Marketing Automation - lessons learnt

One clear winner of the recession have been providers of marketing automation  software which promise to enable marketers to work with customers in a completely different way and add much more value to the sales process. In other words, three groups benefit from marketing automation technology:

1.       Marketers are able to create personalised campaigns appropriate for different stages of their target's buying cycle, automate part of the process to increase activity and optimise campaigns to boost the ROI. They can take responsibility for adding value to leads through nurturing techniques before passing them to sales.

2.       Sales should get fewer, but better quality leads as a result which should mean a more productive sales team and shorter sales cycles.

3.       Customers or prospective customers will get more appropriate and compelling offers which match their requirements and encourage them to do buy

Throughout 2009, we (RBI) experimented with different technologies and eventually settled on the Eloqua system which was more suitable for enterprise clients such as ourselves. The technology is now live and operational in two of our premium, subscription markets - XpertHR and ICIS. It's an exciting time as these tools allow many of the principles of marketing to be realised. For example, marketers can now have 'conversations' with their prospects, adjusting messages based on the recipient's response. Hard offers don't need to be the first offer and value can be added through a series of softer offers which match the stage of the prospect's buying cycle and therefore build trust and credibility. In other words, with marketing automation technology that has been properly integrated with other systems, marketers can replicate a face to face conversation by observing the digital body language of their recipient.

If you're looking at investing in marketing automation technology to improve your competitive advantage, the key lessons for me from this whole process are:

1. Be clear on roles and responsibilities - both within your internal team and the role that suppliers will need to play as they will change over time
2. Be prepared for a big shift in focus to planning which will take up the lion share of the work. Get this right and everything else flows. Over time, marketers will have more time to invest in understanding the target markets' buying process, issues and needs as well as ensuring that they can present their offers in the most effective way
3. Creating, tagging and filing content assets is important - don't underestimate the amount of effort this takes. Offers to download white papers means that you need to have a white paper, but consider what's already available before you set off to create something from scratch.
4. Working well with IT is essential, so make sure you have development resource available to tag pages and integrate other systems if that's a requirement

Further reading

Digital Body Language

Icis case study.ppt