Marketers today are fending off challenges from all fronts. Expectations have never been higher, and our job has never been more complex. We have to manage multiple programs across an ever-expanding network of channels. We have to fulfill constantly evolving objectives. We have to remain bold, creative and responsive. And, we have to accomplish all this while keeping a careful, trained eye on spend.

Taken altogether, these divergent (yet often competing) factors might seem like a recipe for certain disaster. How can any marketing team survive –let alone succeed –when constantly battling potent challenges like these? Fortunately, marketers do have one powerful ally in their corner: technology.

Recent advances in marketing automation enable marketers to regain control of today’s complicated marketing environment. Essentially, automation empowers us to convert raw facts into actionable insight. How? Because once we automate the science of marketing, we can:

• Drive focus and early value. Automation allows us to extract relevant information from the constant deluge of digital data.
• Build measurement into the process. You can’t manage what you don’t measure, and automation helps develop metrics and benchmarks.
• Show results. These days, accountability is key. Automation enables deeper analytics which in turn, help demonstrate ROI.
• Collaborate. Once aggregated and analyzed, data is easier to communicate and share.
• Innovate. Automation creates the awareness required to optimize future campaigns.

Despite this long list of benefits, however, many marketers are reluctant to embrace automation. Hi-tech analytics aren’t necessarily our strong suit; and typically, marketers shy away from advanced statistics and obscure computations. Plus, we recognize that automation has its limits. We know it’s impossible to automate critical marketing fundamentals, such as positioning, amazing content and killer strategy, so it’s tempting to downplay contributions automation can make in other areas. Can automation platforms fit into an established workflow? Will they really make a difference to me as a creative, independent thinker?

Absolutely! Automation provides plenty of opportunities to make our already tough job easier. For starters, we can automate routine creative reviews and reports. We can also automate “lights-out” conversational dialogues online, as well as progressive and real-time profiles of consumers and buyers. In more general terms, it’s time for marketers to move beyond managing provisional processes, ad hoc applications and “taped-together” technologies. We can then simplify the complex –not only for ourselves, but for our stakeholders, our customers and our shareholders, too. In addition, we need to recognize that building out more silos and placing “band aids” on top of small wounds that later turn into bigger pains is dangerous. Marketing silos and improvised solutions make collaboration and efficiency difficult, if not impossible. They restrict the optimization that is vital to success in today’s multifaceted marketing environment.

“While marketers have a wide range of automation choices today, the lack of integration among marketing technologies is a barrier to insight across the integrated pipeline,” explains Jonathan Block, Vice President and Service Director at SiriusDecisions. “True sales and marketing integration will blur the boundaries between systems and roles, but technology will never demonstrate sufficient ROI without a focus on skills and processes.”

Collecting data from the digital fire hose isn’t difficult. What’s difficult is making sense of that data and building cross-functional awareness. Marketing automation applications can gather statistics about visitors, prospects, leads and opportunities, and often add input from the sales process, too. By improving access to this data and sorting out the signal from the noise, automation streamlines business processes and provides marketers with insights to improve their go-tomarket campaigns.

Enhance sales and marketing synergy

Did you know that as many as 80% of B2B leads passed on to Sales are dropped? In addition, 90% of marketing collateral is unused. Fortunately, marketing automation platforms can help resolve this type of sales and marketing disconnect. By enabling effective collaboration and analytics, automation helps sales and marketing take a more holistic view of each prospect, providing actionable intelligence that can help convert a website visitor, for example, into a qualified lead, and then into a sale. In fact, a recent study by Aberdeen Group revealed that when top performing companies align sales and marketing functions, nearly half (47 percent) of the sales forecasted pipeline are generated from marketing sourced leads, and the firms produce an average 20 percent increase in top line revenue.

Other research by Aberdeen Group found that 71 percent of “Best-in-Class” organizations use an automated lead management solution, and 63 percent saw measurable ROI as a result of the investment. The study examined 205 organizations, where the Leaders represent the top 30 percent achieving the highest performance in revenue growth, lead to sales conversion and click through rates.

