Marketing Automation

Been thinking the topic late.  Goals,  risks,  Results?

Automation Maturity Still Woeful?  
Howard Sewell in Customerthink

Almost 5 years ago, our agency conducted a survey to determine whether B2B companies were getting maximum value from their investment in marketing automation.  The conclusion: most B2B companies were failing to follow even the most basic lead management best practices, even in areas that one would assume were a primary business case for purchasing marketing automation in the first place.

In the succeeding five years, the marketing technology landscape has exploded, marketing automation has become a cornerstone of the martech stack, and demand for marketing operations professionals has never been higher.  You’d assume, therefore, that marketing automation maturity – the level of sophistication at which companies employ the technology – has improved.

Not in the least, according to a recent UK survey, which reported, amongst other findings, that just 2% of B2B marketers use marketing automation to its full capacity. Equally striking, the percentage of respondents who reported that their usage was only “basic” – defined as not using many of the available features – was unchanged from a prior 2016 survey, at a mere 28%.

Why does marketing automation as a whole continue to suffer from gross underutilization?  Because our firm services more than forty marketing automation clients, we have a first-hand view of the issues and challenges underlying findings like this most recent survey.  My suspicions are these:

A lack of experienced marketing ops practitioners.

Nowhere is the current marketing talent crunch felt more keenly than in marketing operations, where companies can spend months finding or replacing even the most entry-level marketing automation users.  Anecdotally, the average tenure of a power user, admin, or Marketing Operations Manager has also shortened, as high demand causes people to job hop to higher-paying positions.

Consultants, agencies and other service providers can help fill this void, but don’t necessarily replicate the institutional knowledge that an experienced MA user can build into a system.  Moreover, many consultants and consulting firms are more adept at managing a marketing automation platform then they are in recommending meaningful change, best practices, or lead management strategy.

This knowledge gap means that many companies are either 1) implementing marketing automation in only the most basic manner, or 2) are stalled indefinitely in their pursuit of a more robust, sophisticated use of the system.  .... "