Investing in Marketing Automation is a costly exercise, hence marketers and CEO need a lot of time to consider all pros and cons. Is my company ready for such move? Is my team prepared? How will it affect our performance?
If such deliberations trouble you right now, we provide a short checklist of criteria a company must meet to efficiently implement Marketing Automation. We phrased them as questions; if your answers are yes, you can most probably ready to begin Marketing Automation adventure. If not, you will know what on what to focus.
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1. Do I build long relationships?
Rumor has it that Marketing Automation works best for B2B companies, with long (around 6 months) sales cycle, involving many stakeholders. But that’s no longer true! With the boundaries between B2B and B2C blurring, and the B2C marketers eager to adopt many B2B solutions (like Lead Nurturing or webinars), such restrictions no longer apply to contemporary marketing landscape.
The question refers not to the sales cycle as such, but to the length of your relationship to the customer. If you build (or want to build) lasting relationships, based on loyalty, and increase retention or if you want to educate your clients, then Marketing Automation is perfect for you. All you need to know is whether such type of bond with a customer is appropriate for your business and offer.
See how Starbucks uses data to increase customer loyalty.
2. Is my staff ready?
Your Marketing Automation Platform is worth as much as your team can use it. Therefore, the staff’s knowledge and their readiness define the outcome. Take a look at your human resources and their creativity, analytical skills and knowledge. Can they cope? Will you invest in educating them?
Rick Carlson stresses the importance of marketing team: “Many people make the mistake of underestimating the amount of effort it takes to support a strong marketing automation program. Instead of trying to have one person take on the entire task, consider creating a team composed of a marketing strategist, a content creator, and a salesperson. This allows an agency to integrate deeply marketing automation into an overall cohesive sales and marketing plan.”
3. Do I have a specific definition of my aims?
Marketing Automation doesn’t work like a magic wand that transforms your marketing the moment you set it up. It must be a part of a whole strategy, and you need to know what exactly do you want to achieve by implementing it:
– Increase Lead Generation with personalized contact forms?
– Boost sales with abandoned cart rescue emails?
– Grow loyalty with educational Lead Nurturing campaigns?
Make a list of specific goals.
4. Can I deliver valuable content?
High-quality content fuels Marketing Automation Platform, and lack of thereof can result in wasting resources invested in automation. Why? Because the efficient and personalized distribution of your content won’t improve its quality – it will only help distribute it. Well-crafted emails, powerful subject lines and CTAs, inspiring infographics, helpful ebooks – you need all these combined with Marketing Automation to attract users and convert them to leads and loyal customers.
5. Do I have traffic on my website?
When you generate like 20 leads per month, MAP won’t do much good. Without traffic, automation is useless, because you have no visitors to whom you could present perfectly tailored purchase suggestions and educational materials.
While Marketing Automation supports Lead Generation, it won’t work on its own – start with gathering the audience, on which you will later perform automated, personalized campaign.
6. Can I integrate MAP with other existing systems?
Interoperability is a crucial task when you want to execute your campaign seamlessly. How will your MAP integrate with other software and systems you already implemented or plan to implement? It also raises another question – about data hygiene and quality.
According to Patrick Biddisombe, “Finally, is your CRM data clean and organized? If not, take the time to cleanse this data before layering on the additional data inflow from the marketing platform. Otherwise, data cleansing after the fact becomes increasingly costly and resource-intensive”.
Firstly, tidy up the data you already have. Then you will be prepared to collect and process more.
Marketing Automation revolutionizes marketers’ everyday work and delivers impressive results:
– 53% of B2B Fortune 500 companies use marketing automation – an 112% increase from 2013.
– 78% of most successful marketers claim that marketing automation is responsible for increasing revenue.
See more stats in posts:
20 New Marketing Automation Stats You Must Know
How Marketing Automation Improves Your Company’s Performance? (stats)
Are you ready?
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