Automation can also help companies strategically segment their customers. Results from Gartner, Inc. show that segmenting on factors such as business environment, psychographics and other demand drivers (triggered events, e.g.) –in addition to the typical demographics – can dramatically improve conversion rates and qualified lead volume.

“Our research shows some dramatic examples. One technology provider grew revenue from $2 million to $100 million in five years after implementing its segmentation strategy, which initially started with regulatory affairs managers in Fortune 100 pharmaceutical companies,” says Richard Fouts, research director at Gartner. “Today, the company owns the document management market in pharmaceuticals, and it has secured impressive market share in other key verticals by replicating the segmentation approach it took in pharma. Another case study showed how a software company quadrupled its lead volume within two quarters of operationalizing its segmentation model."

At Aprimo, we have seen how even modest investments to manage and automate marketing process can yield significant business benefits:

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Research from Aprimo’s consulting partner, Accenture, confirms these results, demonstrating increased productivity, reduced costs and more effective resource allocation as a consequence of enhanced marketing effectiveness and efficiency:

[Download PDF for charts]

Leaders

Automation and process integration now play a pivotal role in both B2C and B2B marketing efforts at Eastman Kodak Company. A few years ago, the company realized that its marketing initiatives were fragmented across too many incompatible systems and processes. Ultimately, that meant costs were too high and too much time was wasted on repetitive processes that couldn’t be shared. Kodak updated its systems with a solution that allows the company to execute integrated, interactive, multichannel campaigns worldwide, while effectively managing its marketing spend.

“Our main goal was lead generation for B2B, but we also needed to understand what campaigns worked and what didn’t work. The ability to share data among all the marketers to understand how well a campaign worked and what to do next was key for us,” explains Mike Malec, eBusiness manager at Kodak.

Automation allows Kodak marketers to engage customers through the lengthy, nurturing campaigns that are typical in today’s B2B marketplace. Plus, it provides consistent, reliable channels of communication throughout Kodak’s CRM community.

“We’re less focused on the tools, and we’re more focused on the marketing,” Mike says. “We can share ideas. We can share campaigns that we run. We can share data to understand how well a customer received a campaign or an event, such as a webinar or trade show, for example. We do a lot more sharing now then we have ever done in the past, and management now knows where to get the data. It saves a lot of time and a lot of frustration among marketers and management in terms of getting data and in terms of seeing how well you’re doing at any point throughout the year.”

Automation also helps International Speedway Corporation (ISC) reach out to its 70 million NASCAR fans. In an event business, with an audience now spread across dozens of channels, ISC recognizes that these days, every touch point is critical.

“Being able to make sure that the marketing is on target and that it’s keyed into what every consumer wants to get is so important in our marketing,” says Jim Cavedo, senior director of relationship marketing at ISC. “We have to make sure that every communication, every sales message is right on target and is the right message to the right person at the right time on the right channel.

As Jim sees it, successful marketing now depends on aggregating and analyzing data so that you can understand consumer trends and then apply those insights to your go-to-market campaigns.

“You really have to start investing in analytical thinking. I really believe that that’s the future of marketing,” he explains. “Having analytical marketing minds who can really think about that data and understand the value of post campaign insight and research and really look at that to help drive future decisions –that’s critical.

Clearly, it’s time for marketers, whether B2B or B2C, to band together to redefine processes and innovate internal marketing systems by utilizing an automation platform -- just as other key business functions have already done. Automation helps marketers to make the most of online marketing campaigns while accelerating their marketing productivity. It allows you to simplify everything from process and design to brand, so that you can focus on optimizing business outcomes, rather than marketing program survival.

“Marketers today are asked to run more programs across more media against more objectives-- with the same or fewer resources. Marketing automation can make this possible, but only if it’s implemented in ways that both save time and measure program results,” concludes David Raab, and author of The Raab Guide to Marketing Automation. “The importance of saving time is obvious: it lets marketers do more things. The importance of measurement is longer term: it lets marketers identify the most valuable programs so they can do the right things.”