Marketing automation 2/10: Identify your platform superhero

Step 2 of 10: Select your marketing automation owner

Identifying the person in charge of your platform is key to the success of your marketing automation campaigns. Although you are accountable for the department, this resource will be responsible for the execution and implementation of your tactics. Your superhero (often called Champion in the marketing automation world) will become your ally when the time comes to connect, configure and give meaning to this brilliant idea which is still only in mind for now!

Here are the skills, personality traits, tasks and assets that we believe to be success factors:

Skills:

• Strong understanding of sales and marketing needs
• Ability to answer a strategic marketing question
• Ability to analyze your organization's business needs and objectives

Personality traits:

• Straightforward approach
• Data-driven
• Open to challenge ideas
• Openness to new marketing tactics
• Show business creativity

Responsibilities:

• Workflow building
• Event and conversions rules tracking
• Scoring and Profiling rule implementation and review
• Segmented list building
• Prospects and Marketing Qualified leads analysis

Other major non-mandatory strengths:

• HTML knowledge
• CSS knowledge
• Javascript knowledge
• Google Analytics configuration
• Google Tag Manager configuration
• Good writing skills

Finding the right candidate for each of these traits is no easy task. If you need to prioritize some characteristics, here are a few arguments that will make it easier for you to make a choice.

Marketing automation: A social science more than a software science

Marketing automation leverages your knowledge of the market, your understanding of the targets' objectives (read: Why validate your target’s objective before yours?) you want to address and the steps they can take throughout their purchasing cycle. A marketing automation culture requires the manager and his team to maintain a relevant relationship with the customer, through mainly digital communications. The most difficult part is to assess the quality of the message conveyed. From a customer's standpoint, he expects a highly personalized relationship, which nurtures his interest towards the subject and helps him navigate across his buying journey. Your return on investment will only be better. Let's take a closer look at the sought qualities.

Look for sales and strategic marketing skills

You may have heard the African saying: "All alone we go faster, together we go further." To ensure full alignment of the execution with your strategic objectives, you will require a leader who understands your organization's business context. He should focus on your target audience's needs and the key messages to promote. Without this knowledge, executing your strategy can be risky. You will have to share concepts, ideas and assumptions with your manager. He should be able to improve and translate them into touchpoints within the customer buying journey. This way, your strategy is translated into a series of touchpoints and decisions. This timeline will become one acquisition funnel to which you will assign performance indicators.

Seek a champion in automated acquisition campaigns.

The core of marketing automation is to automate repetitive tasks involved in managing visitors, prospects or any other individual within a buying process. Campaigns must nurture prospects with highly personalized, useful content that helps convert prospects to customers using automated email campaigns, text messages, dynamic messages on the site, relevant articles submission in the course of a browsing session, content personalization on social networks, etc. Teaming up with your manager, you will design this type of campaigns. Your manager will configure the campaign workflows matching your business content pieces with individual interests in your database. Segmenting these individuals by interest, hierarchical level, industry, locality is key when comes the time to track campaign success and improve performance. It is evident that in the eyes of these responsibilities, your manager must have a straightforward mind, a data-driven AND business-driven perspective. This way you will come up with better decisions and manage improvement instead of managing change.

Look for that intrapreneurial character

Creativity in business does exist. It is not a question of design, user experience or advertising but rather of creativity to identify customer needs using the tools at its disposal and a nose for market opportunities correlated by the industrial context. Your future manager should embrace emerging technologies and growth hacking methods to generate traffic, leads and opportunities. He must be able to differentiate between communication, marketing, business development and sales.

Skills that pay more than just bills

Depending on the chosen automation platform, your manager will configure the elements of an automated campaign. However, it is common to encounter pitfalls in the process. He will gap these pitfalls with basic knowledge of HTML, CSS and Javascript. Familiarity with analysis platforms such as Google Analytics and some knowledge of Google Tag Manager configuration is very welcomed when comes performance measurement and conversion tasks. This knowledge is not mandatory, but it will be practical to speed up the production of your campaigns without having to go through your IT team or your agency.

To wrap this superhero up: Look for a "hacker"

Knowing that the superhero candidate does not exist, look for the "hacker" candidate. Look for a candidate who is comfortable with new technologies, passionate about learning and can understand how different systems integrate and work together. He'll have to learn processes that your company is composed of and what pushed you to conceive them this way. Every company is a system in itself and therefore uses marketing automation differently. Finally, a hacker is first and foremost entrepreneurial behaviour and a sense of resourcefulness.

Have a good marketing automation week!