When starting out with any marketing automation tool, one is faced with the challenge of delivering the ROI promised to upper management to justify the investment. But how can you demonstrate the success of your marketing automation initiatives without first identifying the use cases and what success looks like?
Implementing a new marketing automation tool alone is not enough to deliver value to your business. Without your why, who, what or how, any marketing automation tool you end up investing in, regardless of all its bells and whistles, will fall short of delivering the results you hoped for, simply because it is not put to use in an effective way. Identifying and prioritizing your use cases will help you draw a clear roadmap for your marketing automation success, helping you deliver value in the short term while ensuring scalability for your future needs.
Each use case describes a hypothesis to improve a certain process, for instance to improve the MQL-SAL conversion. You know the most important cost and revenue drivers in the process and their current numbers. So, in this case: What is the cost of an MQL? How many MQLs are generated per month or quarter? How much does it contribute to the current Cost per Sale, given the current conversion ratios in your sales process? And how much will the cost per sale be lowered by improving your MQL to SQL conversion?
Knowing exactly what it is you want to achieve, allows you to build strong foundations for solutions that are scalable and deliver on your needs today, and in the years to come. Let’s take Lead Scoring as an example. This functionality can be applied in different ways depending on your business and the results you are looking for. For instance, if you have only 1 product and you want to focus on generating better MQLs to be handed over to sales, you would configure the scoring program to evaluate sales readiness. On the other hand, when upselling or cross-selling to existing customers is the most important business goal, you will need to know which specific product line your customer is interested in. Interest scoring will provide that information. Interest scoring and sales readiness scoring use the same Marketo Engage functionality, but the way these programs are set-up and the logic of the algorithms at play are very different.
So how does one go about identifying use cases? Whether you choose to do this internally or work with a partner to help you define your marketing automation roadmap, there are a few steps you will need to take:
Use cases define how marketing automation can be applied to a specific process within your company to improve the value generated or reduce costs generated by that process. Without them, businesses will have hard time tracking the success of their marketing automation initiatives, and teams will miss out on valuable processes and opportunities provided by the tool of their choice.
When trying to solve challenges for your organization, it is important to first understand the problem as well as the ambition, and what better way to do that than to involve stakeholders and process owners in the conversation?
This is why we recommend a pragmatic hands-on approach, bringing stakeholders together for a hands-on workshop to identify the most value-contributing use cases.
And to help you lead the conversation in the right direction, we’ve created an easy to use template that will aid you in fleshing out use cases, and mapping them out by benefit vs. effort. This will allow you to determine where to prioritize your efforts and define the roadmap to your marketing automation success.
Need help defining your uses cases? Here's an easy to use template to help you define and prioritise use cases that add value to your business today, while keeping scalability and your future needs in mind.
Marketing automation gives you lots of opportunities, though, it is important to successfully deploy it to get your company where it wants to be.
Implementing a MarTech solution like Marketo Engage is the simpler part of your transformation journey. But how can you translate your marketing strategy into SMART programs that deliver on your marketing investment? Here is what 20 years of marketing automation experience has taught us.
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?