The Marketing Automation Progression Model: Phase 0 – Experimental

In our last blog post we covered the Marketing Automation Progression Model, detailing the phases advancing marketing teams go through when leveling up their marketing strategy. 

For this post, we’ll dive into Phase 0, which often starts before any automation even comes into play: Experimental. 

Often organizations come to us with a vision and a reality check. The vision is marketing dominance, with a clear dotted line showing the influence of a specific marketing campaign to closed business. The reality? Something far murkier. 

Sometimes it’s misaligned sales and marketing teams getting in the way. Other times it’s processes that do not tie into systems across the full MarTech stack. Sometimes it’s simply a lack of clarity around strategic direction or a lack of understanding of the tools and tactics to get you there. 

Whatever the challenge, in order to progress to advanced marketing automation, you need to get your teams aligned under a more efficient, strategic approach. That means your marketing leadership needs to commit to moving beyond batch and blast campaigns, aligning goals with sales leadership, and investing in the technology you need to drive demand.

Once that commitment is there, you’re ready to get started with the experimental phase of the model. You’ll start by outlining 6 items:

1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. Goals
                     Your team needs to align, across marketing and sales, with what success looks like for your marketing automation campaigns.
                  2. Belief in the Possibilities of Automation
                     Automation is going to power your more advanced marketing campaigns, so you’ll need to make sure you have the internal commitment (in budget, time and resources) to get the foundations built.
                  3. Team with Technically Curious Marketers
                     The people behind the process and technology are arguably the most important piece to successful marketing automation. Without the expertise and muscle to drive your strategy and tactics, you won’t be able to bring advanced marketing campaigns to life.
                     
                     
                  4. Campaign Initiatives
                     Start with an idea of what you want to achieve in your marketing programs on a campaign level for more detailed campaign KPIs.
                  5. Content Strategy
                     In order to fuel the success of these campaigns, you’ll need to map out content that aligns to your sales funnel and overall goals.
                     
                     
                  6. CRM Database and/or Target Accounts and Customer Lists
                     Without an audience to target, you’ll have no one to send your campaigns to, so a clean CRM database and/or target accounts list is key.
                     

If you are new to marketing automation or lack marketing automation experience on your team, make sure to secure a partner to navigate through the experimental phase so you can lay a strong foundation for the rest of your marketing automation journey.

In Leadous’ Marketing Automation Progression Model, we support your team through this phase with key services including Campaigns On-Demand and Automation Evaluations to give you the strong foundational components and data driven metrics to build a strong case for the investment in automation that will measure the success of your demand generation efforts and create ROI. 

For more information on our Marketing Automation Progression Model, contact Leadous!