Marketing automation is a great solution to help drive your business. Marketers need to be more accountable, engage with customers and potential buyers, and also scale their activities. They are increasingly spending more dollars on technology to support these activities, and in the near future may even out pace CIOs on technology spend.
While there is a great deal of discussion on the undeniable advantage marketing automation can provide, there has been less discussion around what that means for your team. Technology is awesome, but it really is only as good as the people who implement it and manage it on a day-to-day basis. That's why it is important to think about your team structure when putting software systems in place.
Here are a few thoughts on who you need on your team to get the most out of marketing automation; the good news is, you may already have people on your team that have these skill sets.
Content Manager
Make sure you have an individual who can create a steady stream of great content. With marketing automation software, it becomes easier to scale programs (e.g. different job functions at different verticals), so you will need someone who can create effective content for the programs and re-purpose it. This could be a product marketer, an evangelist, someone from marketing communications manager, or a new hire such as a brand journalist. Ideally, this person will have some writing in his or her background.
Marketing Operations Manager
You will need someone who enjoys mechanics. Setting up integrations, key reports, segmentation, and flows in the system are just some of the activities a good marketing operations person will do. This is one of the most critical roles to get right because they are essential to building the technological framework. A good framework = total and complete awesomeness. A bad framework = wasted time and added expense, which we all know equals bad things. A good candidate for this is anyone on your team who enjoys technical details, has a good mind for process and how things work, and feels happy when in Excel.
Nurturing Manager
This role makes sure you are squeezing the juice from the orange. They will work with your content manager and make sure their programs have the right content mapped to the buying cycle. It is also a very critical role because when done well, since nurtured leads can produce a 20 percent increase in sales opportunities versus non-nurtured leads. It is ideal to have someone in this role who understands your buyer and user personas, and also is very good at thinking through the right workflows. I have seen strong marketing programs people succeed in this role.
I hope these suggestions are useful and help you think about the right team to make marketing automation rock in your office! What other players do you have on your marketing automation team? We would love to hear about them.
