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You’ve considered – and purchased – a Marketing Automation System (my first post). You completed the necessary exercises within the organization to get started (maybe those suggested in my second post). You are now ready to implement the solution, and here, your mindset is key in getting not only a good start – but also to being able to finish strong.
Start Small – Think Big – Scale Fast
It started as a conversation around implementation with one of those responsible for Marketing Cloud from Salesforce themselves. He mentioned the above statement. Having been involved in both Pardot and ExactTarget (i.e. Marketing Cloud) implementations, I have to agree with the words. However, I do believe it’s also relevant to add a few words to the individual components – and why they make sense.
Start Small
This is not about your data model and the technical implementation – of course this needs to be in order – but to me, it is about the core functionality in the Marketing Cloud. Whether you are implementing a B2B or B2C solution, it is about starting simple. It is important with a long-term goal, as to where the journey will take us, but to begin with, keep the core functionality simple. You could start with the newsletter (e.g. your As-Is scenario) in order to familiarize yourself with the platform. Next you would build upon the your newly gained capacities – could be anything from adding dynamic content, automations, etc. You build and build until you reach the end goal – which in the Marketing Cloud could be something as complex as automated, individually-optimized and personalized emails using Predictive Intelligence.
Below is an example about how you could scale your capabilities:
Note: ”starting small” is a variable determined by your company’s starting point (i.e. your capabilities)
Think Big
As mentioned above, it is essentially about having an idea – a vision – for your marketing automation venture. A key component to the vision is that it needs an owner (typically the CMO). Whoever owns the vision is responsible for constantly communicating where you are going, must sell the idea to the rest of the business and ensure the business is on board.
Scale Fast
This speaks to the example of the above phases. Break your implementation down to smaller components. Make sure to collect the experience, know-how and learning along the way. Remember to convert the experience to organizational capacities and based on those, prioritize the components in the order that makes sense, based on your needs, gaps, capacities, etc.
Summary
So for your marketing automation, think about what you can quickly complete. Make sure you have a vision of the destination, and finally – scale quickly.
