Thank you Mel for such a warm introduction.

I’m not sure how many of you might be interested in marketing automation, but I am fascinated with it.  There are so many vendors that are coming up with new and exciting software platforms that streamlines effective 1 to 1 marketing.  I believe marketing automation is going to change the way we think about sales and marketing in the next few years.

So why is marketing automation such a big deal?

Simple.  It turns marketing into a…..Repeatable, Predictable Process.  Take a second and let those three words digest.   I think they are very important.

When marketing people run a campaign, it’s traditionally done as a ‘batch and blast.’ That is, a big group of suspects, prospects or customers are delivered a message all at once and we hope that our message hits a few people at the right time.

There are a number of problems with this old approach:

1. Messaging takes very little or no account of an individual prospect’s interests, behavior, and timing. Our messages are practically begging to end up in the trash.
2. It’s ‘One Size Fits All’. Your most interested and highest-value prospects are getting the same treatment as the window shoppers. Hopefully sales can sort the wheat from the chaff, but is that the best use of their time?
3. It’s a recipe for marketing overwhelm. If a few campaigns are successful, marketers end up with more and more ‘old stuff’ to manage, and less time for creating the next winning strategy.

With good marketing automation software, there’s a more effective way.

One of the big ideas here is to turn marketing into a repeatable, predictable, automated set of processes that’s managed not on a project-by-project basis but as an always-on system that is monitored, adjusted, and optimized in real-time.

Lead generation will always require some initial net-casting, of course. You have to run an ad or send a direct mail piece to begin to fill the pipeline. But what happens next is the critical piece. How does each individual prospect experience your brand? Is messaging timely and relevant?

With marketing automation software, you can build processes that are activated individually for each contact. So, instead of blasting out a weekly or monthly e-mail to everyone on your list, each prospect will receive a communication that makes sense for them according to their stage in the buying cycle – all automatically.

At the end of the day, the marketing department stops looking like a publishing house (with everyone rushing around to meet the next deadline). Instead, marketers become optimizers. They develop marketing processes that run automatically. They test new processes against old ones, constantly improving effectiveness over time. The end result is that the company is left with a highly-valuable marketing asset that can be used and invested in confidently.