Ovum Digital Marketing and Connected Customer practice claims broken CRM promises and hype from technology vendors had left CMOs sceptical about initial adoption
Marketing automation is reaching a tipping point that will see it become more readily adopted across organisations, according to new research from Ovum’s Digital Marketing and Connected Customer practice.
Ovum’s senior digital marketing analyst, Gerry Brown, said the need to more effectively and efficiently attract and retain customers is driving organisations to seek tools for automating marketing functions, and the market has now achieved sufficient successful implementations to give later adopters greater confidence.
“People are seeing that marketing and customer orientation are becoming increasingly important, and executive boards are much more likely to sign off deals for marketing automation,” Brown claimed.
To date, however, he said technology suppliers have been their own worst enemy, with many rebadging what are effectively sales lead management systems as marketing automation tools.
“It has confused the marketplace and in some ways has slowed the growth,” Brown said. “Return on investment of using some of these tools is very substantial, so there is no reason why there shouldn’t be much greater wholesale adoption.
“But marketing departments as a whole have been sceptical of the hype associated with marketing automation and have held off when they should have been investing.”
In some instances, the broken promises of CRM implementations have also caused CMOs to be cautious regarding which suppliers they spend their money with.
“CRM was used as a tool to beat sales people over the head with when they weren’t hitting their targets, rather than helping them understand customer needs and the quality of the relationship and how they should pull the right levers to deliver strategic profitable deals for the organisation,” Brown said.
Suppliers such as Marketo, Eloqua and Responsys now have sufficient implementations where they can demonstrate dramatic gains in customer acquisition to assuage the fears of CMOs.
“The main thing in marketing now is the need for speed – to respond in real time to changing customer needs and be able to exploit spikes in demand as they occur,” he said. “Using a system like Eloqua means you can see very clearly the impact of marketing campaigns and the level of marketing influence within campaigns.”
Despite this, Brown warned many organisations will still need to invest significant resources in cleaning up their databases before marketing automation will prove effective, and added many are still sufficiently immature as to need specialist skills to extract value.
“The tools are very competent but they don’t have all the controls that an enterprise IT system would have, so you need to have someone who is a super power user in charge,” Brown said.
Follow CMO on Twitter: @CMOAustralia, take part in the CMO Australia conversation on LinkedIn: CMO Australia, or join us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/CMOAustralia
In this latest episode of our Conversations over a Cuppa with CMO series, we catch up with Jane Power, who stepped into the director of marketing and transformation role at GenesisCare in April 2020.
Understanding the core principles of Behavioural Economics will give players in the travel industry a major competitive advantage when restrictions lift and travellers begin to book again. And there are a few insights in here for the rest of the marketing community, too.
Unicorns, the Sunken City of Atlantis, Zeus: They are very famous. So famous in fact, that we often think twice about whether they are real or not. Sometimes if we talk about something widely enough, and for long enough, even the strangest fiction can seem like fact. But ultimately it is still fiction - stories we make up and tell ourselves over and over until we believe.
At a time of uncertainty and economic hardship, customer retention takes on much greater importance. CX Lavender’s Linda O’Grady examines the big grey area between ‘all’ and ‘best’ customers when deciding who is worth fighting for and how.
Thanks for sharing. You might want to check this website https://lagimcardgame.com/. An up and coming strategic card game wherein the cha...
Pierce Fabreverg
Board games distributor partners with Deliveroo in business strategy pivot
Such an important campaign, dyslexia certainly need more awareness. Amazing to see the work Code Read is doing. On the same note we are a...
Hugo
New campaign aims to build understanding around scope and impact of dyslexia
Great Job on this article! It demonstrates how much creativity, strategy and effort actually goes to produce such unique logo and brandin...
Pierce Fabreverg
Does your brand need a personality review? - Brand vision - CMO Australia
Here’s an article on solving the most complex customer queries without a delay. Hope it helpswww.engati.com/blog/address...
soham
How to manage social media during Covid-19
Thank you for explaining the rules. This article covers the principles of design, which arrange the elements of art into a composition. ...
Pierce Fabreverg
Reports: Brands have an important role to play during the COVID-19 crisis - if they're useful