The royal way to crash your digital marketing: bet everything on the marketing automation tool, leaving aside the strategy. There is no point in investing in the Rolls Royce of marketing automation if you don’t have a clear strategy and no content to feed it! Sometimes a good old tool is enough to frame and reassure you, while your strategy is essential: it is unique, specific to your business and defines precisely the content of your future campaigns!
What does marketing automation consist of?
Marketing automation consists of automating a set of actions to accelerate the acquisition of qualified sales leads and to increase the growth and deployment of a company’s activity.
Generally, it is the tasks with the lowest added value that are concerned:
- Triggering the sending of an email based on a particular contact behavior;
- segment the database in real time;
- maintaining contact with leads over time and nurturing them;
This frees up time for higher value-added tasks (such as talking to customers) and increases efficiency! A scroll is worth a thousand words: find out how Leonard himself converted to marketing automation.
Marketing automation is at the heart of inbound marketing. It allows you to rationalize, measure, fluidify and accelerate your marketing strategy… provided, of course, that you have defined one beforehand! If your marketing strategy is well defined and your content is relevant, marketing automation will take you to the top. If not, it will take you to the wall faster!
You prefer :
- a CRM tool that is not very shiny but widely used by your sales teams
or
the Rolls Royce of the genre but sales people are completely allergic to it? - a basic email routing tool that is not exactly state-of-the-art, but which has proven itself and allows you to share high-quality content
or
the latest high-end emailing platform, which even makes coffee and incredible email creations, but with ultra commercial push messages and very low perceived value?
Why the tool is secondary
The marketing budget of a small business is often allocated to the tool and not to the support and content to be injected into marketing automation campaigns. It is however essential to know what to say in your campaigns and to whom, before buying a marketing automation tool that will gather dust if you don’t know what to do with it.
#1 You will always be behind on the tool…
One of the pitfalls of tools is to want to master them entirely, at the risk of getting lost. All the features of Golden Market’Auto 6.0 may not be adapted to your business… and to your maturity.
#2 “A fool with a tool is still a fool”
A tool remains a tool. If the person who uses it has designed a winning strategy – via processes, methods, best practices – and is well organized, this will contribute to 90% of the project’s success. Consider that a CRM, an expensive tool for your marketing budget, is useless if no leads are generated. A tool is a cost center: it is the strategy that creates value.
#3 Marketing budget: it’s not just about the tool
Among the many possible factors of failure of a marketing automation strategy, there is the one that consists in budgeting only for the tool itself. This is a big mistake! Plan for support, consulting, data, content… without which your tool will only serve to weigh on the costs of your marketing budget.
To put you at ease, I’m an expert in Marketo, one of the Rolls of the marketing automation world, which I use daily. I threw myself into the tool when I first started out – that’s my Leonard side… and I learned the hard way that without content and strategy, my Marketo wasn’t much use to me.
My position is of course that a top strategy, with relevant content, and a Marketo, is a must, even for a SME!
PS: if you have to choose, start your marketing automation with the strategy anyway.
A few tips to conclude
- Consulting and content do not make the strategy! Do things in order. Assess your digital maturity, set goals and consider the different steps to achieve your objectives.
- CRM and marketing automation: you’ve probably made a successful transition to CRM a few years ago; take inspiration from the successes (and failures) of this deployment. Take the opportunity to compare the respective costs, and validate the right lead generation and management model.
- Give the last word to the marketing department rather than to the IT department for the choice of the tool, it’s one of the best ways to avoid a gas factory, certainly brilliant, but that nobody will use…
Do you want to talk to us about your marketing automation desire and your digital marketing strategy?
Image credits : Vecteezy
