When I started blogging around 3 years ago, I made a promise (to myself) to never blog about my day job — with the sole reason of never crossing the boundaries (well, sorta). However, it was a bad call, not talking about what you do makes the job even harder. So, here I am, breaking the promise (I’m also running out of fresh ideas).
Marketing Automation is the science of bringing “order” to the creative chaos, which is Marketing organization, with the help of business processes, technologies, tools, systems. The high order bit of Marketing Automation is making Marketing organization accountable for dollars spent across various campaigns and it’s effectiveness across channels, segments and Business Units. The low order bit is the automation to allow the revenue generated by Sales to be tracked at the campaign source.
Why do we need Marketing Automation? The rhetoric is simple — Marketing organizations have traditionally been a “cost center”. The organization gets a percentage of revenue to spend (mostly at will!). Whatever money is allocated and spend on various campaigns and programs are never efficiently reported back.
Even if there are reports, they mostly live in spreadsheets or in vendor systems and yeah, every owner of a major marketing campaign or a program has it’s own report on it’s outcome. The outcome — Every quarter the divisional and regional bosses running like kids around the house to organize the data for their moment of truth. This gets repeated every quarter. The goal of the automation is to track the progress and the ROI of every dollar being spent on awareness, brand building, demand generation and market development.