There is a growing buzz around marketing automation and the results it can deliver for businesses. But what few people realize is that effective implementation, and subsequent success, is determined by many more factors than the technology alone. There are a number of key foundations that need to be in place first, to support the roll-out of a marketing automation platform.

Marketing Transformation Before Marketing Automation

Don’t try to fix a broken process with marketing automation - it won't work. A complete overhaul of your marketing strategy is necessary to achieve the results you want.

Just to give an example, many marketing teams struggle to provide the sales team with good quality leads through their marketing efforts, and a lot of the time, the handing over of leads to sales is all manual (due to not having an integrated email and CRM system), which is obviously very time consuming and inefficient. Many of these marketing teams then look at automation as a solution to their lead problems. WRONG!

Process is Key to Success

In order to convert more leads, you first need a solid process in place to attract more leads, which doesn’t mean buying email lists. That doesn’t count as lead generation – it’s called spam!

Automation will certainly make things easier, and will improve efficiency regardless of your foundation. But this alone will not allow you to achieve your overall goals as a business.

Related Class: Demand Generation: Sales and Marketing Alignment

In order for your marketing automation to really flourish, your content must be valuable to your audience, highly personalized and targeted to an engaged database. Sending your database irrelevant or uninteresting content is just wasted time. Get your content right first by finding out what your customers want, and delivering just that.

Hunch Based Marketing

At most companies, the marketing department is working from an outdated playbook when it comes to their marketing efforts - back when sales was still in control of the buying process.

Batch and blast, hunch based marketing is a thing of the past. Highly targeted, persona based marketing is the future!

Related Class: Building a Digital Persona to Drive Strategy

If you want to utilize marketing automation effectively, you need to ensure that your content is aimed at the right people. The only way to do this is through clearly defining your ideal buyer persona(s).

Your buyer persona, in layman's terms, is basically a stereotype (so to speak) of what your typical customer looks like. You can read more about buyer personas and how to create one in this blog.