Don’t Buy Marketing Automation

Jeff;
Great video – such essential advice and so often ignored. You are so right: without a Marketing Strategy and detailed implementation plan, Marketing Automation is just another way to spend money without gaining much benefit.

But I would take it one step further. Inbound Marketing and Marketing Automation, or what I call Inbound Marketing Automation (IMA), requires 3 elements to be in place before you even switch on the tools:
1) A proper marketing strategy
2) A formal process description of how you will run your IMA system
3) A detailed implementation plan covering all of the subjects you cited in your video.

The marketing strategy may sound old fashioned for something like Inbound Marketing, but it’s still essential that you have defined your product/service offering, the target markets, ideal prospects and your competition, and the other usual topics such as pitch, promotion, price and place.

The formal process specification should ideally be written around the Continuous Process Improvement strategy of, “Think, Plan, Do, Measure and Repeat”. In the Think stage, for example you define your objectives for installing an IMA system, as well as set the metrics by which you will measure its success. And in the planning stage for the first iteration (the first Do and Measure phases), you create your detailed implementation plan which covers your Keyword Research and implementation plan (its effects on your website), your social media marketing plan, your content design (which pieces are aimed at which prospect and when in the their buying cycle), and the content which will be used in, as you called it, your drip email campaigns storylines.

It may sound very academic, but readers who want to learn more are welcome to read our formal process descriptions on, “How to run a Social Media Marketing Campaign”, and, “How to run a B2B Twitter Campaign”, both of which can be found on our blog at http://www.inbound-marketing-automation.ca/blog. Just search for them…

And coming soon is a formal process description specifying the Process for use in operating your IMA system itself.

Hope this helps…

Jeff,

Love the sentiment and the passion, but I’d like to throw in a couple of thoughts.

Yes, I agree implicitly with the need for content and a plan, however, that need doesn’t have much to do with marketing automation. Content and a customer engagement plan are all critical to how you get build awareness and get someone into the top of the funnel, but not about (as directly) what you do with them afterwords.

The main thrust of marketing automation is the rapid maturation of an identified lead through the sales process. There are some businesses (opensource for one) that don’t struggle with generating leads, but qualifying them and driving them through a process. For these folks I’d argue very much that marketing automation is the right play.

One small plug in regards to the “Don’t Buy Marketing Automation” – have you seen the new offering from Loopfuse? They are offering it for free now for up to 2,500 subscribers. Worth checking out if you haven’t seen it before.

Keep up the good work,

- Tewks
http://www.themarketingmojo.com