Marketing automation, the deployment of software and marketing tactics to have a positive impact on business sales and performance, is all the rage. We’re seeing more and more clients wanting to implement across their business in order to improve the reach and impact of their marketing.
But before you are seduced by the allure of unimaginable website traffic, untold qualified leads, a significantly more engaged audience and new business riches, check these ten considerations to establish if marketing automation is the right thing for your business right now and if it is, how to get the best out of it.
1. Marketing automation requires a strategy and focus
What do you want marketing automation to achieve for your business? Is it the big ticket items such as lead generation, brand awareness, or is something more service based like taking the heat of an overworked internal sales team who are having to deal with lots of enquiries from people asking questions and that might be better served and sifted through more helpful marketing?
Agreeing what you want to achieve will set the framework for how you set up, what resource you put to it, and crucially how you will manage the impact and return on the investment. Like all other aspects of business, a failure to plan how to implement marketing automation means it is more likely to fail.
2. Marketing automation requires a sales process.
Marketing automation technologies are set up to help move prospects through the sales conversion pathway. So you have to have a pathway. Ask yourself these questions.
- Do have a target customer?
- Do you know what their points of pain are?
- Are you able to cluster individual target customers into recognisable groups to scale the resolution of pain?
- Do you have a scoring process in place to help you prioritise prospects as they show interest in your solution?
- Can you establish how and when a lead should be acted upon and have the tools and trained personnel in place to achieve it?
3. Marketing automation requires a list.
You might know who you want to work with but do you have their contact details and do you have permission to communicate with them? All to often, marketing automation is based around the serving up (broadcasting of material and offers) to an audience that hasn’t opted in to it and may not be receptive.
Many marketing automations campaigns fall short of their targets as a result, especially in b2b marketing where the gestation period from awareness to interest to desire to action (AIDA) is much longer and more information critical. Building this on a bought list just adds a potential hazard to the mix.
4. Marketing automation requires a CRM system or database platform.
Communicating out is one thing, but what mechanisms are in place to feed what is actually happening in real-time, back into your database.
The ability to mail out offers, and report back on engagement and click-through and add this back into a prospect’s record is one of the most important aspects of marketing automation.
This provides you with the information to move to the next step of the communication process, whether they engaged or they didn’t.
5. Marketing automation requires content.
If you don’t have anything worthwhile and relevant to offer to a targeted audience, you will just be that guy at the networking event talking about himself. This is why all the advice around (and best campaigns) are often built on building landing pages that house free downloadable content that helps to advice on known problems rather than a brochure or catalogue.
This information can be different too, depending on what stage of the AIDA model you are targeting. At the very least, you’ll need a blog talking about industry issues that can be translated into a weekly or monthly newsletter, depending on your frequency and resource restrictions.
Downloadable content serves to bring more new people to your business and can also be used credibly right across the digital marketing mix.
6. Who should be responsible for what?
There is lots written online about the pros and cons of outsourcing this sort of work. Make no mistake – it is budget and time resource heavy – when you consider the need to plan, create, implement, report and refine over and over again.
There are a number of skill-sets required i.e. editor-in-chief, copywriter, creative, digital marketer and analytics specialist in order to plan and implement effectively.
It may be you can build a team internally that, over time, can scale to feed and run a marketing automation machine. Using agency partners like Clock, does give you the best chance to really crystallise what you’re doing and more importantly, why you’re doing it, to give you the best chance of success.
7. Marketing automation requires follow up.
What if your first (or next) marketing automation campaign achieves incredible interest? Are you going to be set up to rapidly deal with a significant uplift in attention? Conversely, how are you going to deal with laggards?
Is everything going to be email based or are you going to switch to LiveChat style technologies online, Google Hangouts, or the good old fashioned telephone?
How are you going to make sure all your internal team understand and can bring the campaign concept to life when dealing with prospects who have expressed an interest?
And don’t forget problems? How are you going to handle the challenges of becoming an information based business – how quickly will you be able to resolve any I.T challenges prospects might encounter as they use your platform?
8. What platform is best?
There are an abundance of technologies available. Platforms such as Eloqua (Oracle Marketing Cloud), Marketo, Hubspot, Pardot and Infusionsoft dominate amongst the big brands and the marketing industry blogs. This isn’t a post about comparing marketing automation technologies.
What is important is to take the time to do your homework. Test and demo them all online. You can often view a video, walk-through a live demo and talk to someone without having to sign up to anything.
Some offer better email functionality, others greater filtering, some import capability, and others better social integration. Pricing can fluctuate wildly too, as can the level of personalisation and customisation.
9. Ensuring whole company buy-in.
Running a content marketing initiative to fuel an outbound marketing automation programme requires the contribution of a number of people across an organisation. Often, securing industry and application insight from experts who sit in other teams, requires long term planning to ensure you get what you need, when you need it.
Explaining what you’re looking to achieve and how their contribution is critical can help lock in buy-in, but remember this will be extra-curricular for many people in other areas of the business.
10. Evaluating effectiveness.
Investment in marketing automation at any level can be significant and it can take time to bed in, train users and see a result from. That is why setting those critical success factors at points 1 and 2 in this post will serve your investment decision well.
Only, by having tangible conversion metrics built around bottom-line business measurables can the value of a marketing automation investment truly be assessed.
At Clock, we’re not in the business of mis-representing marketing automation (or any other aspect of brand marketing communications) for our own gain. We advise business leaders on how to best deliver the right message in the right way to the right people at the right time. If it requires marketing automation, awesome.
And you do you want to be awesome, don’t you? [Marketing awesomeness awaits].
The post Ten considerations before going ‘all in’ on marketing automation appeared first on Clock Creative.