Marketing Automation updates

The latest issue (November 7) of B2B Magazine has a couple of interesting articles on Marketing Automation. The first, “Lack of Resources Impedes Marketing Automation Adoption,” reports on the results of a survey conducted in August and September. The survey was conducted by B2B and Aprimo, a supplier of a marketing automation solution. So the highlights are:

• only 44% of b2b marketers have implemented some sort of automation
• a scary 11% are not aware of marketing automation

11%? Really? What, do you live under a rock? But maybe the 11% just didn’t understand what was meant by marketing automation. Still, that is a rather high percentage considering how long these systems have been around.

Of the 44% of “users,” here’s some interesting findings:

• 52% use it for automatic distribution of leads
• 19% leveraging more advanced features such as lead nurturing programs, closed-loop automation (not really sure what they mean by that) and sales/marketing alignment

An interesting part of the article quotes Jeff Ernst, an analyst at Forrester, who says that “full-featured” automation is only being used by about 5% of b2b marketers. Since the survey had a relatively low 276 respondents who likely are B2B magazine readers and more engaged in this area, I believe Mr. Ernst may be closer to the true number. I would be interested in people’s thoughts on this.

As a side note, a little over a year ago, I wrote a blog article on “Evaluating Marketing Automation vendors.” I’m thinking it may be worth re-visiting that article and updating it. There are several new and impressive vendors in this space.

The second article in the issue is “Marketing Automation Requires Buy-In to a Different Way of Thinking.” This article covers some important things to know about implementing marketing automation and the changes/benefits it can deliver.

Both of these articles are worth the read.