It's been on my mind for a while.
If you are a business looking to implement a marketing automation solution, how do you ensure that the investment will be beneficial?
Of course, the automation software companies are going to tell you it's going to work and the case studies of success will roll out.
But we all know that introducing technology into a business is complex and has ramifications that can be felt throughout the culture of the organisation. There is often a fear of change and a history of 'technology projects going wrong'.
So how do you independently look for robust information to inform you what factors can help you succeed? I tried to do this and failed.
Everything out there is singular opinion or statistics without rigour. However, if we take a step back and look into the deep dark past of the 1990's there's a whole body of research waiting to inform us. Thousands of organisations went through a significant change with the rise of sales software. In retrospect, many of these projects were deemed to be failures in the cold light of ROI. Can we use this information to produce guidance that can inform organisations about potential pitfalls of marketing automation software implementation and how to prevent them?
As the industry matures and the hyper-growth of the software providers continues we are bound to see stories of failure arise and a backlash begin. There is a recent increase in the number of blogs around '5 reasons for marketing automation failure' and similar click bait headlines. However, they all focus on the external failures of campaign set-up or data problems. The focus is looking IN THE WRONG DIRECTION. What happens when soon people start to write about why they have abandoned marketing automation software? What happens when the software companies start to experience an increase in customer churn?
Why not look at this now? Can we help both the software companies and the organisations embarking on their journey succeed?
Can YOU help to build that robust information?
I am currently conducting a research study to do this very thing and would appreciate it if you could spare 10 minutes of your time to help me!
The study is accessed via the link below and forms the research for my MSc in Digital Marketing.
(beware - the first page has a lot of text.. required by the university... it gets better after that I promise!!
Thank you in advance to those of you that are able to take part. I REALLY REALLY appreciate this. I need a sample of 384 people to complete this research survey with the rigour that I want..... (and that's a lot of you!)
TAKE MY SURVEY HERE:
https://www.surveymonkey.co.uk/r/SarahLundyMScResearchStudyMarketingAutomation
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