11 things to consider when evaluating Marketing Automation

With all the hype swirling around about Marketing Automation it is easy to get caught in the buzz, or think you are missing out. The fact is… you are.

I am a big advocate of using marketing automation as a tool to support marketing programs like management of demand generation campaigns, improving quality of leads to sales, email blasts, lead nurturing, lead scoring and analytics. Now, Marketing Automation won’t do this alone, it is a larger part of the overall marketing program – but it is one that needs great emphasis and attention.

No longer are B2B marketers just judged on awareness and throwing any lead over the fence and then passing the buck to sales. Today’s marketer needs to demonstrate a greater impact on the pipeline and produce quantifiable ROI. While we still need to make the flashy brochure, be at the right shows, launch targeted webcasts, produce high quality websites, launch social media campaigns, give attention to SEO and SEM, etc… we are being asked to do even more every day.

Marketing Automation tools make this a much easier task. As someone who has used many and recently went through the process of  selecting a new vendor after working with a different platform many years I thought I might share a list of some of the important questions to be thinking about while evaluating vendors and their unique technologies. Some of these will be obvious to some, but I am hoping this might spur a few “a-ha” moments to those of you looking at the multitude of tools available to you today.

11 Things to Consider:

1)    Will you be able to dedicate a full time person to managing this tool? (some tools require a more technical person to administer, while they can be quite powerful be aware of the additional investment)

2)    Do you have the in-house talent to design templates, or will you need to outsource? (some tools make it easier to quickly design landing pages and emails, but note they can only do so much without the proper touch of an experienced design professional)

3)    How accessible do you want this data for your sales team? (some technologies allow almost full visibility with their enhanced CRM integration, but often times at an additional financial cost)

4)    How many licenses will you need? (consider the point above, also,  what level will sales need, what about product management and other teams that send large volumes of emails)

5)    What CRM system are you using? Are you using a CRM system? (many of these tools are best used with a specific CRM system, make sure you make clear up front what tool you are using)

6)    Will you want to host the forms/landing pages on your site, through the automation tool or your CRM? (this is important when considering flow to sales/CRM and ease of form creation)

7)    What other technologies beyond CRM are you using, will they integrate? (pretty straight-forward)

8)    Will they give relevant references? (what customers switched to them from another vendor you are looking at, what other companies are in your industry, your size, your place in the cycle when launching)

9)    How robust a tool do you really need? (will you be using this just as an email blast tool, how many emails will you be sending, will you be scoring leads, will you be creating multi-threaded nurturing campaigns, will you use landing pages, will you integrate your PPC program, do you need advanced integration into CRM, etc)

10)    Is the vendor innovating? (is this a tool with buzz for all the right reasons, do the references look forward to what is coming next or is this a company resting on name recognition)

11)    Have you evaluated enough vendors? (sure, you might fall in love at first site, this happened a couple times in the evaluation process for me – but I wanted to throw you a list of names I evaluated to consider – these cover all ends of the spectrum in terms of price and robustness of the tool: Aprimo, Eloqua, Exact Target,  Genius, Marketo, MarketBright and Silverpop)

This is just a launching pad for the questions that came up in the process, please feel free to add your own in the comment section below.

Is this really my job?

Today I was sitting at my desk and realised how much my life is comparable to the average 12-year-old girl. I regularly check my facebook updates, send out tweets, view of the stats on my YouTube channel, go to Digg and promote articles I find relevant and monitor networking groups on LinkedIn - and I call this my job. If I started listening to the Jonas Brothers I would have to begin questioning what exactly has happened to my life.

It is crazy to think about how my role as a marketer has changed in just the last decade. In my first job I was excited to have email and now I operate almost exclusively in a virtual world. I simply can not imagine myself still being in this field if my sole focus was making brochures and writing white papers (not that I still don't do these things, but you know what I mean.) The thing that is most exciting is figuring out what is coming next. 

Social networking is here to stay and is an effective marketing tool, but only if you use it appropriately and too it's fullest. Having your CEO blog about the new color of his office is not utilizing technology properly. If you are thinking you don't know if social network marketing is for you, know certain aspects may not be - but don't rule out the entire communication vehicle as a whole. As the economy continues to seize and budgets get tighter you need to at least look at everything the net has to offer... I am looking at you B2B companies.

Just because you are not marketing a soft drink to a group of teenagers does not mean that social networking is not for you, it can be. Take a poll of your staff, find out how many people utilize these tools in there everyday lives. As the workforce gets younger these numbers are only going to rise - so it only makes sense to be where your audience lives. 

Despite everything going on in the news - this is still an exciting time to be alive and an exciting time to be a marketer. Marketing is and should be fun - embrace it. Explore the world of blogs and tweets and maybe flip over to ITunes and give the new Jonas Brothers single a listen - it can't be that bad... can it?