Whoever among marketing professionals has not come across marketing automation is …

… like me a few weeks ago. Ok, I have heard this and that, but after the last week I see things differently. I am actually a sort of ashamed of being so late to this game, especially since the principles have been there for a long time already. A further reason for my shame is the claim I’ve been putting out for a long time, that is that I am the guy you come to when you want to marry your marketing to finance. There goes my reputation, however it does not mean there’s nothing to be said about marketing automation.

If marketing once used to be creating “brands that lead to sales”, this is middle word “lead” is now front and center. Marketing automation is the missing link. It takes you from prospecting to leads, to nurturing leads, to warming them up, and when they’re ready hand them over to sales. Well, it does not end there, you nurture every customer from there-on, cross-sell, up-sell, and what-not.

Isn’t that what CRM used to promise?

It is. But it never delivered. The new breed of software now known as marketing automation integrates google-analytics grade of insight into tracking of each or any customers.

Example: I invited a vendor of such solutions to a meeting. He showed me what kind of data they’re gathering for themselves and their clients. To make it relevant I wanted to see what he has about me. There I was. I receive a forwarded mail for an event that he was organising for a week later. The forwarded mail lead me to the registration site. It took me 33 seconds to look a two pages and in this time I already applied. And so on.

For some people the records were screens and screens of data. Naturally there’s the analytic view of any customers or customers’ groups interactions as well as any granular point of what was going on. And it all starts with cookies.

Why is all this important?

If you don’t want to know how your marketing relates to sales, it’s not important for you. But then maybe you should find yourself a different profession. For all others, now’s the dawn of the era where every one of you will have to know the strange acronyms like CAC, CLV, RPM and other beastly animals of the marketing zoo.

Want to start somewhere?

Check out Hubspot, Salesforce, Eloqua, Marketo, or locally in Slovenia check out FrodX, Agilcon, ProGMBH and maybe a few others. And yeah, let me know about your successes. Or failures. All those matter. To me and many others.