Is Marketing Automation Worth the Effort For Your Company?

Almost every company, large or small, aspires to achieve a systematic process for marketing automation.  Marketing automation promises pre-defined triggers and communications that will minimize time and effort while maximizing sales and leads. However, most companies run through an endless cycle of false starts and rebuilds that never really fulfills that promise.  So if marketing automation is a high risk / high reward aspiration, why do a majority of companies feel that they will overcome past failures to finally achieve this holy grail?

Most trainers, consultants, and professional coaches are aware of marketing automation on a conceptual level but a lack of understanding the specific function or lacking a clear vision for the end solution leads most of them to fail or settle for a subset of what marketing automation can provide.

Some of the blame for this falls on digital marketers.  In our enthusiasm to describe the merits of marketing automation, we often gloss over whether it’s a realistic goal for a company.  Working with varied firms, we tend to find that only about one in five have true marketing automation.  The others tend to:

• Have a system that used to be adequate but a knowledge gap from losing staff, partners, or subject matter experts has led a previously functional system into ruin.
• Be working with some isolated marketing automation functionality that is stitched together with a series of manual processes.
• Believe they have marketing automation in place but one or more marketers are working frantically to make the marketing process seem more turn-key than it is.

Marketing automation is a admirable goal but one that the majority of companies will not achieve. Remember that marketing automation will require more expensive tools, more expensive expertise, and longer implementation process to become productively functional. You can count on costs be exponentially higher so the projected return needs to be well defined to justify the endeavor. Based on size and type of business, it’s really not a justifiable venture for some firms.

Be realistic with how sophisticated your marketing automation needs to be.  We tend to suggest starting off with automation basics that are easier to implement and gauge the return on that process improvement.  In this way, you can gradually build processes that save time and effort while maintaining or increasing leads or sales.