Does Marketing Automation solve your “too much data” problem?
I still remember the time when I started thinking about how to automate a number of the marketing activities in the company I work for. The term marketing automation was unknown to me, little did I know.
As a marketer I had the following challenges:
- We had many incoming “interactions”, but we had no way of tracking these interactions and actually do something with them beyond responding to these interactions. With interactions, I mean we had people mailing us, visiting our website, participating to webinars, showing up at tradeshows, etc…
- We had no way of identifying all of these interactions (well, not always).
- I had no way of storing the marketing intelligence that these interactions brought me (now that’s where the challenge began).
- We had no way of actually converting these interactions into leads, or at least “micro-convert” them further along the buying cycle.
How to avoid your marketing automation failure?
Many marketing organizations are looking into marketing automation.
Why? Because year after year they need to do more, with less.
By automating tasks, and by adding a number of intelligent marketing techniques, they think that their marketing operations will be easier to manage, and in the end their lead generation will run better.
But one should not jump into this technology too quickly.
What is the promise of marketing automation?
The promise of marketing automation sounds great.
- integrate your website with your e-mail engine
- automate the registration, confirmation and post-processing of webinars
- set-up lead nurturing campaigns
- get to know your prospects better and better through progressive profiling
- automation of e-mails (website, webinars, events, …)
- decrease manual segmentation, manual lead input, manual lead management, etc…
It cannot go wrong, or can it?
When considering marketing automation you should not jump into this technology without being ready, because you can fail at it.
In a great blog post on BrightCarbon, Joby Blume talks about what he considers the lessons learned after “his” marketing automation failure.
