Marketing automation success comes from finding the right person to lead marketing automation through to how to get all the marketing team to adopt automation. People, process, and technology working in harmony create the true business transformation that moves you ahead of your competitors, makes the experience better for your customers, and proves the ROI of marketing.
Marketing Automation: A Three-Legged StoolIn some cases, the CMO or CIO might not be the best person to head up your marketing automation efforts. While both these roles are important, the marketing automation person has to be unique. It’s like a game of musical chairs using a three-legged stool, with sales, Marketing and IT making up the legs of the stool.
All three departments have very different motivators:
- Sales concentrate on doing the next deal.
- IT cares about technical functions and risk mitigation.
- Marketing wants to move people to take action.
So, you might look at it as:
- Sales = money
- IT = problem solving
- Marketing = creative
A marketing automation lead should put together team with a member from each department to become a unified front with the single aim of improving the buyer experience.
- From IT, hire a good communicator, someone open to ideas and good at bridging the gap between business and technology.
- From sales, hire someone who is an early adopter. They need to be more advanced in the use of applications, metrics savvy, and understand the art and science of sales.
- From marketing, hire a bridge builder, someone ready to help and explain concisely how marketing automation benefits the business to bind the whole thing together and be the glue between the pieces.”
Consider that, overall, while your marketing automation tool might be technology, someone from IT might not be the ideal person to take charge of your marketing automation.
Find the BalanceCompanies need to find an all-important balance between marketing’s desire for creativity and the need to push technology. When dealing with marketing automation, you might find yourself sitting between the marketing and the technical delivery teams. Thus, you have to become used to balancing the needs and preferences of both creative and technical personalities.
This means that person leading your marketing automation efforts should not be someone
purely technical, since then you will have a technical implementation. However, if they are pure creative and don’t understand how you build programs you will also have issues. You need to strike the proper balance between the two.
A Thin Line Between Success and MishapHow do you persuade senior management to adopt a marketing automation tool and engage with customers on a more personal level? Marketers know that personalized, value-based communication works. To get leadership to buy into that idea might prove difficult because it is a risk. The pressure on marketing to drive revenue is greater than ever, too.
What to do then?
Hailing the wins you pick up along the way thanks to marketing automaton can help drive change. Looking at metrics and taking in feedback can also point you in the right direction of generating more leads and getting more conversions, which will open any company up to doing more of the same. If everyone can see the positive impact marketing automation will make, they will be easier to convince of its merits.
Find out “6 Reasons You Need Marketing Automation” to read about its further benefits.
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