Marketing automation plays an important role in efficient inbound marketing campaigns. It does not, however, work if one’s inbound marketing efforts cannot consistently produce and generate qualified leads.

In order to exponentially multiply sales without exponentially multiplying work, you need to automate. Your marketing automation will only work if it’s done correctly. Bash Foo has transformed marketing automation from a strategy to an art by discovering and understanding the marketing automation needs of each business it serves.

Marketing automation is not a stand-alone fix for generating leads and increasing revenue. It’s a way to magnify what you’re already doing well. That’s how Bash Foo helps small businesses. They implement best practices and automate your campaigns to produce substantial growth.

Marketing automation requires effort and skill. When done correctly, it provides a huge return on investment.

When you’re aligning marketing content with customer needs, then marketing automation becomes a lot easier and a lot more effective.

Some of the key findings from the State of Email Workflows include:

• Email content planning continues to be relatively ad hoc.
• The number of emails in production and the time it takes brands to produce an email varies significantly based on the sophistication of the email marketing program.
• Extremes dominate email development, with some tools and techniques seeing wide usage, while others are rarely used.
• Successful email programs put extra focus on ensuring their emails display and function as intended.
• The number of people involved in approvals and the frequency of last-minute changes are the two biggest factors that determine the efficacy of approval processes.
• Companies are roughly split between those using just one email platform and those using two or more.
• Halting an email send is rare. Sending an apology email is even rarer. Both are likely far too rare.

MISTAKE 1: THINKING YOUR DATA IS ALL THAT

MISTAKE 2: BEING EXCLUSIVE

MISTAKE 3: IGNORING INTEGRATION

MISTAKE 4: HAVING EYES THAT ARE BIGGER THAN YOUR STOMACH

MISTAKE 5: UNDERESTIMATING SALES

MISTAKE 6: UNLEASHING A HURRICANE

Marketing automation is a big investment, as are the barriers to adopting and fully implementing automation tools. See the steps marketers can take to successfully implement marketing automation.

Data reveals two truths that marketing-automation software sales reps will not bring up when they paint a picture of your idealized marketing future:

Marketing automation is complex and requires an investment from your teams to translate existing processes into an established sales and marketing process before implementing.
Marketing automation requires a fire hose of content.
What can you do to protect your investment and realize the true potential of marketing automation? Here’s what I recommend:

• Hire a pro.
• Assemble a team.
• Map your buyer’s journey.
• Plan for developing content.

1. Identifying, attracting, reaching and nurturing new subscribers or prospects
Through understanding essential things about the targets digital body language you can appropriately take the right action based on an appropriate trigger. 
2. Targeting hot leads
The most useful trigger for this workflow is the lead score. The lead score will allow you to decide those who need to be engaged immediately because they are ready and willing to continue along the sales funnel.
3. Re-engaging unsure or uncommitted leads
The best trigger to keep an eye for in this workflow is sudden level of activity. This is because your marketing stimuli and assets should create some impetus to act based on monitoring appropriate digital body language like social media clicks, web pages visited or even lead source.
4. Re-targeting dead-end leads
When you get any notification or trigger from your sales people or from your marketing automation system that a lead has been lost, this should trigger your activity to try and woo them back instead of letting them slip through your fingers without any effort on your part.
5. Customer retention
The best trigger here is to assign roles to your different customers in order to send them content that will keep them engaged and enhance their experience.

Getting started with marketing automation doesn’t have to be hard. 4 proactive steps to make onboarding marketing automation more organized.

"1) Marketing automation rules cannot cope with complex buyer journeys

The problem is that the B2B buyer journey is much more complex than marketing automation vendors would have you believe. 

2) Rules cannot adapt to changing contexts

The nature of marketing automation rules is that once they have been activated they remain active until you manually deactivate them. This mean that they are not adaptive and they cannot learn from a campaign’s results, only repeat them.

3) Marketing automation rules mean more - not less - staff 

As counterintuitive as it sounds, marketing automation often means having to bring on more – not less – staff. As well as a marketing manager, a database manager, a demand gen exec, a content strategist, you will most likely need a marketing technologist who is able to help you get the most out of your new system."

Web marketing sprint 1: months 1–4

• Persona/KPI interview & questionnaire
• Analytics setup
• Site audits
• Topical keyword research
• Information architecture analysis & implementation
• Navigation optimization
• Social strategy/review
• Benchmark report

Web marketing sprint 2: months 5–8

• Navigation implementation
• Tag optimization
• On-page optimization
• Content messaging
• Editorial calendar & blogging
• Social media implementation
• Information architecture analysis
• Benchmark report

Web marketing sprint 3: months 9–12

• Information architecture analysis
• On-page optimization
• SEO performance reviews
• Social media implementation/blogging
• Conversion optimization
• Benchmark report

Short-Term Considerations

1. How quickly can your team get up and running on this solution?

2. Can this system clone entire programs, campaigns, and forms?

3. Can you easily build audiences and workflows side-by-side?

4. How easily can you incorporate other best-of-breed solutions?



Long-Term Considerations

1. Will this platform centralize all of your core marketing needs over the next three to five years?

2. Will you be incorporating multi-channel marketing?

3. Does this platform have a history of marketing innovation and being forward-thinking?

4. What kind of ongoing support can you expect?

5. Is this platform capable of growing with your data management strategy?

We often hear from our clients that they are interested in migrating from their existing marketing automation platform (MAP) for another platform. In today’s b-to-b environment, MAP swapping is common. When should an organization consider a MAP migration? There are five common scenarios:

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