Customer World

Exponential adoption not exponential growth is key in 2011 for marketing automation

I have been reading a lot of blogs, views of consultants & research reports over the last couple years on the growing need for marketing automation in companies to manage customers better.

This is an irony that has always suprised me - the companies that have made the marketing automation investments don't use them enough and the ones planning to invest don't really plan well on how to get enterprise-wide acceptance.

It was interesting for me read an article by Carlos Hidalgo

• “Less than 25% of organizations that have implemented a [marketing automation platform] fully currently utilize its potential.”
• According to a recent study, 78% of marketers state that generating high-quality leads is still their biggest challenge.
• Various reports have between 70-90% of leads still being ignored and going to waste.

This was quite relevant points that corraborated with what I have been observing over the last few years.

Here's what I would like to see in 2011 for exponential adoption first,  lest marketing automation will die its natural death:

1. Organizations must break-down silos and exponentially adopt marketing automation across various departments as customers don't do business with departments in companies!
2. Determine metrics that are relevant to each of the departments and all these must roll-up to an enterprise-level metrics on lead management( lead capture, lead nurturing & scoring),  lead fulfillment and post-sales customer management.
3. Practice byte-sized execution plans across mutliple customer-facing departments and clearly think multi-channel -  web,  mobile, call centre etc.
4. Create a marketing budget across customer acquisition and customer retention and look at the ROI across both these parameters.
5. Build a "marketing automation tree" across both acquisition & retention and determine when the grid-lock link breaks across various stages of customer interactions.
6. Build a test and control group for various marketing automation campaigns to clearly benchmark success &  incremental lifts - to enable other deparments see the benefits for quick adoption.

To be successful, there must be a sound foundation, definition of the business process across marketing, sales & customer care - alignment across these departments  is critical &  key to exponential adoption of marketing automation across companies.

The right way for marketing automation to grow is to now focus on exponential adoption as it will act as the much needed catalyst for growth in the coming few years.

 

 

How to determine if you want to spend more or less of your marketing budget in 2011?

The year 2010 is coming to an end and the 2011 marketing plans are being drawn out by CMOs.I have often wondered how are budgets allocated year after year by CMOs and marketing managers. In fact, most CMOs use archiac methods of planning marketing spends? 

1. How much did I spend last year?
2. How much is the category or competitive brands spending during the same period?

Is there a better  method to plan and allocate marketing spends? I am sure time has come for us to look at this kind of an analytical framework.

I came across an interesting article on how this can be done and I found it very interesting. Here are some of the higlights of the approach:

Step #1: The first question the author says is for the CMO to determine or test their spend leverage.

 

Step # 2: Most often, the author comments, marketing departments are not in alignment with the overal organizational strategy - on margin improvement, new geography penetration, production innovation or redesign, alternative channel testing etc.. It sounded very familiar to me and it is an important item which CMOs & marketing teams need to revalidate as they build their marketing spend plans.

Step #3: To determine which marketing spends to "defund" based on impact to business over the last year.

Step #4: Then basis the above 3 steps build a strategic prioritization plan.Strategic prioritization means CMOs need to decide which geographies, which segments, which innovations, which programs need more or less monies.

Step #5:  The other interesting point made is that marketers should also look at risk issues around the environment as normally only GDP growth rates are looked at. The issues include terrosim issues, weather etc. which do pose a risk to marketing planning and spending.

 

I believe this is a great framework for a start to look at defining and planning marketing spends in a new year.