B2B Magazine reported yesterday that marketing automation is gaining popularity among American marketing executives. As more companies jump into automation (59% of those surveyed say they’ll boost their marketing automation spend this year) it’s important to stay focused on what makes a marketing automation effort successful.
We consider the following three things to be key ingredients for any marketing automation campaign:
- Data. Good data alone doesn’t ensure that your marketing automation effort will succeed, but bad data guarantees it will fail. The kind of data you will gather depends on your goals and the type of campaign you’ll run, but at minimum, you’ll want to make sure that your list of names and contact information is complete, up to date and representative of your target market.
- Content. Finding, creating and organizing content is often the most challenging task in marketing automation. Each step in your marketing automation workflow will require some sort of content, whether it’s copy and images for an email, information and calls-to-action for a landing page, or an asset like a case study or white paper that will be available for download. Begin by assessing the content you already have on hand, and then identify areas where you’ll need to develop new content and get to work. When viewed together, your content should tell a cohesive story and move your target through to the decision you want them to make.
- Workflow. How you build your workflow will depend largely on the marketing automation solution you’re using, but whether you’re running Genius, Eloqua or Marketo you should set your workflow up to nurture your leads through the sales funnel. Begin with emails, assets and messaging targeted at the awareness/interest stage of the purchasing funnel, and then move your way through to consider/evaluate and select/purchase.
While marketing automation is rarely as simple as stirring together three ingredients, we hope these tips will get you off to a good start when planning your next campaign.
Image via PubliPage.
i think you’ve hit the nail on the head here. The great part about all these tips is their benefit goes beyond marketing automation. (You can see I agreed with you in this post, but your ideas are even more succinct. http://blog.marketo.com/blog/2010/02/marketing-automation-simple-ways-to-get-started.html)
Good data leads to great segmentation, increased performance, and clear reporting.
Content not only supports a marketing automation strategy, but is also key in a strong SEO, PPC, and social strategy.
Workflow ensures more than just passed leads, but also allows for reporting based on revenue generation (because you know where your marketing leads went).
I often think that many of the reasons companies see such dramatic results with marketing automation is because of these benefits that extend far past the platform. Great post!
Also, thank you for the mention of Marketo.
-Maria @Marketo