Marketing Clique

Step one is realizing that your organization will benefit from marketing automation software. But getting past step one can be a daunting task, especially when you are trying to distill your vendor choices down to a short list.

This handy interactive graphic from Marketing Automation Software Guide helps the savvy online marketer quickly categorize who's who in the marketing automation world. While it's not exhaustive it's certainly a great place to start and features most of the leading marketing automation companies:

Doing Your Due Diligence - Avoid The Traps

Cogent marketers will realize that selecting a marketing automation vendor requires due diligence. It's an important decision and requires a significant investment of company resources.

Once you've selected a vendor you can learn from understanding some of the common traps into which many of the pioneer marketing automation users have fallen. Following are three of the traps that Jeff Ernst, Principal Analyst at Forrester Research, highlights in a recent blog post:

• The process trap. They don't get buy-in and support from the sales organization, so they generate more leads without changes to how sales works those leads.
• The content trap. They don't anticipate that effective, targeted lead nurturing greatly increases the content requirements.
• The skills trap. They don't have people with the skill sets to define their customer buying cycles and information needs at each stage.

Ask For Help

Before you take the next step, regardless of where you are in the selection/installation process ask for support from your vendor, get advice on marketing software choices, consult with other marketing professionals, and consider outsourcing parts to a consulting organization that has experience developing and automating lead flow.