Why Marketing Automation Failed the First Time, and Why This Time Is Different
Matt Williams, a Golden-Glove winning second baseman, was a promising batter but couldn’t hit a curveball. He had potential but the wrong strategy. What did he do? He revamped his swing-and dramatically improved free ceo and cfo email leads his batting average, not to mention his salary.
Chipper Jones was the star third baseman for the Atlanta Braves, but he knew the importance of versatility. So to expand what he could offer the team he switched to the outfield-and may have saved his job. He’s still playing for the Braves today, and he’s back at third base by the way.
What do these players have in common? They recognized the changing nature of their industry and did something significant to maintain their value, with significant success as result.
Just as baseball has evolved, requiring new strategies and techniques to stay competitive, marketing is also undergoing a dramatic upheaval, free ceo and cfo email leads driven by the Internet and the rise of marketing accountability. In turn, this will lead to new players and strategies for success in marketing automation.
Marketing upheaval
The Internet has forever changed the way we interact with and market to customers. Web sites, email campaigns, Webinars and pay-per-click campaign management are just a few examples of this, not to mention blogs, podcasts, and user-generated content. You won’t find any of these tactics referenced in classic marketing textbooks from just a handful of years ago. But they’re all valuable channels for interacting free ceo and cfo email leads with potential customers, and they can’t be ignored.
Another fundamental change to marketing departments is a growing call for accountability. Marketing is a significant expense for many companies (a good rule of thumb is between five and 10 percent of total sales), but unlike manufacturing, IT, etc., traditional marketing expenses are loosely structured and hard to tie to revenue-which is why many executives think of marketing as a cost center, not an investment. And that makes marketing budgets hard to justify.
Enter marketing automation free ceo and cfo email leads
When any market experiences significant change, companies spring up to provide solutions. For that reason I expect we’ll see a rebirth of the marketing automation industry in the near future. This time around, however, things will be different, because it’s a whole new ball game out there.
As a category, marketing automation first emerged in the mid-’90s in response to the explosion of data available about customers, the emergence of online channels, and the need to keep track of it all.
Marketing automation was first thought of as an extension of database marketing, and it later fell under the CRM umbrella. These solutions promised to bring companies closer to their customers, automate and streamline free ceo and cfo email leads the marketing department, and deliver the holy grail of complete marketing accountability.
Unfortunately, while that initial promise had promise, the majority of these solutions failed to deliver-and most of the early marketing automation vendors ended up being acquired or shut down. Why? What went wrong with marketing automation?
WHAT WENT WRONG?
Strike one
In a stroke of irony, most first-generation marketing automation companies didn’t understand their own target audience. What do I mean by that? Early marketing automation companies didn’t understand that free ceo and cfo email leads marketers aren’t techie people. The solutions these companies built were delivered using on-premise software and were extremely difficult to install and integrate. They also required ongoing IT support, which is rarely available to marketing departments.