Adopting a new marketing tool, with all its impressive high-tech bells and whistles can be intimidating. A powerful marketing automation tool like Marketo Engage offers a vast variety of functionalities that can be applied in a multitude of ways to create custom processes that deliver on your business needs. So how can you get started with your marketing automation journey and ensure success?

'Show me the money!'

That’s probably something you’ve heard before from upper management or your CEO. ‘Why are we doing this” and ‘what’s the ROI’? Well, if you don’t have a clear overview of what it is you want to achieve, you will find it very difficult to formulate that elevator pitch, let alone define your business case or roadmap to success. That is why identifying your use cases is key to your success. If you are not yet familiar with this term, a use case defines how to apply marketing automation to a specific process within your company in order to improve the value generated or reduce costs.

But how does one go about identifying use cases and deciding which ones to focus on?

Dig deep for your why, what, who & how

At Chapman Bright, we work closely with clients to help identify the most relevant use cases, and subsequently which functionalities will be needed to deliver them.

Each use case is summarized by:‌

• Description of the use case: what is the hypothesis and potential value of selecting this use case?
• Dependencies: What is required to make this use case happen?
• Benefit: What kind of results can be expected? (first qualitative assessment)
• Effort: How much effort does it take to realize the use case? (first qualitative assessment)?
• Possible Hypotheses: What needs to be delivered in Marketo Engage for this specific use case?

And just like that you have defined your itinerary, the stops along the way, and how exactly you’re going to get there. This roadmap, including a phased delivery of your most important use cases, is absolutely mandatory to realize your marketing automation business case.

Need a little more inspiration to help you get started? Here are some the most common use cases Chapman Bright has helped achieve. 

• Drive quality leads: enrich data, increase sales and customize experiences. Find out how we helped Lely do just that but implementing Marketo Engage’s latest functionality ‘Conversational Chat’ on their website here.
• Lead management: nurturing MQLs to increase conversion to SALs. Learn more about how Sungevity improved lead quality by improving their lead scoring and lead nurturing activities on Marketo Engage.
• Align marketing and sales: facilitate communication between departments to improve the sales and marketing process and boost business. Here’s how DHL achieved this by integrating OneInsight into their Marketo Engage instance.
• If your business works with frame contracts, the uptrader/downtrader use case may be very interesting: automatically assign a customer who orders less han expected (downtraders) in the framework agreement to analways on marketing program, and engage with them to find out how to increase sales.