Hello {Firstname} – how small automations create big differences in B2B marketing.
In what was a really fun chat with a group of about 40 leading B2B marketing community members of Australia, I laid out my rationale for why small automations shouldn’t be ignored, and provided 11 examples of what they could look like (not exhaustive!)
Small automations just don’t get the love they need.
- Marketing automation as often promoted by vendors can often be big ticket items that look bold, and come with big results. This is usually accompanied by big costs.
- Marketing automation as promoted by speakers at events are often complete revisions of whole programs of work within a given business. Sure they seem impressive, but again they require big visions, big efforts, big results, and big political power.
But the compounding power of marketing automation is often hidden, not celebrated, or actually just never seen for what it is.
Big is not always possible to do due to budgets being cut, resourcing constraints, problems with software not being up to scratch, and almost always teams are overcapacity and under available to take on new work.
Plus – marketing teams aren’t the big dog. They are usually the tail that can’t wag the dog.
There are actually so many things that you can do to provide great value to a business just using the possibly limited platform that you’re using right now.
Here’s the structure of the talk, outlining how I came to that point:
Bots To Beat Boring BAU
- If you can automate tasks try and do it. Raise a good percentage of your daily work from business as usual to higher order, higher value work for your company.
Is it Worth it?
- Small tasks drive value over the long term.
- Marketers are often seen as a cost centre to a business, so articulate the value using a pretty easy automation value calculator, and determine how much time to spend on your automation.
So Many Small Automations
- Triggers when deals change
- Checking duplicates
- Removing expired data
- Removing unsubscribes and dead records
- Validate data automatically
- Standardise data across multiple systems feeding your martech platforms
- Real-time data cleaning/enrichment
- Using the Yeah/Nah method of gathering preferences
- Introduce progressive profiling
- Hack a Pause and Play method to reduce unsubscribes
- Bring in content abandonment flows
There are no doubt a heap more small automations that can provide value within a business, and they don’t all have to be about sending a communication (as you can see above, fundamentals in marketing are often about data data data).