Considering #marketing automation? Make sure you are ready.

Wanna talk through how an insight like this can impact your company?

Hubspot, Marketo, Eloqua, Silverpop and a host of others have brought an amazing marketing technology to fuel your business development efforts. The tech is awesome. A SaaS way to program who in your database receives what message at what time based on their profile and their engagement with other messages or where they are in the funnel. It’s a way to be in front of them…even when you aren’t in front of them. Absolutely transformational. And most of the time…it won’t work for the commercial finance business. At least not yet.

Before investing in marketing automation…and it’s a significant investment to most…here are some of the reasons it fails today for most commercial finance companies:

Data.

For this tech to work, you need very good to great CRM data on your marketplace. And for some reason this is an Achilles heel for the commercial finance business. You don’t just need contact info, you need to understand how to segment them based on sales stage, need and more. Having data like this takes money, time and more than that it takes a cultural focus on building the market data as a critical business asset for growth. Having this culture dramatically improves the rate of success of marketing automation technology

Content.

If the software automagically drives the right message to the right person at the right time…what are the messages? What content are you actually sending out at each of these touch points that really connect with the audience. After they connect with the first message, what is the next message…and the next. What messages do customers get versus prospects? It takes a truckload of content to power a marketing automation engine and just when you get there, you need to refresh it all. Who’s going to build all that content? Typically takes 2-3 new content pieces per week…minimum…to power an effective marketing automation machine. Most commercial finance teams have no real staff or budget to dedicate to it.

Strategy.

Just because someone is a prospect, doesn’t mean they all should get the same message. Developing a strategy of content development, data management has to live at the outset and the ongoing operation of marketing automation technology. “Strategy” requires smart people thinking through the challenge and continuing to think through the challenge as the business development landscape evolves. And smart people cost money. Whether your own or outside experts, it takes a dedicated force to make keep the strategy focused. Take a look at this…

We think the tech is really wonderful. And these companies are very cool. But if you don’t have the infrastructure you could pay big bucks for a platform and only use 10% (or less) of its brain only to abandoned the effort for lack of ROI. There are solutions between “almost no marketing” and “marketing automation”. And once you’re ready, marketing automation will change your business development effort in a very positive way. If you ever wanna talk about all these cool-sounding marketing ideas…give us a holler.

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