Choosing marketing automation: in 4 steps from orientation to selection

Step 2: Involve the right stakeholders

Before you get started with marketing automation, sit down with your key stakeholders. Internally, these are your colleagues in marketing and sales. Develop with them an online strategy and some practical use cases that will serve as the basis for your approach to marketing automation. Make sure they know what you expect of them, and communicate this in a timely manner. Together, organize buy-in from key people within your organization:

1. The marketing director

Depending on the structure of your organization, the marketing director may be the owner or key stakeholder of the project. Involve them as a stakeholder in the capacity of project sponsor. Marketing directors want to understand how marketing automation will deliver more effective and targeted campaigns, and greater (and more measurable) marketing ROI. They are less concerned with the technical capabilities of the system than the rest of the internal team. Implementing marketing automation is a perfect opportunity to work with the marketing director to redefine customer journeys and sales touchpoints, gaining buy-in.

2. The sales director

Sales directors are interested in how marketing automation can help their team achieve sales targets. Work with them to understand what a good lead looks like for the sales team, based on segmentation criteria. This can be based on the prospect's job title, industry, specific behaviors and current interests. Help them understand the impact of implementing customer data-driven marketing. Explain how lead scoring and assessment can save time for the sales team, provide lots of information and improve conversion rates.

3. The general manager/CEO

The size and structure of your organization affects your access to the general manager or CEO. They are unlikely to be involved in the project, but their perception of marketing automation can be a key success factor. They have largely the same motivations as marketing and sales directors; they want the organization to be more customer-centric, and value a clear understanding of the ROI of marketing campaigns. Your chances of getting buy-in from the top boss are greatest when you can demonstrate that marketing automation contributes to two things: increased revenue and customer retention.

4. The IT director

An important stakeholder. Most of your customer data resides in systems managed by IT. This department's goal is to keep systems running operationally secure, fast and efficient. But also increasingly to align technology as closely as possible with business objectives. There's your opportunity to work with the IT manager. Your objective: software that marketing itself can work with, and with which IT is as little burden as possible in day-to-day operations.

Step 3: Planning, budget and return

Make a realistic plan and allocate sufficient budget. Implementing marketing automation software usually takes two to three months. You pay an average of €2,000 - 3,000 per month for a system with features such as e-mail marketing, web and app notifications, text messaging, integration to socials, content personalization, segmentation and basic analytics. Don't be confused by vendors communicating low entry-level subscriptions. Integrating the right data, setting up your platform and onboarding your department has the most impact on a successful integration. The important thing is to be flexible even after that. Marketing Automation is not a handy tool that you 'just set up'.

Do you want next level? Implement immediately a Customer Data (eXperience) Platform - one platform with all relevant customer information from which you tune all marketing promotions based on a fully integrated customer view of buyers or segments. That will run you about €4,000 to €6,000 per month, depending on the size of your organization, number of contacts and volumes.

Much more interesting than the cost, of course, is the return on investment. In our white paper When are you ready for customer data-driven marketing you will find a calculation example, which shows that an average marketing department gets up to 50% cumulative return from marketing automation. That's clear information for your stakeholders!