The Biggest Mistake B2B Company’s Make When Adopting Marketing Automation and How to Fix It

The big mistake.

The purpose of a successful marketing automation system is to help B2B marketers to manage their time and resources more effectively, connect with and gather more leads, align sales and marketing and manage their marketing funnel. Marketing automation can also help you make your marketing teams more effective, and can help you create stronger marketing campaigns that produce tangible ROI.  However, the problem with this is that it makes marketing automation systems seem like a quick and easy fix, when in fact that isn’t the case at all. If your marketing campaigns are built on a weak marketing process, then marketing automation isn’t going to be a one-size-fits-all band aid that will provide an immediate solution to the problem.

If you’re trying to decide whether or not to implement a marketing automation system, the first thing your company needs to do is a comprehensive audit of your current marketing process. Not only will this help you determine if a marketing automation solution can actually solve the problems you’re having (before you waste a lot of time and money) but it can also help you to get a better idea of what you need in your marketing automation solution. With the wide variety of options available, doing an audit can help you navigate the vendor selection process much more easily.

If you have a strong idea of where you want to improve, how a marketing automation system can help, and have set your expectations for where you’d like to end up, your implementation of (and subsequent experience with) a marketing automation platform will be much smoother and more successful.

Performing an audit.

The challenges and difficulties that your company is facing within your marketing process can sabotage your marketing automation system before you see measurable results. You wouldn’t build a house on a faulty foundation, and the same is true for implementing a marketing automation system on a weak marketing process.

A marketing audit should give you a comprehensive view of your company’s marketing objectives, strengths, weaknesses and strategy which can then be compared to your company’s overall marketing goals.

The best option for a comprehensive audit is usually to turn to a marketing agency that has experience critiquing marketing strategies, but if this isn’t a viable option for your organization, here are some questions you should ask that relate directly to issues that a marketing automation system can help solve .

Internal Marketing Environment

1. How is our marketing team organized?
2. How efficient/effective is our marketing team as a whole? 
3. How does our marketing team align with other departments (ex. Sales)? 
4. How effective are we at CRM (customer relationship management)?
5. What is the current state of our marketing process? 
6. What are our current objectives for marketing? 
7. What are our current marketing strategies? How effective are they? 
8. Is our marketing process being controlled effectively? 
9. Are we achieving our marketing objectives? 
10. Are our marketing teams implementing our marketing plan effectively? 
11. Do we have the resources, budget, to accomplish our marketing objectives? 
12. Are the marketing resources we have allocated appropriately to achieve our objectives?

1. What are the buyers needs and how can we satisfy them?
2. What is our audience’s perception of our brand and their loyalty to it?
3. Do we understand the buying process of our target audience? Are we addressing it effectively? 
4. What are the relative strengths and weaknesses of our competition? 
5. What are the marketing plans and strategies of our competition? 

Posted by Amberlie Denny at October 19, 2010 8:00 AM

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