To improve its customer journey and relationship, your company will most likely opt for marketing automation tools.

But before jumping into choosing a platform, it’s a good idea to ask yourself the following question: is your company ready to move to marketing automation?

Let’s list the 10 signs that you are ready to take the marketing automation plunge.

•  1. Your business is profitable but you want to grow further: marketing automation is not to be taken lightly, it is a long-term investment requiring time to adapt, training and dedicated resources.
  You have to be ready to put all the chances on your side, or you will be heading for failure.

•  2. Your marketing and sales teams are aligned and technically comfortable: It is critical that the teams understand their interests in working together.
  To be effective, ideally your sales and marketing teams should get together to determine the company’s content needs and key touch points with leads.
  The idea is to provide relevant marketing content tailored to your leads’ behavior.

• 3. CRM is no secret to you: most of the time, a CRM system is considered the “baby” of your sales department.
  However, if your marketing team could understand it and know the basics, it could be beneficial for everyone.
  It would demonstrate that your company has enough lead flow to consider switching to a marketing automation tool.

• 4. You already make (good) use of email campaigns: most companies that switch to marketing automation start by using the emailing utility of their platform before implementing the other features.
  In fact, you may face some difficulties and a longer adaptation time if you are not used to sending emails.

• 5. For you, TOFU is not only a Chinese cheese (TOFU – Top of Funnel): you are familiar and comfortable with the basics and terms of marketing, inbound/outbound marketing and understand how marketing automation works, as well as its ins and outs. Marketing automation is a bet on the future and you are ready to capitalize on your knowledge when choosing and using your marketing automation platform. For it to be effective, it is essential to succeed in optimizing it according to the behavior of your leads.

• 6. Your content is varied, of quality, and adapted to your targets according to their maturity: unlike John McLane, intervene at the right place, at the right time.
  Nurturing is a key element for the success of your marketing automation, and it must be well prepared: what messages, what content, when, for whom?
  When using a marketing automation platform, you want to get quick and conclusive results, and this requires a good preparation beforehand.
  The implementation of creation and publication processes is therefore imperative, otherwise there is a risk that your project will quickly turn into a mess.

• 7. Your management values inbound marketing … : … and understands the difference with outbound marketing.
  Marketing automation should not be considered as a simple tool but as a way to approach the prospect.

• 8. You have a good marketing database: you have a clean and up-to-date lead database. You are able to know when and on what occasions you last interacted with your leads.
  This information will also be very useful to Sales.

• 9. Your traditional channels are no longer as effective as they were in the past: reduced budgets, loss of impact and results, need and/or obligation to innovate… Marketing is changing, and practices are evolving very fast. What worked very well yesterday is not as effective today? Think about tomorrow! The time has come to review your habits and invest in a new tool, adapted to current practices, otherwise you will quickly find yourself out of date. If you are ready to explore beyond the boundaries of traditional marketing, marketing automation is waiting for you!

• 10. And of course … you have a functional, clean, optimized and (perfectly) referenced website!
  Marketing automation is a powerful tool to manage and adjust your marketing.
  It can be integrated in many companies, small or large, but it does not totally replace your traditional marketing.
  It does not replace the work of a marketer in the creation of the customer acquisition campaign, the choice of media, the creation of qualitative and relevant content, or the improvement of the conversion rate.

Before you start implementing a marketing automation tool, you should ask yourself the right questions, understand how it works, and think about how to adapt to it.
Moreover, it is effective when coupled with an acquisition and conversion strategy, which it will help you structure.

Putting all this in place obviously requires time and money. That said, it can make a significant difference between companies that use it and those that are not interested (yet…).