Marketing Automation Provides Tactic Validation

I was just reading a post by Mac McConnell, You've Got Marketing Automation. Now What?, and one of the points Mac made really resonated with me. He was talking about what could be referred to as throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

One of the things that marketers must get better at is the ability to measure the effectiveness of every element of their marketing mix. In the scenario that Mac shared, his client had stopped doing tradeshows because they didn't think they were as effective as other tactics.

According to Adobe's 2010 Analytics Survey, 44% of 1,000 marketers surveyed said they could not allocate sales and costs to marketing campaigns. Given this, it's not really surprising that 76% of marketers cannot measure full marketing ROI.

Which is why many marketers are still playing the intuition game.

So, back to Mac's story. What his client did once they had marketing automation to track lead disposition was to divide their spend equally across 3 demand generation initiatives:

• list rental
• content syndication
• one trade show

Guess which one is driving 2.3X more pipeline than the others after 6 months of tracking and measuring activity and results?

Yes, that would be the trade show the company had eliminated from their marketing plan because they thought the event wasn't successful.

There are a lot of new marketing technologies, processes and tactics available [read shiny new toys]. But this doesn't mean that the more traditional tactics aren't effective - well at least some of the time. The important thing is to gain insights to deeper data that can prove how close your intuition is to the truth.

Mac's post also provided a great chart showing the difference between engagement with content that prospects find valuable and that ridiculous "look at me" content that many companies are still cranking out.

The difference is striking - click over to Mac's post and see it for yourself.

Although I have to say that the customer story statistic surprised me. The questions I'd have for Mac would be during which stage of the buying process was the customer story used? And, was it a valuable story that showcased the problem-to-solution process or a glorified 2-page brochure that touted brand and product names without any meat on its bones?

Comments

[mharris InsightDemand.com]

For people like myself who don't have your experience in this side of Marketing, we can be lost in trying to figure out the effectiveness of these toys.
E-mail Marketing: I do email marketing, do you use Open rates (difficult now that many don’t accept dot/image to measure open rates), click through (my Buyers use a blackberry so I don’t see then clicking) or do you go opt-in yet many like myself haven’t. I checked your book and you say that the days of rent a list are gone. It’s now opt-in so I guess that's the answer yet a painfull one.
Website Tracker: I would like to track who visits my website through reverse IP address look-up to get the company name yet I am told that you can only do this with a few visitor say 10-20%.

Have you done a blog on the tools? Would you say email marketing, don’t bother unless it’s opt-in. Website tracking, worth the bother? Thanks for your bog and book

[Advertising and Branding]

Exactly! Marketing automation is the use of software to automate marketing processes such as customer segmentation, customer data integration and campaign management. The use of marketing automation makes processes that would otherwise have been performed manually much more efficient, and makes some new processes possible. Marketing automation is an integral component of customer relationship management.

[Marketing Automation Software]

mharris,

I've got some experience with marketing automation tools and especially email marketing and website tracking. The benefit of these tools is not very powerful when used as standalone tools. The real benefit is when website tracking is used in conjunction with marketing automation.

From my perspective, it's not very relevant if someone opens and email message. However, it is relevant if someone opens a message, then visits my corporate website, then browses 3+ pages, and looks at a product page related to my email message. Email marketing helps you send the message and website tracking helps you identify the people really interested.

I think you'd agree that an email open does express interest but if that's the recipients only action their interest is probably much lower than someone continues on navigating your website. Marketing automation pulls in a few other features such as lead scoring and notification to "alert" proper folks when a prospect meets certain criteria, defined by you. I've found that using email marketing as a standalone package requires me to "pull" info and dig through reports to find what I need vs getting the info "pushed" to me. Hope this helps.

[Andrew Spoeth]

Mac's example points out the gap between marketer's perception and reality, e.g. the company thought trade shows were ineffective.

The big example that comes to mind is social media. It is indeed changing how we communicate, but its adoption amongst marketers is at least one or two steps ahead of the rest of the world (which likely includes your customers). Just because a tactic is new and sexy doesn't mean it can replace what has driven leads before.

Robust marketing analytics, coupled with an understanding of how our customers actually work, is key.