What is the best way to implement marketing automation in a business? Our guide takes you through the steps — and the hurdles to watch out for.
Marketing automation management systems facilitate the complex and time-consuming work in marketing and sales and help you to achieve your goals cost-effectively and efficiently. But how do you optimally implement marketing automation and which hurdles can await you?
How to use a marketing automation CRM
Marketing automation – a definition
You can find many different and extremely eloquent definitions of “MA” on the web, such as: “Marketing Automation is a category of technology that allows companies to optimize, automate and measure marketing tasks and workflows so that they are operational Efficiency can be increased and sales can grow faster.”
The reason a lot is said about this without being explained is because these definitions come either from companies that sell MA software or from agencies that provide services that companies use in the use of MA software platforms support. The goal is to get you to get in touch with them to really understand. That in itself is an example of demand generation, but certainly not the best.
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In concrete terms, marketing automation (MA) is a digitally designed process that can be performed by many different MA software platforms. It can potentially automate any type of digital communication between a company and its customers by tracking and automatically responding to their online behavior.
In short, marketing and IT have married and their child – a thoroughbred millennial – is called Marketing Automation (IT is mom!).
The greatest advantages of marketing automation
1: MA enables a targeted, time-saving and individual dialogue with customers and – in this case even more important – interested parties, across all media systems and departments .
2: MA enables the so-called “digital footprint” of customers and interested parties and in cooperation with other in-house systems (MarTech Stack), this can extend over the entire funnel, from the initial interest in a product or the company to the successful conclusion of a business.
3: The entire way through said funnel can also be accelerated, controlled and monitored with the right MarTech stack, so that at the end, among other things, a complete ROI can be seen, with which it is possible to determine exactly which marketing campaign was successful and how much sales generated.
4: In the acquisition of new customers, MA is now essential in both the B2C and B2B areas, as the first quarter, if not the first half of the sales funnel (before contact is made) now largely takes place online and the customer a Expects uninterrupted communication, regardless of whether he is sending an email, calling or using other channels. This is not just my personal assessment, it has been proven with a lot of data and facts for years.
How to get your employees excited about the automation journey
There are many options for doing this, which depend very much on the individual situation in the company. If we were to make a general statement here, then it would be best to take the employees on board from the start, with training and many practical examples as well as an opportunity to participate within a defined framework to implement marketing automation. However, you should set the path and the goal right from the start.
What should happen first in order to develop the appropriate automation strategy?
At the beginning there should be an analysis of the complete sales cycle, or even the demand generation cycle. In other words, where and how can potential customers find out about the company or its products for the first time and which paths they can then take until a successful deal is concluded.
All channels, all steps and all departments involved must be included in the analysis. Paired with the goals of a company, this analysis can then result in the appropriate employee strategy and the appropriate MarTech stack.
From this you can see how huge this topic is, which is still greatly underestimated in many companies, and why a separate professional branch and a separate course of study are developing for it.
The biggest hurdles in marketing automation
The biggest hurdle to implement marketing automation is undoubtedly the fact that two main areas of competence with extensive experience, united in one person, are absolutely necessary for an MA:
Marketing and IT – two areas that have so far not got along very well, to say the least. Whereby IT is the more important part.
The right job description for marketing automation
There is still no job description. In modern marketing courses, the subject “Online Marketing and E-Commerce” is at best all that is covered. This gives an idea of what is going, but not how exactly it is going. The IT background knowledge plays a bigger and more important role here, so there should actually be an area for marketing automation in an IT course. This is now brand new!
The job title that comes closest to this mixed qualification is that of “Marketing Operation Manager” and not that of “Digital Marketing Manager”. For some companies, the latter is simply the person who operates the social media for the company – also known as the social media manager.
Even job platforms don’t have a solution
Even job platforms like LinkedIn and XING do not yet have their own category for marketing automation. In short, there are not yet enough specialists for the topic.
Marketing managers with a traditional degree and professional experience in marketing rarely have such extensive IT knowledge and the necessary wealth of experience that they could lead the introduction of professional MA in a company.
The IT experience plays an immensely important role here, as many procedures and processes in employees not only have to make sense from a marketing perspective, but also have to be technically feasible. In addition, there are new technical risks in online communication that a traditional marketer may not be aware of, but which can have an extreme influence on a company’s image in the online world.
What the management level expects in terms of automation
The management level also faces the same problem here when you implement marketing automation. Complete marketing automation, which should cover the whole funnel, not only includes software for sending e-mails, but also the right MarTech stack, which means that several systems must be set up in such a way that they can easily and automatically exchange data with one another.
Hardly any company, not even global companies, implement all these systems at once. Something like this can take several years. However, if you don’t know how and if these systems fit together from the start, years of work and investment can be wasted. These decisions are usually made by the Chief Marketing Officer or the Chief Information Officer, but both should decide this together with the Chief Sales Officer.
What options marketers have
- You can acquire the necessary IT knowledge voluntarily and part-time.
- You can hire an agency to do this for you.
- You can recruit very fresh graduates from these new courses in the future, but they will not have any experience, which is very important here.
- In a global company you can ask your overseas colleagues to share their existing solution with them, as it has been an essential part of every marketing and demand generation strategy in some countries for a long time.
- You can try to find a candidate on the job market who by chance combines both qualifications and work experience.
Our personal recommendation is a combination of the solutions mentioned. You shouldn’t rely 100 percent on an agency here, but an agency can be of great advantage, especially in the initial phase. It should definitely be an agency with a strong global presence that has the necessary knowledge in the USA if necessary.
There are other hurdles for both marketers and businesses, but there is a solution for everyone. Funnily enough, a lot of people think that cost is a hurdle, but I don’t think that is the case. There are now very good and scalable employee solutions for companies of all sizes, you only need one consultant who knows them all and can choose the right one. Finding such a consultant is then again a hurdle, because the different possibilities for a MarTech stack are almost endless.
