Why CleverTouch Exists

According to a recent report by Ascend2, organisations that invest in marketing automation and then execute it properly are at a major advantage to those organisations that don’t. It’s a straightforward, basic statistic, and one that is blindingly obvious to us here at CleverTouch – providing optimised marketing automation services to grow our clients’ pipelines is why we exist.

MA is great, so how about doing it right?

It’s frustrating then, to read in the same report that nearly half of global marketers say that the lack of an effective marketing strategy is hampering the success of their marketing automation efforts. We work with some of the most switched on marketing managers in the B2B and the B2C landscapes – they know and we know that a strong foundation of solid marketing strategy is the best way to prepare for creating a successful marketing automation environment.

The report covers all the usual challenges of marketing automation. In this post, we thought we’d dip in to our knowledge bank to comment on a few key areas.

Lack of Skills

According to the report 44% of marketers cite lack of skilled staff as a major hindrance to marketing automation success. This is certainly a situation we’ve seen before. We often get called upon to provide training for in-house teams, and we are always on-hand to educate our clients on the basics of MA and the specifics of their platform. There are a lot of innovators in the marketing landscape, but how many companies are there out there who have invested in an MA platform and who are not using it? Or what about the companies that are using their MA platform to send out monthly newsletters and not anything more; no workflows or actual automation in place, no assets living on their websites, and no alerts or lead scoring set up for prospects? It’s a situation that is likely occurring around the globe, and it’s one we really enjoy resolving when we get the opportunity!

Think about it this way. You could be paying £10k-£100k a year for your MA system and getting nothing back in terms of increased pipeline and revenues. Or, you could be paying £10k-£100k a year to triple your pipeline and your revenues.

Poor data management

Marketers claiming insufficient data quality and poor management of existing data came in at 34% in this report, and once again, this sort of thing is why we get out of bed in the morning – to help our clients avoid this two-tiered situation at all costs.

In fact, we feel so passionately about data we formed a new company, CrowdVu, dedicated entirely to improving the quality of data for email marketing campaigns. Provided as an online platform with a universe of over three million B2B contacts in the UK alone, CrowdVu is the ideal foundation for companies serious about their marketing automation efforts.

When it comes to managing data, we really believe that it’s key organisations don’t ignore the intelligence they get from their marketing automation campaigns. It’s okay to have lots of very granular marketing lists – in fact, we encourage it.

Lack of useful reporting

Ineffective metrics are another complaint we hear more about, with 16% of marketers in report citing this issue as a hindrance to their marketing automation success. Again, this often comes down to lack of education, as even the most sophisticated MA systems can present complex graphic user interfaces.

Getting reporting right is essential for obvious reasons. Without good reporting, marketing teams will not be able to gather the intelligence they need to determine whether their MA programme is having the desired result.

CleverTouch provides training on reporting across the major MA platforms, and when required, we create reports for clients. Either way, clients must be able to identify what inbound is coming in from outbound efforts, and to what extend a prospect is showing behaviour that indicates interest.

Lastly

We were pleased to see that only 7% of respondents claimed their marketing automation efforts were unsuccessful. MA is marketing’s hottest aspect, and it’s growing leaps and bounds. It’s important to understand the full potential of an integrated customer and prospect marketing strategy, and we’re looking forward to help more clients build predictable pipelines and faster revenues through smarter joined up-marketing.