Does Marketing Automation live up to the Hype?

Our experience with engineering marketing automation, 8 months later.

 

Many of us already have marketing automation systems in place. For those of you still debating whether to implement a marketing automation tool, here’s a post from last year about our decision process. 

In the end, we went with Hubspot.  One reason we chose them was their excellent Inbound conference  in Boston every September.  (If you are going, let me know.  I’ll buy you a beer). 

Marketing automation was not without challenges at the outset.  The user interface and training tools were excellent, but setting up our pages within their environment was harder than we expected.  We assigned a full-time person to get us going, and it took her several months.  

 

In fairness, a lot of that time was spent mapping out our customer’s journeys and creating conversion pieces in addition to spending time with the marketing automation tool.  One thing about implementing software, it sure points out where you need to focus! Thankfully, this effort has now been reduced to a more manageable level (less than half the time), although feeding the content machine is a never-ending challenge.

The good news is that it has worked.  Lots of prospects have become new customers thanks to our content marketing efforts.  Could we have done all of this without marketing automation?  Yes, but we probably wouldn’t have.  The structure has helped us prioritize and set deadlines for our campaigns, and that has proven very valuable. 

 If any of you are considering implementing a marketing automation tool and you would like to learn more about the process, do not hesitate to post a question or shoot me an email.  I can also be reached by phone, and would be happy to chat with you about it. Looking forward to your thoughts.

Happy marketing,

John