Marketing is about circulation. — Kim Sawchuk
Do you take your clothes off after you shower? Do you fetch a pot after throwing some food on the stove? Do you get on the train after it has left the station? If not, then don’t start working on any data until you’ve defined your workflows.
If you’re in the habit of putting on trousers one leg at a time, then the following is for you.
For over a decade every company I’ve been hired to work for has brought me in to do database marketing without making available to me a marketing database to get my job done with.
Since my tenure with these companies has most often lasted several years, clearly I’ve done my job. But it never has been database marketing to begin with.
It has always been the creation of the marketing database to help grow an integrated marketing operation.
Now you’d think that the first task I’d set out to accomplish in building a marketing database would be to get data to fill it up with. Not on your life!
That’s equivalent to filling a drum with gasoline before I had a car to run it on.
Perishable Data
Data is volatile. Also like good wine, it doesn’t age well unless well stored in sterile containers. It won’t hold in old wine skins either.
If you don’t want a mess in your hands then, before you scoop data up from anywhere, work on how you’re going to take care of it throughout the entire harvesting, pressing and bottling process first and, don’t forget, that being meant to be served up for the consumption of different types of drinkers, you must also plan how you will label, price and distribute it on an ongoing basis.
All that is workflow, friend, even if running a winery is not your daily forté.
Database marketing strategy is all about marketing workflow management. And marketing workflow management precedes marketing workflow automation, of course.
In other words, if you want a plan in your hands for doing marketing with a database behind you, and you further want to automate components of this marketing to reduce costs and improve performance, then you need to know in advance how you will sequence and control every marketing task that will depend for its fulfillment on such a marketing database system.
After you learn the context within which you are to operate in an organization and can identify what will govern the stability of your marketing processes, the most important step to take is to identify what youre going to accomplish for marketing and how you will systematically achieve those objectives through a database marketing system.
Strategic Database-centric Marketing Workflow Automation
A plan like the one above is a practical formulation of your database marketing strategy. If you define this strategy well enough to touch 5 key areas of marketing operations, then you will succeed in defining the core marketing workflow for you business.
This workflow may lend itself to automation, where efficiencies may be achieved and optimized through a database-centric system.
With a database marketing strategy so defined, you will be ready to start the execution of a marketing workflow automation strategy, beginning with the creation of a marketing database system.
The heart of integrated marketing is an integrated workflow. It throbs for automation, but only if your description of it is accurate. Therefore, get a serious hold on that workflow definition to take the next step in marketing workflow automation.
Rip it to pieces to analyze it thoroughly. Squeeze it for all it’s got. Your description of an integrated marketing workflow should distill into a single decanter the following 5 process areas:
- Planning a marketing budget
- Generating marketing content
- Managing promotional campaigns
- Processing campaign responses
- Analyzing return on marketing investment (ROMI)
By combining these 5 areas of operation you will be positioned to automate your marketing workflow and transform the way your company does business from a marketing operations standpoint.
Don’t spill a bloody mess by going for data first and then a workflow to handle it. Formulate your workflows first, and then neither your data will go rancid nor will your marketing workflow automation fail to improve your performance.
Additional Marketing Workflow Automation Topics of Interest
- Tailoring Your Work Style To Match a B2B SaaS Marketing Process
- Simulate Your Marketing Workflow Before Automating It
- Pilot A Marketing Business Process Without Crashing and Burning
- How To Keep SaaS Data Quality From Sinking Your SaaS Marketing Automation Solution
- Marketing Process Automation ROI: Show Me The Money!
- Why SaaS Adoption Means Having To Fumigate The Marketing Organization