Applying technology to marketing makes you a better marketer. In our recent survey about marketing automation, we saw that there is a correlation between the degree of automation in some of marketing’s core operational support processes and respondents’ level of competency in those processes.
Trouble is, the processes we are best at aren’t the ones that matter most.
In my last post, I talked about how things like email marketing, CRM, and web analytics are the processes where people have applied the most automation—and say that they do them well.
But to support the core goal of services marketing—putting good thought leadership before customers and prospects at the right time and in the right context—you need to be good at processes like content management, lead management, campaign management, and segmentation/predictive analysis. All of those processes ranked lower in their levels of automation and competency.
The good news is that you know what you should be automating. When we asked survey respondents to rate the ROI they have gotten or expect to get from automating processes, lead management, and campaign management rise to the top. And segmentation rises, too. And of course, contact management is up there, because nearly everyone has some sort of a CRM system these days.
Meanwhile, the highly automated processes—especially web analytics and email marketing—drop like stones in terms of ROI. This says to us that we are spending at least some of our marketing technology dollars in the wrong places.
I think it’s also a testament to the relative complexity of automating the processes that really matter. The four key automation areas of content management, lead management, campaign management, and segmentation/predictive analysis won’t be successful if they are developed and implemented in isolation from each other. They should be integrated into a holistic process-based approach to generating leads and nurturing them until they are sales ready (and salespeople agree that they are sales ready).
What do you think?
