Three Things CMOs Should Never Stop Thinking About

By Brian Reilly, VP of Marketing Automation Services, Harte-Hanks

CMOs have a lot on their plates. One thing that’s most often top-of-mind is marketing automation. The overriding consideration is ensuring that marketing automation is a good investment both for the organization and its stakeholders. To help keep the focus on what’s most critical, I suggest breaking the umbrella concept of marketing automation into these very familiar areas: process, resource management and technology.

Process

In real estate it’s location, location, location. In marketing it’s all about process, process, process. How does your organization get the “big things” done? What processes and governance guidelines are in place for managing events, email campaigns and lead generation efforts? To ensure marketing automation does what it’s meant to do, an organization needs to establish processes for very specific areas, namely marketing data, program implementation and metrics.

Marketing data — Consider the current state of your marketing data. Where does it come from? Who has access to it? Is there a consolidated view of the customer? If so, how robust is that view? In what ways can it be improved? Having a comprehensive understanding of the state of data is job #1 in making marketing automation work.

Program implementation — Think about the contact you have with customers and prospects. Who is responsible for marketing program strategy and implementation? Which programs touch contacts and with what frequency does outreach occur?

Metrics — You can’t improve upon what you don’t measure. Rationalize and standardize metrics. Strive to build a consistent view across the organization so there is an understanding of key metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs) and how goals will be met.

Resource Management

Finding the right people to make your marketing automation investment worthwhile can be a constant challenge. In most large organizations, there are two types of marketers: strategic and tactical. As a leader, you will find a good number of strategic people, a few of whom may also excel at being tactical. Very often, however, these skills are divided into two job functions. Even the most tactical people are not marketing tools proficient, although that capability may exist within pockets of the organization.

The point here is that, as a marketing leader, you need to understand where your strategic, tactical and technical capabilities lie. In order for a marketing automation effort to be successful, you must have a map of what resources are available so that you can fill the gaps and leverage all resources to champion the technology.

Technology

When it comes to selecting marketing automation technology, it is important to do your homework up front. I’ve seen too many cases where the wrong tool for the job was selected, which can be an expensive and time-consuming proposition. To avoid falling in love with the first drag-and-drop tool put before you, come prepared with a detailed list of goals and objectives as well as KPIs that must be delivered to executives from the data within the tool.

Be sure you have a thorough understanding of extensibility, the migration path on and off old tools and ease-of-use for the majority of the work your team will do in the tool as well as the minority. Once the technology is in place, revisit requirements and outcomes early and often. In today’s SaaS world, it is easier than ever to stop the bleeding if a vendor and/or tools don’t perform as expected.

The power of marketing automation can be a transformative force to an organization. By keeping your finger on the pulse of the areas of process, resources and technology, you’ll better ensure that you derive maximum value from your investment.

Brian Reilly is VP of Marketing Automation Services for Harte-Hanks. Harte-Hanks, Inc. is a worldwide, direct and targeted marketing company that provides direct marketing services and shopper advertising opportunities to a wide range of local, regional, national and international consumer and business-to-business marketers. Contact Reilly at (512) 695-5267 or via e-mail at brian_reilly@harte-hanks.com. Visit Harte-Hanks at http://response.harte-hanks.com/MOST.