If automated demand generation is to be more than just the latest ‘craze’ sweeping the marketing sector, then we need to get back to basics – and fast.

Ah, for the days when direct marketing was easy! You identify the best prospects for your product, create a wizzy direct mail campaign, print, enclose and post it out, and wait for the responses to roll in. Now you need to think multi-media, web 2.0, push and pull, and get a space on Face Book for the campaign, which now involves a film shoot as well as the usual folding stuff. You need to make sure those emails are ‘compliant’- and hope that you’ve got the right combination of elements to create a hot hit that’ll get your target audiences (there will be more than one these days) gossiping around the legendary ‘water cooler’. And, of course, you need to be able to measure the responses – from whatever direction they happen to come – from hits on your website to sales calls. No wonder the days of direct mail look simple.

Hardly surprising then that so many are turning towards automation as an answer. Rather than just pull your audiences towards your product or service with complicated and complex email campaigns, how much better to identify the key triggers that make people buy, and then, having identified the crucial actions, slip out some carefully crafted responses which hit the customer or prospect before they’ve even realised they were in the market to buy. Once again, life looks manageable.

But hold on a minute. To make this really work, you need to know just who you are selling to…and by that I don’t just mean a carefully segmented prospect list or pool. You need to agree and prioritise just what makes a lead a lead – and to do that in B2B you might just have to talk to the sales team. Sounds straight forward enough, but recent figures suggest that 52 per cent of marketers don’t work with their sales teams to define just what a lead looks like. That’s a lot of people running marketing campaigns to generate business when they don’t even agree what that business should look like. No wonder a lot of in-boxes remain stubbornly closed to the well crafted inducements that land in them from time to time!

Automation does sound like an answer to a dream, but to stop that dream tuning into yet another data nightmare there’s a lot of basic groundwork to do first. If we are to make sure that increasingly complex campaigns really deliver – and in ways we can effectively measure and assess – we need to get back to the fundamentals first. Until we do that, I’d suggest, the miracle cures of the brave new multi-media world will remain just that – miracles.

Liz Woodbridge
Business Development Manager
Mardev