Marketing Automation Strategy

What’s your marketing automation strategy? If you’re still figuring that out, consider chatting with our talented marketing automation consultants.

Strategy and planning support anchor our marketing automation firm services. Strategy development can be broad in scope or can be narrowly focused around a specific initiative or objective. Get in touch to learn more.

Components of a Strong Marketing Automation Strategy

A strong marketing automation strategy will include the following components:

Objectives — Your marketing automation strategy supports your larger business strategy. What does your CEO say are her biggest concerns or opportunities that she thinks Marketing can address? These business objectives should of course feed into your marketing strategy which then informs your marketing automation strategy.
Audience Definition and Prioritization — With the big issues you hope marketing automation will address, it’s time to talk about what audiences need to be influenced in what ways to get a win. Audiences can be individual names, small groups or large groups. You may have pre-existing relationships, or you may be starting out cold. The specifics of who you are targeting and how you prioritize your audience outreach will determine how you structure your strategy and plan for marketing automation. Avoid trying to do too much at once!
Desired Outcomes — Envision the future state you want. After you’ve engaged the audiences, what do you want them to do? Map out approaches to get the desired results and then test out your concepts on individual audience members. There’s no sense scaling things up before you’ve tested that your approach works.
Tactical Execution Plan — Once you’ve got clarity on objectives, audiences and prioritization — coupled with approaches that either have delivered results in the past or that have shown promise via testing — you’re ready to document everything in your marketing automation plan.
Budgets, Timelines and ROI Targets — Bring it all together with a detailed budget and a final workplan. You’re almost done. Don’t forget to define quantitatively and qualitatively what you expect the impact of your marketing automation strategy to be. While it can be risky to articulate before-and-after metrics because there are so many other causal elements involved, we always recommend specific performance targets.
Measurement — It’s critically important to make sure your marketing automation system will deliver the metrics that allow you to judge whether you are getting the results. Don’t even think about starting any campaigns until you get your analytics and reporting running to spec. If you’re struggling with metrics, we’ve got some of the top marketing automation consultants ready to assist.
Feedback and Flexibility — Maybe you’re at one of those rare organizations that doesn’t shift its business priorities every other month (some unfortunate marketers we know would love it if the shifts in prioritizations were that rare). More likely, some business unit won’t hit its numbers or the company will pivot to a new business strategy just as your programs started getting traction on the old strategy. It happens. Build in flexibility into your marketing automation strategy and have frequent check-ins with management to ask: “Have the priorities changed in any way or should we keep moving forward with the current marketing automation strategy?”

Important: Marketing Strategy Before Marketing Automation Strategy

Assuming you’re not one of the many organizations that don’t have a documented marketing strategy, we can help you figure out how marketing automation can be a material and strategic contributor to achieving your marketing goals.

If there’s a lack of consensus on your overall marketing strategy, however, then it’s too early to work on your marketing automation strategy.

Instead, we’d recommend we help you define your B2B marketing strategy via some quick but effective marketing strategy planning sessions.

It’s probably pretty obvious, but it bears repeating: always make sure you define your marketing strategy before you start thinking about a marketing automation strategy.

Otherwise, it begs the questions: what exactly are you automating and why?

Choose the Right Marketing Automation Strategy Partner

We’d love to help you decide what’s next and set a course for world-class marketing automation.

We’ve helped countless clients map out that journey and make it to the finish line, with hundreds of millions of automation-powered revenue dollars to prove it.

Let’s move beyond the theoretical and discuss your marketing automation strategy in earnest. Please reach out to our team to start the conversation.