What's on your Digital Marketing Roadmap?

One of the biggest pain points we keep hearing from Digital Marketers is the need to be exposed to all the relevant technologies available regarding Marketing Automation - and more importantly, how does an organization get started with such a complex topic? Let’s look at the big picture first. There are over 1000 different technology platforms that are classified as Marketing Automation. In short, companies need a platform or series of platforms that will do the following in the realm of lead management:

• Identify Net New Contacts
• Show the Demand for Contacts
• Create Campaigns for those contacts utilizing forms, landing pages and e-mails to present relevant information and/or offers
• Score those contacts to rank their likelihood to close
• Reports the results and/or integrates with CRM

A major platform such as Pardot will do elements of all of this, but there are lots of add-ons that can bolster its power.

This post isn’t about exposing you to all of these technologies, but rather to introduce the idea of making it someone’s responsibility to be an expert on all of them.
That person might be your internal administrator or it could be your Digital Marketing partner. Task them with identifying the right technologies associated with those five bullet points and putting together a road map for how your company will get started with Marketing Automation and continue to bolster its power through the next 2-3 years.

Also, you don’t need ALL the technology to get moving - you just need one of them. My Project Manager at Accenture used to say two things that have stayed with me. The first was, “Don’t let Perfect be the enemy of Good.” What she meant was that companies get so caught up in wanting everything to be perfect that it paralyzes them from getting started. Start simple. Perhaps an e-mail campaign using existing contacts. The second quote was “We’re Digital Marketers, not Heart Surgeons where the smallest mistake could be fatal.” Mistakes happen and companies need to get them out of the way. If you start with a Pilot Program or small dataset, the worst thing that happens is your company learns a lot and now has experience to go to the next level - and everyone will survive.

The opportunity cost of not doing these two elements is that your Marketing efforts will not be generating net new leads for sales teams. Marketing is defined as the action or business of promoting and selling products or services. Ask yourself - are you really doing that?