In today’s rapidly changing marketing landscape, practitioners must get to grips with new technologies all the time. Take, for example, marketing automation. It’s a terminology being increasingly referred to, and linked closely to other marketing practices such as CRM, lead nurturing and demand generation.
But whilst some believe this is a practice all B2B marketers will have to embrace, cynics warn that marketing automation is nothing more than another name for a fancy email marketing platform.
Will Schnabel, vice president and general manager of international markets at marketing automation vendor Silverpop, is, unsurprisingly, one of the believers. “I think that as a concept, it has really taken off in the last 24 months,” he says.
“Industry estimates suggest that the marketplace is currently only five per cent penetrated in terms of marketing automation deployment – it’s still only early adopters involving themselves in it, but it’s really moving towards being essential – it’s catching on really quickly because people are seeing such high benefits.”
A money saver?
If this is the case, then what are these benefits? According to Adam Sharp, director at Clever Touch, the upside of marketing automation is its ability to allow marketers to build predictability into their marketing engines by applying a process of structure and order to their relationships with customers.
By definition, it uses software to automate processes such as customer segmentation, customer data integration and campaign management, thus saving huge amounts of time and money in the long term.
“Today, most marketing organisations are more finance driven than ever. The beauty of marketing automation is that it can drive everything to a central database that hides behind the web,” points out Sharp. “Because it’s got that seamless link to CRM, it’s really powerful – it gets rid of spreadsheets, it saves time and reduces the risk of lost leads all at once.”
Imagine, he says, that you’re generating 500 leads per month and passing these on a number of spreadsheets to your sales team, “At the end of each quarter you might end up with a bottleneck of leads which would get thrown out, and so the whole process would start again,” he says. “What marketing automation does is reduce that leakage.”
Risks of early adoption
But before you attach a golden halo to marketing automation, be warned that it is not without critics. Even early adopters who are already trialling the technology within their marketing function warn that as a concept, it’s still not particularly established.
Pete Jakob, marketing information leader at IBM, has in the past year overseen the IT giant’s foray into using marketing automation – yet feels that its still early days for the technology. “Certainly the levels of interest I’ve seen at conferences in the last 12 months has increased – but it’s still not desperately well defined. It’s classic early market stuff really – lots of people are trying to attach trendy buzz words to it, and you see people trying to pass off their email programme as marketing automation. To me it’s about rather more than that.”
Sharp agrees that some organisations are confused about the difference between an elaborate email marketing platform and the benefits marketing automation software can provide.
He believes that brands must address several key issues in order to establish a solid automation process which includes performing a data audit and analysing the prospect journey, persona of buyers and business processes – all before they can consider the technology framework they’ll put in place in order to make their marketing automation strategy successful. “All too often organisations start with this last step, only to back fill later [so that] in essence they end up with an over elaborate email system, which is an expensive way to go,” he warns.
More than an email platform
Whereas email marketing platforms allow no opportunity for lead scoring and lead nurturing, and limited capability for lead profiling, marketing automation platforms, says Sharp, allow for all three.
Similarly, CRM integration is limited using an email marketing tool, but embedded and dynamic using an automation one. “While typically more expensive, they have greater functionality, flexibility and offer more campaign variety and usefulness to the marketing department,” he adds.
“Marketing is evolving to take on lead nurturing and lead scoring and you simply can’t do that without marketing automation. I can’t imagine running a modern marketing department today without marketing automation any more than I can imagine a sales executive trying to run their sales function without CRM,” adds JonMiller, VP marketing and co-founder at Marketo.
On the point of the relationship between marketing automation and CRM, there has been much debate over how the two align. Clearly there is a relationship between the two – but are CRM vendors simply jumping onto the marketing automation bandwagon in order to breathe new life into their own offerings?
The popularity of CRM solutions suffered in the noughties, so some believe there may have been an element of this early on – but they add that, since then, the two technologies have learnt to compliment one another. “Siebel, Epiphany and a lot of the other leading CRM vendors tried to tackle the market early on by having marketing automation technology within their offerings, but none of them were successful.
“The economic model of selling CRM is based on how many people use the system and the problem is you can’t sell marketing automation in that way,” says Miller.
CRM and automation gradually seem to be aligning to support one another now though, according to Schnabel. “I definitely think they are pure complimentary technologies. The trick for B2B organisations is in having a process to move leads through from the first touch to making the sale, and that requires sales co-operation. Now I think, we see CRM support the sales side and marketing automation support the marketing side, and that’s how the two work together.”
Benefits of a ‘left-brained’ approach
“Marketing as a function is becoming more left-brained, more process orientated and more analytical,” says Miller, “10 years ago it might have been acceptable for marketers to do a big campaign, and any kind of response or lead you gave to a sales person. Today, you need to send out different versions based on different segments, and have automated follow-ups that depend on how people have responded. Then you need to do a lead nurturing campaign to develop leads over time and only give the good ones to sales.”
Jakob agrees that a fundamental shift in the practice of marketing is pushing marketing automation higher up the agenda. Jakob has for the past year been heading up a marketing automation strategy at IBM – using it to manage responses coming in from mulitiple marketing campaigns and integrating them in one place.
“Marketing has got to learn to collect and gather insight from customers – by understanding their behaviours we can better structure future campaigns. Every time someone responds to a campaign we treat that as something of value, rather than cherry pick the most interesting responses.”
He is also keen to point out that although the benefits for a large, complex organisation like IBM appear instantly clear, the principles of automaton still apply to much smaller companies even if the scale of the solution may be quite different.
Because solutions are mostly based on the software as a service model (SaaS), they can be tailored to fit according to the requirements and budget of a business. For smaller businessnes, and even start ups, one of the bonuses is the lack of what Jakob calls the “legacy” headache – that is, the need to link future responses in any way to past ones, which may be stored in other ways or on other systems.
“I think everyone should be exploring marketing automation, but be careful not to fall into the trap of ‘it’s trendy, so I should be doing it’. For large or small companies I think there are potential benefits. Start from a tangible point, for example you might want to start by getting your data better organised first – identify where you have got the biggest pains and ask yourself whether there is a way that this type of technology can help.”
Increasing take-up
With Schnabel estimating only five per cent penetration of the market at present (Miller similarly concurs, estimating a current two per cent take up in North America), it is still early days for marketing automation technology. But beyond fears that some may confuse automation with more simplistic email solutions, it appears that as a solution, take up is on the rise. At IBM, it’s too early, says Jakob, to talk tangible ROI benefits, but he is certain that they are on the right path and that automation is giving IBM better insights into customer behaviour – in turn allowing for more targeted campaigns in the future.
And as Sharp points out, as Internet technology means marketers are collecting responses from an increased number of sources, automation could hold the key not only to increasing insight, but in crucially taking a lot of leg work out of response collation, whilst ensuring all valuable data is captured.
“If a marketing organisation in B2B doesn’t need the web, doesn’t need email and doesn’t need social media then they don’t need marketing automation. Therefore, in my opinion it’s going to become fundamental,” says Sharp.
