Marketing Automation and Marketing Management

Marketing automation and marketing management have an interdependent relationship. Good automation enables strong marketing management.

As a marketing manager, you are tasked with developing and executing marketing programs to deliver on business goals.

To be successful, you need a closed-loop system that can isolate what’s working and what’s not working. Marketing automation software is designed to give you exactly that capability.

Marketo Silver Partner

Focus on KPIs, Dashboards and Revenue Attribution

In helping our clients to improve their marketing management function via marketing automation, our focus is always on metrics, dashboards and revenue attribution:

  • Metrics and KPIs need to be sorted out and agreed upon prior to going live with a marketing automation system. There are hundreds of metrics that you can generate from your martech stack. Get agreement from all parties on the ones you care about. We recommend no more than five marketing KPIs.
  • Next, build out the dashboards you need to report on those KPIs. Salesforce dashboards can do the trick, or many automation platforms now also offer decent dashboards. Alternatively, you can feed the data into your business intelligence tool. It’s a marketing automation integration that we are very familiar with.
  • Finally, avoid downstream arguments on cause and effect by setting up revenue attribution workflows and systems that will end the debate. To be a good marketing manager, you need to know what is driving revenues to Sales. If you can’t do that, there will be a bullseye on both your head and your budget.

Justifying the Investment in Marketing Automation Software

You can make a strong argument that the marketing automation software industry is growing so fast mainly because marketing managers were struggling to access metrics that could tell them (and their bosses) how good of a job they were doing.

We once helped a B2B tech company CMO to get budget for a marketing automation solution by walking the CEO through the CMO’s job description. Point after point, the conversation was “If you are going to hold me accountable for that, I need a system to execute on it and to give us the data to know if we are hitting the goals.”

Choose a Good Marketing Automation Agency

As marketing automation consultants, our goal is to make you look good. That means helping your organization to hits it numbers but also giving you the marketing automation data you need to make the case that things are going well — or giving the intel you need to course correct when things are not.

We invested in a team of experts that can help you with Marketo marketing automation, Salesforce Pardot marketing automation and Hubspot marketing automation.

If upping your game with respect to marketing management is on your to-do list and you feel like marketing automation could be the key to getting to a better place, we’re here to help. Reach out for a gratis consultation.

Additional Marketing Automation Resources

At Walker Sands, we’re all about tapping into the power of marketing automation to help our clients be more successful. Learn more about a few of our marketing automation agency service offerings:

Get in touch