Every CMO faces the important and critical task of choosing the right marketing tools in an environment that includes digital marketing, big data, and the need for personalised and interactive conversations with customers.
So how should a CMO choose a marketing automation tool that could make their marketing budget perform better?
The right questions are essential when selecting your marketing automation system.
The MarTech landscape has a litany of tools that promise to make life easier for marketers. If we focus on tools that help with lead management for new customers and usage expansion for existing customers, some of the key considerations when choosing a marketing automation tool are:
- Does information, data and reporting flow both to and from existing sales and marketing systems?
- Once these systems and data is integrated, what added decision making capability or visibility will you have?
- Is your organisation set up to take advantage of the tool you choose?
- What type and how will data cleansing and migration take place?
These are questions that only the marketing team can answer and have little to do with the tender process; these are the questions that few organisations can answer until after they select and install a marketing automation tool.
Perhaps the biggest, and most important question to ask is “How will this system increase my marketing ROI?”
Our clients are constantly grappling with several systems that overlap and underlap (don’t quite reach all the data), the need to prove the value of marketing, using all the data they have access to in the best possible way, and bringing together all the channels they use.
The other factor to consider when selecting a marketing automation is the skill in the marketing, sales and customer service teams. Sometimes the system and what it delivers can dictate which skills are needed in the team and can either provide an opportunity to re-skill for the team or become a useful hook in becoming a destination employer. Sophisticated marketing talent want to work with sophisticated tools.
So the question we often ask is not “which CRM do you need”, but “which CRM can your organisation get the most value from?”
About the Author
Hanzel Nillo is Customer Engagement & Partner Lead for DCA’s technology agnostic Data Services Division. Hanzel’s strategic partnerships and breadth of experience across best of breed automation tools ensures DCA’s clients receive the right solution to optimise their marketing success.
