#MarketingAutomation’s Dirty Little Secret
In his recent article at Destination CRM, Kevin Akeroyd, general manager and senior vice president for Oracle Marketing Cloud, drives home the point that marketers often fall into the trap of letting their marketing stack drive their activities instead of the other way around. This is another version of, “If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.”
While technology and tools are important, the fact is that success is driven and measured by a strong set of goals. To me, it’s all about how marketing contributes to the financial success of the company. You can use every tool you have and implement every tactic with skill and efficiency, and still not contribute to the financial success of the company. In order to get this true metric, the feature that any marketing automation package has to have is cost tracking and ROI reporting.
The rest of it is all just tools to achieve that goal. We are not trying to generate vanity marketing metrics like clicks, shares, looks and likes. Our real goal is to provide high-quality leads to the sales team to increase their chance of closing.
Avoiding the trap of becoming hamstrung by your marketing stack (or your lack of resources to properly use all the tool within your stack) is one of the reasons that I advocate outsourcing the operation of your marketing technology. You have the strategy. You have the messaging. You may even have all the content you need. However, there is no need to waste your internal resources assembling all of that into marketing automation campaigns. That is a completely horizontal task requires no special knowledge of your business.
Architects trust builders lead by a General Contractor to build their designs. The architect doesn’t hire every craftsman or carpenter to implement their designs. Why shouldn’t a CMO, VP or Director of Marketing have a marketing automation agency full of experts to implement their campaigns. The job of hiring, training and maintaining all those marketing technologist is the responsibility of the agency, while the CMO, VP, or Director gets to focus on results.
Solutions need to match up with how marketers actually work. But too often it’s the other way around.