After reading the findings in the 2016 B2B Marketing Automation report from Smart Insights, we realised B2B marketers were still afraid to push the boundaries of marketing automation. In short, most were only using their marketing automation platform for email marketing purposes. Let me set the scene for you…

Your managing director has demanded that you achieve another 60% growth in sales in the following quarter. You, the overworked and understaffed marketing manager, panic. You go into what we call “campaign brain”, developing a set of objectives and briefs that cover every possible marketing angle you can think of.

You then divide this by what your team can do and how much you can automate. You’ll probably only automate the email campaign, you don’t have time to do anything else. The rest will often be thrown to an agency (social media, lead generation, events, PR…etc.) All so you can deliver the impressions, traffic, and conversions that are expected of you.

Three months later, you use a wide range of unaligned monitoring tools to try and analyse the results of your campaign. Except you’re manually reporting on everything because your marketing methods were not all housed under one roof. You can’t attribute what happened in the buyer journey past the first and last click because none of it marries up.

This isn’t the way.

Instead of wasting your marketing budget on media buying, content production, agency relationships and reporting processes, you need to be focusing on your strategy. More importantly, how it can align with your marketing automation software. Once you have this in place, you can take on the machine that is marketing automation. You’ll be able to start using proactive, rather than reactive, marketing techniques.

Social media, tracking which website visitors come to your landing pages based on which emails they interacted with….everything. It CAN be reported on from within your marketing automation platform. Because your platform is designed to encompass all marketing activities, not just your email.

Don’t be the lazy marketer who automates campaigns that could go through a standard email marketing provider. It’s time to start using your marketing automation platform to its full potential.