Now that you are interested in Marketing Automation, what is next?

Now that you know that Marketing Automation (MA) will alleviate your challenging tasks in one way or another, how do you go about convincing your management to adopt some sort of MA solutions?

1. Structure a plan on integrating on your existing marketing campaigns with requirements of the sales department. Get coporate buy-ins from them department by showing them how they could benefit from having a more efficient marketing platform, and how they could increase their sales from automated lead generation program.
2. Review the various marketing automation platforms available in your region. Starting with an online MA platform, like Hubspot, may not be a bad idea. They provide the main benefit of ease of implementation, and does not require high investments in development and hardware like servers and networks.  And they usually come with online training that helps you get familiar with their tools easily and quickly. On the other hand, they may not be able to provide customized MA solutions (that are tailored to your organization) that more sophisticated programs like Marketo and Oracle Eloqua could provide.
3. Evaluate your current marketing funnel and adapt it to fit the processes withthin the selected MA platform. Starting with your goals, like branding or lead generation, develop plans around the platform and how it is able to assist you in nuturing your target market segments into sales prospect.
4. Test your campaigns and improve your marketing funnel using the MA platform. Although it would be ideal to get the desired results within your first time implementing MA solutions, this is hardly the case. As every organization is different, it is difficult to find a single solution that fits all company requirements. However, with the MA tools, we have more data that we can analyze and discover trends. The idea is to keep testing, expand on what went right and change what went wrong.