In an intense conversation around marketing automation during our Roundtable in London last month, I learnt a great many things of which I feel I must share. Marketing automation is about doing what you previously thought was impossible, and to make the impossible happen, you must take your business through a journey.
Marketing Automation – All You Need Is Grit
We were proud to host guests from brands including BMW Group, Spirit Pub Company, Skipton Building Society and Archant Publishers.
Conversation in the room felt like it had a theme – put simply by our client Kenny from Spirit Pub Company, the word of the morning was ‘grit’. Grit being the optimal quality needed for someone to be successful in implementing marketing automation.
Now you might be thinking – ‘why, of all qualities, is grit important?’
The answer is that marketing automation isn’t a simple process, it’s a journey that your business must go through in order to make the impossible possible. Someone must lead the business through this journey and to do that, you need grit.
Most businesses see the value in having a marketing automation tool, but how many see the hard work and investment that goes into implementing one?
The morning opened up a lot of conversation around how you can take your business to the next level and some main themes stuck out to me which I will share with you here and whenever I am talking to prospective customers:
Company Culture
Marketing automation software isn’t just there to help the marketing department and be unknown to everyone else. Marketing automation will help every arm of your business and thus every department and employee in your business must see the value for it to work.
Company Governance
For someone to lead your business into this new ‘era’ of marketing automation, you must allow them to make decisions. The faster the process happens, the quicker you will start seeing a return, so it’s important that you can make decisions and be at the heart of the strategy.
The Data
Marketing automation is as much about the customer data as it is about the customer experience, you can’t have one without the other. So what does the data mean to your business now and how will you be able to use the data in the future. It’s important to stay ahead and not get too tangled up in the numbers. Finding the right balance is key.
Pace Yourself
The main challenge is not running before you can walk. Everybody wants results but marketing automation is a much longer journey and the rewards much higher. It can take around two to three years to really start seeing the results you want from it, but do it right and your money will be well invested in the end.
At the end of the Roundtable discussion, we agreed on three key take aways on how to succeed in Marketing Automation:
- A leader of the project with grit
- Complete buy-in from the board
- A single view of your customers