Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
Marketing automation now has a face. The face is on the front of a bucket – a metal bucket.
At the top of the bucket is a lever that glows orange. It seems to beckon to everyone in
within visible range of the bucket’s mischievous smile. Pull my levers and leads will come
out. Now, just where those leads will come from
is probably a bit too much to detail in this brief audio, but when you put all of these
aesthetics together, they form a robot. And the robot’s name is Marketing Automation.
Last week, Marketo launched something called The Definitive Guide to Marketing Automation.
The result is a hundred page opus to marketing automation. What it is, why you need it, how
to buy it, how they use it and much, much more. It’s a great guide, but if you think
that’s all there is, you’re sadly mistaken. Marketo’s Definitive Guide Series has been
going on for years now. They have guides on social media, email marketing, lead nurturing,
scoring and all those now-familiar terms. Wait, what? Are you even doing have these
things already? If you do, you’re in the minority. 85% of the clients we work with
at the start of the engagement are not using those pillars of marketing automation. The
ones that are are just scratching the surface. It’s pretty important to make the buyer
aware of the problem. How do we do this? Anyone in sales, please
answer with me: Expose the pain . Pain is a funny thing. It tells us when something
is wrong, alerts us to threats and notifies us to do whatever we can to make that sensation
stop. If we want to make a case for marketing automation,
we have to call attention to pain. Over the course of a hundred pages, it’s describing
the trends, methods and needs for content driven, right-time buyer management. But mostly,
it’s giving you a blueprint. The ugly truth is a majority of business-to-business
marketing is still in amateur hour. This certainly isn’t a new message, but it really is enforced
when a marketing automation vendor has to put out a hundred page guide telling its target
buyers how much pain they would be in if they actually started marketing like them.
Ultimately, the catalyst for true change is actual pain – felt pain – the kind where
marketers are trying to juggle great content with a great process, but are unable because
they aren’t backed by scalable software. But we can’t really succeed with software
until we know exactly what we don’t want to go back to.
So until then, the smiling bucket remains frustrated. Discouraged, but not down, he
heads back to the drawing board to formulate a new content piece and an even more effective
campaign to translate pain to his buyer. How much he must want to just walk up to the buyer
and simply give him a swift kick – a kick right in the rear to get the pain flowing.
Alas, he cannot, because he’s a floating, smiling bucket without any legs.
To learn more about how to automate your business, check out LeadMD.com today.