Marketing Automation finally burns the silos between Markeing & Sales!

Written by Federico Persson

Marketing Automation – A seasoned Marketer's dream come true 😍

A great way to deal with the ongoing crisis is to learn new things and update your tech stack. Learning and taking the opportunity to review software and systems is productive and feels good. Clearly, after the crisis is over, the world will have changed. Are you equipped to handle those changes?

I love fashion and come from a past in the fashion and retail world. After a little traveling, studying and windsurfing, I started, as a 25-year-old, a fashion chain called "Tessie". It was fun. I moved on to major international brands such as Louis Vuitton, Oriflame, etc. and recent years have been spent in the start-up world within Edtech and Fintech. I see opportunities based on a healthy mix of gut feeling and data. Commitment, personalization and a true customer-first approach are basic prerequisites for success. Maybe there should also be a test kit to measure the presence of these attitudes in newly hired staff?

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You've probably read and heard about Marketing Automation. Obviously it is a topic that we who work with marketing and who love everything digital really need to address. For the business leader, it is a catalyst that binds your departments together and helps them work towards common goals.

Does it feel like something only large companies (perhaps especially B2B) are engaged in? Not at all. Marketing Automation is for everyone.

What is Marketing Automation?

AdNIKA, where I have a role as the Head of the Advisory Board, defines marketing automation as the strategies, processes, software technology and brain capacity that enables Marketing and other departments to automate, measure, and improve the performance of their collective strategies, activities and workflows.

There are certain parts of the marketing and sales work that can really benefit from being tested for automation. Top seven below:

Figure 1: Marketing Automation Deployment LifecycleEmail Marketing
Lead Generation
Omni-Channel Marketing
Additional sales
Segmentation
Home-page optimization
Measure ROI

These strategies and activities include Email Marketing, Multi-channel Campaign Management, Inbound/Search Marketing, Landing Pages, Lead Generation, Lead Management, Lead Scoring, Lead Nurturing, Social Marketing, Marketing Resource Management, Event Management, Engagement Marketing and Marketing Analytics.

It can feel overwhelming, so think of the above as a journey. A lovely journey. Now when we cannot travel physically we can at least do other types of journeys. And remember as Churchill once said: "Kites rise highest against the wind, not with it.”

So hang in there!

Clearly, the marketing teams that embrace automation are getting better results than the more traditional ones.

Facts

Marketing Automation is not a system for sending out a lot of spam and it does not replace your marketing department. Marketing automation is a way to give your marketing department new superpowers. The more your company grows, the more important it will be to give the company's teams the right conditions to succeed. Automation creates space for this. This applies to both marketing, sales and product. The old organizational structures have lived out their lives and now you as a company must organize yourself in order to really be able to work with a growth mind-set and start testing new processes. That's what Growth is all about. Several departments need to collaborate more deeply or simply be restructured into different teams.

Marketing automation comes in different forms. There are several types of technical platforms that are integrated with different cloud solutions. Alternatively, you may replace existing systems with holistic solutions such as for instance Hubspot.

Image 2. Growth Mindset vs. Fixed Mindset

What then distinguishes companies that work with Marketing Automation from the others? They simply have the right tools for optimizing their resources. In this case, it means they can be much more spot-on. They get better control of the sales funnel and have tools that can effectively determine when leads are ready to buy. In the highly “noisy” digital world, it is hard to get one’s messages across a targeted audience. Therefore, these abilities become absolutely crucial. Marketers can better classify and encourage leads by optimizing content and personalizing it at the right time and then handing them over to sales. This results in higher growth, i.e. revenue.

The ability to demonstrate the effectiveness of campaigns helps marketing departments move budgets from cost centers to revenue generators. Content and the right content strategy is a crucial and important part of the automated workflows.

As a seasoned marketer, I have been in situations where I know, through gut feeling, that my campaigns are working. In fact, working incredibly well. But I have had a hard time demonstrating it to sales and product.

Therefore, Marketing Automation and Growth are an extremely important approach that enables performance measurement and data-driven strategies.

As a marketer you benefit from:

Stylish dashboards with common measuring points
Agreement with sales and product on hand-over points
Freeing up time and resources for creativity, growth-testing and branding
Measuring your impact and ROI with common and specific goals
An improved customer journey that affects existing and potential customers

As always, there is a certain amount of hesitation to buy and integrate new solutions. It takes time from existing resources to learn to use new tools. But without doing so, you risk falling behind in development and miss out on many opportunities. It's time to get started with your Automation and associated Growth. Of course, we are happy to support you in this endeavour and will teach you to fly with your own wings.

AdNIKA uses a step-by-step methodology to develop a Marketing automation plan that increases sales, builds customer insights, and grows brand awareness. Reach out to AdNIKA for support with the following steps which are good to evalute how you can get cracking.