Intelligent Demand Generation / eTrigue Corporation

Congratulations! You’ve decided it’s time to automate your marketing (many excellent reasons to do that) and even got the budget to do that.

As you start looking for a marketing automation system, you will notice fairly quickly that there are several options out there. How do you choose? Or better yet – what mistakes should you avoid when picking a marketing automation vendor?

1. Choosing a solution that worked for someone else. While it’s a good idea to go out there and get recommendations, make sure that the people you are talking to have similar needs to yours. So, if you’re a small company with a limited marketing budget, find a solution that would enable you to quickly set up your marketing automation system. If you purchase a complex tool that requires more resources than you can afford for setting it up and maintaining it, you’ll likely end up not using the expensive solution you had just purchased.

2. Automatically going with the most popular tool. Assuming that “if it works for everyone it will work for us” might prove to be an expensive mistake. Many of the popular marketing automation tools are just too complex and expensive to operate, unless you can allocate dedicated, significant resources to them.

3. Assuming that once you buy it, your marketing automation tool will set itself up. It won’t. You will still need to set it up (so the simpler it is, the better) and you will then need to feed it with content. So make sure you get a system that would not just be easy and quick to set up, but would also be user-friendly and intuitive. Marketing automation needs constant attention and monitoring – it’s not a “set it and forget it” type of tool, so it better be user-friendly.

Above all, remember that the purchase of a marketing automation system should reflect your specific needs. So before you start approaching vendors, think long and hard about your needs, what are you trying to achieve, and how much you can dedicate to setting up and maintaining the system after you’ve purchased it.

The best marketing is done when we really, truly understand our customers – when we reach a level of familiarity and understanding that makes us not just aware of what they think, but actually think like them.

When you think like the customer (or prospect), that gap between you as a marketer and them as a consumer is eliminated. Eliminating this gap can make a big difference, because if you stop thinking like *you* and start thinking like *the customer* you will avoid familiar pitfalls such as preaching features instead of talking benefits.

It’s not as easy as it sounds, of course, because, after all, you are you and they are they. But the best marketers around -not unlike actors – find a way to BE their customers. Then they can approach them in ways that are enormously more effective than when that familiar marketer/consumer gap exists.

So, how do you do that? How do you think like the customer? One way is to use marketing automation tools that gather detailed information about each lead arriving at your website. Then take the time to look at the information and analyze it. In most cases, you will get a clear understanding of the person’s pain point, of what he’s looking for.

I also like Stephen Davidson’s suggestion that we stop focusing so much on surveys, and instead of inviting customers over, ask them to host us for a day of shadowing. Imagine how much useful information you could get from such a day – even from just an hour or two!

The basic idea is that the focus must be shifted away from the marketer and onto the customer and/or the prospect. The more we can focus our attention on our audience, the better we will be at communicating with them, and getting them to do what we want them to do – become buyers or repeat buyers – not in a spammy way, but in a helpful way that respects the customer and their needs.