A marketer’s day is filled with tasks and steps to complete. Your goals for all of these things you are doing is to help your company:
- Expand your brand
- Expand your reach
- Get people to know about you
When I ask marketers what the goals of all of the things they are doing are, they usually give me answers like the ones above. I have to then dig in with them to really get the answers to why these things are things they want to do. Usually it comes back to growth. The function of marketing is meant to support sales by generating leads. You as a marketer are meant to provide leads to your sales team so your company can hit revenue goals.
There are tasks that you must do day to day to help to generate leads for the sales team. These tasks can take time and take a lot of work. Sometimes things are harder than they need to be. More tedious than they need to be. Sometimes you have to rely on a designer or someone who can code to help you. That must be frustrating.
I hate having to lean on people to help me to do my job.
When I think about the terms “marketing automation” I don’t think we really are using those terms in the right way. Marketing automation should really be automating all of your marketing efforts or as many of them as you can. As the marketing world talks about marketing automation today- it mostly means automating email marketing. We should change the definition to include all the ways that you could automate parts of your marketing efforts with software.
When you look into software to help you to automate your marketing you should ask yourself what you really want out of a software? Do you just want to automate email or are you looking to automate many parts of your marketing efforts?
If you actually broke apart all of the different players in the marketing automation space and you looked at what tools in their software actually helped a marketer to automate parts of their marketing I would think a lot of tools wouldn’t have what they are actually looking for.
Tip to marketers looking for software to help them to do their job: Think about what you do day to day and think about the steps you take to do something…take those different activities and think about how a marketing platform can help you to do those things easier than you do now.
