, a report pulling the wrong date range
Keeping documentation and naming conventions tidy so campaigns can be found and compared later, and helping onboard colleagues onto the tools

How graduates get in

Direct application to an entry-level marketing operations, marketing executive or marketing assistant job - the most common route, and many of these roles do not require a specific degree
Internal moves within a company: starting as a marketing assistant, sales development representative or data/admin role and shifting into operations once you show you are the person who can make the systems work
Graduate schemes - some larger businesses run marketing or commercial graduate programmes with a rotation through operations, though a dedicated marketing operations graduate scheme is less common than a general marketing one
Placement years and summer internships in marketing, which often involve exactly this kind of campaign-build and reporting work and frequently convert into graduate offers

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Agency side: starting at a marketing, CRM or digital agency where you support multiple clients' campaign delivery, then moving in-house later
Self-taught route via free platform certifications from the major marketing automation, CRM and analytics vendors, combined with any demonstrable project - running email for a student society, a charity's mailing list, a small business's social accounts

What employers ask for

A degree is commonly asked for but the subject usually does not matter much. Marketing, business, economics, maths, statistics and communications are all common; so are completely unrelated subjects. Some employers accept candidates without a degree if they have hands-on experience with the tools
Grade requirements are usually looser than in law, finance or consulting - a 2:2 is often acceptable, and many adverts specify no classification at all. Some larger graduate schemes do ask for a 2:1
Confident spreadsheet skills are the single most common hard requirement - filtering, lookups, pivot tables, cleaning messy data
Any exposure to a CRM or email marketing platform is a strong advantage. Free vendor certifications in marketing automation, CRM or web analytics are widely recognised and cost nothing but time

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Some employers want evidence you understand UK GDPR and PECR (the rules governing electronic marketing and consent) at a basic level - you will be handling personal data daily
Experience requirements vary a lot: some roles are genuinely entry-level, others labelled 'assistant' expect a placement year or a year in an agency. Read the advert rather than assuming

Skills that matter

Spreadsheet and data manipulation

Most of the job is getting lists, exports and reports into a usable shape, and you will be doing this several times a week.

Attention to detail under time pressure

An email sent to the wrong segment or with a broken link cannot be unsent, so the checking habit matters more here than almost any other marketing skill.

Process thinking

You are constantly asking how a contact gets from a form into the database into a sales queue, and spotting where that chain breaks.

Basic data literacy and scepticism about numbers

You will be asked why two reports disagree, and the answer is usually a definition or date-range difference you need to find and explain.

Translating between technical and non-technical people

You sit between marketers who want something and the systems that constrain it, and have to explain clearly why a request takes a day rather than ten minutes.

Learning software quickly

Tools change, companies migrate platforms, and your value comes from being the person who works out the new one first.

Working knowledge of data protection rules

Deciding whether a list can legally be emailed is a routine judgement call, not an occasional legal question.

Putting these on a CV? We counted which skills 12,914 live graduate adverts ask for, and what to do with the answer — part of our application advice.

Where it leads

Marketing Operations Executive or Specialist - you own campaign delivery for a product line or region rather than supporting others, and start designing processes instead of just running them. Commonly a step up after roughly one to three years, though this varies widely by company size.
Marketing Operations Manager - responsible for the martech stack (the set of marketing tools the company uses), budgets for those tools, and often a small team. In smaller companies this title can come quickly; in large ones it takes considerably longer.
Branching points open up here. Common moves are into revenue or sales operations, marketing analytics and insight, CRM management, or a platform-specialist route where you become deeply expert in one automation or CRM system - platform specialists are in demand and can command strong pay, including as contractors.
Head of Marketing Operations or Head of Revenue Operations, usually in mid-sized or large organisations, overseeing data, systems, reporting and process for the whole commercial function.
A sideways route some people take is into the vendors and agencies themselves - implementation consultant, solutions engineer or customer success roles at a marketing technology company, where your practitioner experience is the main qualification. Timelines across all of this vary enormously; there is no standard ladder.

What people get wrong

“It's a creative marketing job - you'll be coming up with campaign ideas and writing copy.”

It is closer to a data and systems job that happens to sit in the marketing department. Most days involve spreadsheets, platform admin and reporting rather than creative work. People who want to write and design are usually happier in content, brand or social roles.

“'Assistant' means it's a low-responsibility admin job you'll grow out of quickly.”

Operations people often hold the keys to the systems that the whole marketing team depends on, and mistakes are highly visible. The function has become one of the more reliable routes into senior commercial roles precisely because so few marketers understand the data side.

“You need to be technical, or know how to code.”

Coding is rarely required. Being comfortable with logic, spreadsheets and clicking around unfamiliar software is enough to start. Some people later pick up SQL or basic HTML for email templates, which helps, but it is not an entry requirement.

“Marketing operations is the same everywhere.”

In a small company you may be the only person who touches the tools and will also be writing emails and running events. In a large organisation the role can be narrow and specialised - one person just on email deliverability, another just on reporting. The job title tells you very little without reading the advert.

Where this varies

The biggest variable is company size and sector. In a small business or charity, "marketing operations" may just mean being the person who runs the mailing list alongside lots of general marketing work. In B2B technology, software and professional services firms - where marketing operations is most established - it is a defined specialism with its own career path, closely tied to sales and often reporting into a revenue operations function. Agencies offer broader exposure across several clients but usually less depth in any one system. There is also a split between employers who use a large enterprise automation platform (where you become a specialist in that specific tool, which is valuable on the job market) and those using simpler, cheaper email tools (where you learn more general principles but less marketable platform expertise). Finally, the degree to which the role involves analytics versus campaign execution differs a lot - some roles are essentially reporting jobs, others are essentially email production jobs.

See all 1 live Marketing Operations Assistant jobsFrom employers' own careers sites, updated daily Tailor your CV for this roleFree with an account, 3 a month

General guidance about the role across the UK market, not about any specific employer. Entry routes and requirements vary — always check the individual job advert.