Overwhelmed Marketing Managers are frustrated by clunky marketing technology and long for more advanced and better integrated software. Your marketing toolkit matters. Improve it and you'll have a more effective, motivated team and enjoy more sales and happier customers as a result.
If you are asking your team to compete in a digital world with outdated tools you are going to need a big team.
If you want to recruit and retain the best marketing talent you will have to give them the best tools available to do their job. The best Millennial Marketers won't tolerate crappy tech. They'll get frustrated and leave.
So right now, how well are you doing? Does your team really have the tools they need to compete in a competitive world?
How Many Tools Does Your Marketing Team Use?
The days of using a dozen or more different applications to manage digital marketing are over. It’s inefficient, it’s time consuming, it’s frustrating and it just doesn’t work well enough.
A typical B2B Marketing Manager might be managing upwards of a dozen different systems for attracting, engaging and delighting customers. It's not unusual to find a B2B marketing manager juggling:
- a CMS (Content Management System) system for updating the website
- a blogging system
- a CRM system (which sales people are supposed to update but often don't)
- quotation systems
- sales data from an accounting system
- a customer support system for logging customer support calls and issues
- email marketing systems for creating and delivering email campaigns
- analytics systems such as Google Analytics for identifying where visitors come from and where they go while on a website
- IP tracking systems to try and identify who has visited their website
- multiple social platforms for posting updates (YouTube, LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram etc.)
- scheduling systems for programming social media posts
- systems for monitoring mentions of the company or its brands online
- Google Ads, LinkedIn ads, Facebook ads and other online systems for advertising.
Employing so many individual systems can create a number of problems:
- How many sources of customer data does the organisation now have (and how big a GDPR headache is that)?
- What are the chances of your customer data being consistent across all these systems?
- Which system is providing you with a true picture? (They almost all measure and report numbers in different ways.)
- Integrations between systems are notoriously flaky and often break when one system or another is updated.
- How do you automate processes across so many different systems?
Marketing automation makes your team more competitive by:
- providing a single, joined-up system with a single source of accurate and consistent marketing and customer data
- providing a single, consistent interface for the user and (ideally) a single toolkit to manage the entire marketing process
- defining workflows and automating processes to improve a better end-to-end customer experience and reduce sales costs (which becomes exponentially simpler, faster and more effective as you reduce the number of systems involved).
Millennial Talent Won't Tolerate Outdated Technology
Ultimately your business needs the best talent and today, the best millennial marketing talent will simply not tolerate working for employers with outdated marketing technology.
Marketing automation is becoming the normal way that smart people manage their ever-more-digital marketing. If you haven't yet done so, check out the competitive edge you can get through adopting marketing automation technology.
What Next? There are another Nine key Benefits of Marketing Automation outlined in this Intergage blog 10 Benefits of B2B Marketing Automation.
