The following is a guest post by Maurice Rahmey of HubSpot, a marketing software company based in Cambridge MA that makes inbound marketing software.

Marketing automation has become an extremely popular tool for marketers who are looking to increase their company’s revenue, and push more leads through the sales funnel.  However, if done inappropriately, marketing automation can actually hurt a business’s bottom line by driving away leads or annoying customers. Below are 10 steps to make sure your marketing automation is ready for showtime. Have your own? Let us know in the comments.

  1. Have marketing goals. To ensure your marketing automation efforts are a success, you have to look at your current marketing goals (or create marketing goals) and set up your automation system appropriately.  By having these goals, you’ll easily see if you’re efforts are on track, and if they are not, how you can optimize towards your benchmarks. Before you send any emails, ask yourself the question – What is the hard goal of doing marketing automation?
  2. Have a good amount of leads in your database. Marketing automation is about pushing leads through the middle of the funnel in your sales cycle — not about generating new potential customers at the top of the funnel.  If you don’t have a large amount of leads in your database already, or you aren’t generating new leads, you should probably spend your current budget on something other than marketing automation. Also, make sure that you have a steady stream of lead generation coming in to keep the system fed and full.
  3. Set a budget. Make sure that you have the proper funds to implement an automation program.  If you don’t have enough money set out to pay for the software or the employees needed to carry out the automation implementation, you may end up losing money instead of making it.
  4. Make sure management is on-board. It’s important to have your CFO and other high level executives willing and enthusiastic about a marketing automation program.  Marketing automation isn’t cheap, and it will be time consuming to set up, monitor, and test performance on. It will benefit the company in the long-term if done properly but make sure they are bought in for more than the first three months.
  5. Define and segment your target audiences. Marketing automation is really helpful if you think in terms of segmentation, not volume.  Before you even think about using an automation program, think about what types of customers your company typically deals with and how you’d tailor your message to convert them from a lead into a sale.
  6. Provide valuable content. As you make your way through the marketing automation process, your messaging and content delivered to your leads should always be about solving their problems and not about making a quick sale.  Think about the customer and what they’d find compelling to read.  For example, send a “How-To” ebook instead of brochureware.  Your content should also be targeted towards your audience segments too.  This will provide you with a more efficient effort towards sales than any straight sales pitch could.
  7. Understand your sales cycle. Timing is everything when it comes to marketing automation.  You may be producing awesome content for your leads and are sending it to the right audience segment, but if you aren’t sending it at the proper time, you aren’t going to convert into sales.  Different B2B companies have different sales cycles.  Understand how long yours last so you can properly nurture your leads.  
  8. Have “data-driven” people. Marketing automation relies on large amounts of data like conversion rates, email delivery, and opt-outs.  Companies that rely on more intangible marketing techniques like public relations will need to hire new staff to create closed-loop marketing reporting that integrate properly with sales data.
  9. Crawl before you walk. You should certainly be thinking about the bigger picture when you decide to utilize marketing automation.  However, take incremental steps first by implementing in phases.  For example, maybe start with one targeted campaign before launching into three or four.
  10. Remember that it’s not as easy as it sounds. Product demos and videos make marketing automation look really easy to implement.  It’s not. 

Success means proper preparation and analytics. A cool feature in your marketing automation software can certainly help, but remember that you have to know how to implement that feature in your marketing strategy for it to work properly. All of your plans need to be focused on the results and benefits. Do you have other tips or plans on how to succeed with marketing automation? Share them with us in t