Marketing Automation: The Marketer’s Perpetual Motion Machine

When Leonardo da Vinci first thought of his perpetual motion machine and drew his ‘Study in Perpetual Motion’, he was trying to solve one of the greatest achievements in physics.

A machine that can run continuously with only an initial injection of energy, without requiring additional energy to maintain inertia and keep the machine moving.

Now, you may be wondering what one of the greatest painters and human minds ever born has to do with Marketing Automation?

Innovation, adaptation and future thinking…

Innovation

Marketers are supposed to be at the forefront of business innovation and be leaders in business change and transformation. We are looked to as sources of creativity, inspiration and momentum. However, the daily life of a marketer normally involves a delicate balancing act of planning multi-channel marketing strategies, managing budgets, providing sales teams with leads, generating revenue, proving attribution and ultimately demonstrating ROI.

It can be hard to be the innovator that you are expected to be on a daily basis!

Adaptation

Marketing is a constantly shifting and moving landscape with new ideas, techniques and ways to approach your target audience popping up constantly. It can be difficult to adapt to the wealth of new lead generation strategies, content marketing approaches, nurturing techniques and multiple new technologies that are introduced on a weekly basis to help marketers and make their jobs “easier”.

Future Thinking

Now we are not all Leonardo da Vinci, I wish I was sometimes as he was a lot cleverer and a lot cooler than myself. He was a rock star of his age!  He predicted so many inventions and his thoughts have been the basis behind everything from palaeontology to air travel.

However, we all have the power and intellect to think ahead and predict future trends in our own marketing spheres, whether we are marketing a niche product, targeting a specific industry, trying to interest a specific buying persona or simply trying to make our marketing more efficient and effective.

One thing we do need to make those ground-breaking future decisions is the information and data analysis to guide our thoughts and action.

How does Marketing Automation help with these challenges? (And what does this all have to do with the perpetual motion machine?)

Marketing Automation is the perpetual motion machine for marketing that you are looking for. It may seem like a scary piece of technology that costs a lot, takes a huge amount of time to implement and will be hard to manage once it is being used.

However, once you have injected the initial energy into the machine (i.e. the budget investment, the time to set it up and the adaptation of your team to work with it), it will maintain marketing inertia and actually save you time and money by running and running without requiring much additional energy.

It simply will run and run, nurturing interested prospects with information when they need it, turning those prospects into qualified leads with more “sales-driven” content, identifying which leads are sales ready by monitoring behaviour and passing those leads to your sales team for human-to-human follow up and sales closure.

OK, so not exactly perpetual in terms of motion as you will need to keep it fed with content, manage your data going into the system, build some more workflows over time and keep an eye on the results so you can change approaches. But it will help you a lot in the long term with an equivalently small initial injection of effort and budget.

And most importantly, it let you be the innovator that you want to be, it will give you the time to think about and take on-board new marketing adaptations and provide you with the data and insight to think well into the future and plan your future market or product approach.

In essence, Marketing Automation lets us all do more of the things that marketers are passionate about… marketing!

To find out more about Marketing Automation, download our handbook…