Broadening the scope of your Marketing Automation platform
Introduction
As the marketing automation environment matures, we’re spending an increasing proportion of our time helping organisations to deliver more value from their existing platforms. Most organisations that we work with are only using a small portion of the capabilities available to them out of the box.
The initial purchase or decision to migrate your marketing automation platform is usually accompanied by gathering a list of requirements and a future-looking wishlist. Implementation time and budget constraints typically mean that the focus of the initial implementation is to get the new platform up and running quickly and the focus is on implementing the essential components to make that happen.
For platform migrations, this may be an “as-is” implementation, which means that you are effectively re-implementing the capabilities from your old platform to your new platform.
This may be the best initial solution, but is also then essential to commit to investing in developing your marketing automation strategy and investing in developing your capabilities post-implementation to make sure you capitalise on the capabilities of your new platform.
With pressure on ongoing BAU campaigns as well as resource and budget constraints, this does not always happen. Rather than developing in-house capabilities and delivering an improved CX, some organisations end up making significant licence and management investments in a platform whilst continuing to use a fraction of its capabilities and ultimately only delivering a small portion of its promised ROI.
A marketing automation platform is designed to automate communications and has a broad spectrum of applications beyond lead generation and nurturing.
Moving beyond acquisition
A marketing automation platform is designed to automate communications and has a broad spectrum of applications across the whole of the customer lifecycle beyond lead generation and nurturing. Customer-centric organisations that are focusing on end-to-end customer and connected experiences are more likely to be able to drive the inter-departmental and strategic cooperation that is required to enable this.
This usually starts with a strategic approach and significant changes to key strategic goals and KPI’s to broaden roles and responsibilities.
We’ve been on a decade-plus journey helping our clients to expand their application of marketing automation, and many of our customers are focused on driving more value from their marketing automation platform. However, few of our clients have successfully expanded their use cases beyond acquisition and nurturing.
Here are some examples:
Conclusion
Delivering timely, relevant messaging is critical to supporting customer experience excellence. In an Experience Economy, where the experiences you deliver are as, or even more, important than the product or service itself, marketing automation can play an important role with internal marketing, and across your customer lifecycle.
If you’d like to find out more about any of these ideas or explore them together, please contact me.
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I’d love to hear from you. If you have any insights you would like to share on this topic, or any questions, please get in touch.
Not sure where to start with your broadended scope?
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