According to the agency we interviewed, time is the most complicated thing to manage in marketing automation. Setup time, the time available to teams, etc. Let’s look at this in detail !
Why should you allow time to implement marketing automation?
Marketing automation is used by many agencies and companies, so we interviewed the agency Digital Passengers, which works with various SMEs and mid-sized companies, to understand why time is the number 1 critical point in implementing a marketing automation strategy.
How much time are we talking about?
Quite a lot… It is a question that is impossible to answer given the diversity of strategies deployed in marketing automation. But we are still going to give you some estimates for the automations we most often implement for our clients.
Setting up an email workflow:
Time: 2 to 3 hours (scenarios + email writing + setup + testing + optimization)
Note : 1 single workflow is not enough
Lead scoring setup :
Time : 3 to 5 hours (planning + setup + testing + ongoing optimization)
Note : You will need to do this in coordination with the sales and marketing departments
Automated publishing on social media :
Time : 1 hour (setup + ongoing manual review)
Note : Plan for manual optimizations on each post to personalize them at a minimum
Creating automatic lead lists in the CRM :
Time : 1 hour (creation + sorting and filters + verification + cleanup)
Note : These lists can quickly become a mess, so plan to review them globally on a regular basis. This must be kept up to date in your documentation serving as the reference.
Setting up a trigger on the site that launches a pop-up :
Time : 2 to 3 hours excluding design creation (creation + tagging + implementation + tracking)
Note : When it comes to triggers on a site, we also talk about them in the plural 🙂
Etc…
Why is time a problem?
For 2 reasons, the first is obvious: it is the short-term profitability of the operations put in place. But the second is more difficult to imagine at the outset: it is your own time, as a marketing manager, communications officer, etc.
The marketing department is often put under pressure by management and/or the sales department, which wants “more leads”, “faster”, “quick and inexpensive promotional campaigns”, “not to hurt margins”, etc., and all of that by yesterday.
However, we know that setting up email workflows, writing automated emails, configuration, testing, optimization, sequencing, etc. take time and, above all, do not generate large quantities of quality leads within a very short timeframe.
So if you choose to implement a marketing automation strategy in your company, let your colleagues know from the start that it will take time before optimized results are achieved.
To reassure management and sales teams and keep them waiting, nothing prevents you from continuing to generate leads with so-called “outbound” and short-term methods, such as acquisition campaigns (Google Ads, etc.).
Finally, if time is a problem, it is also because marketing or communications department managers already have a long list of recurring tasks to carry out, such as monthly newsletters to design, blog articles to write, dashboards to update, meetings with the different departments, the trade show booth to design, etc.
And you are going to have to find additional available time ? Yes, so prepare yourself for that because the time you devote to your marketing automation will be proportional to the results you can hope for. This is why marketing automation manager roles are beginning to emerge in companies and why you can also delegate the setup and management of campaigns to your agency!
Marc NOEL, one of the founders of the agency Digital Passengers, says :
“ If there is one reason why implementing marketing automation fails, it is the lack of time from a person dedicated internally within the company. Believing that, because you have an agency supporting your company, you are freed from this burden is an illusion. It is essential for the agency to have an internal point of contact who is responsive, aware of everything, a decision-maker, and above all who has time ! ”
