Want Marketing Success? Examine Your Internal Processes Before You Invest in Technology!

By Patricia Seybold

Today’s marketers need to use social media, email, mobile, and web technologies to effectively target and personalize their messages. Ideally, all of these targeted and personalized “campaigns” are managed by an integrated suite of marketing automation tools.

Marketing automation is one of the fastest growing niches in the technology landscape for good reason: it enables marketers to personalize their nurturing of leads and get higher conversion rates. Personalized marketing results in higher conversion rates for self-service sales, better quality leads to sales people for assisted sales, and, of course, higher revenues. It also helps marketers reduce creative production costs, cut short poorly performing campaigns, and improve predictability of revenue.

However, too many marketers view the technology as the panacea, so they often select and start to implement technologies, such as marketing automation systems, before addressing their own organizational issues and business process requirements.

How many leads do we plan to generate from this campaign? What’s the conversion rate we’re after? Do we want to encourage customers to buy online or to pick up the phone? If they buy online, what’s the right rhythm for a consultative sales follow-up? How many “unsubscribes” before we pull the plug on this campaign? Who is in charge of generating, refining, and approving all of the targeted content?

Not thinking through all of the ramifications, complications, roles and responsibilities, and core competencies required to profit from closed-loop marketing before a technology selection is made leads to struggle and, for about a third of marketers, underutilization of the marketing automation system.

Sue McKittrick’s report highlights insights gathered from five suppliers of marketing automation systems, whose experience spans over 2,000 system implementations. From a group of 23 skills, processes, and organizational changes these suppliers identified as important for successful implementation, they selected 7 as most important:

1. Clear objectives, performance measures, and metrics

2. Lead management processes

3. Having a champion in senior management

4. Improving the sales/marketing relationship

5. Lead scoring/updating lead scoring

6. Segmentation and targeting

7. Content strategy and plans

Given the nature of the organizational changes required to ace each of these areas, marketers can and should tackle these challenges before selecting a system, thereby smoothing the path to successful implementation.

What Marketing Automation Suppliers Have Learned About Implementation Success, Version 1
Survey Results on the Skills, Processes, and Organizational Practices Needed for Success
By Susan McKittrick, Analyst and Sr. Consultant, Patricia Seybold Group, April 21, 2011

Comments

[experiential marketing agency]

Marketing techniques like personalized marketing and experiential marketing are making a name in the industry today. Apparently, it sells when brands interact with their potential clients.