Why Content Marketing, Marketing Automation & Marketing Orchestration Is Like Making a Hollywood Blockbuster

By Fahima Miah

We're living in a society where films are already becoming the new face of content marketing, without consumers even necessarily realising it. We've blogged previously on this subject [see: here] in terms of how Lego have used their brand to manipulate consumers into viewing their own gated content through the release of The Lego Movie earlier this year and this just goes to show how content marketing already has a presence in the film industry. In fact, even TV advertising is becoming more and more “contenty” as old media desperately tries to jump on the content marketing bandwagon. This is something else we blogged about too [see here] not so long ago. 

This blog – written by our new content marketing intern Fahima - is a bit of an observation piece really which focuses on how the process of executing a successful content marketing campaign using marketing automation and marketing orchestration is uncannily similar to the process of producing an Oscar award-winning movie.  It’s actually a really interesting and incisive analogy from Fahima on what we actually do here at Superfluity Towers and why we're the difference between being an agency who creates The Godfather and those who create straight to DVD fodder like that on the left! 

As with many things marketing - and film making - there is usually some sort of roadmap to success – a blueprint if you like. Likewise, there are certain similar stages that come to mind when one embarks on making a movie or a content marketing strategy, including:

 

1. The ideas stage (the script)
2. The planning stage
3. The production stages (pre-production, production, post-production)
4. The distribution elements
5. The tracking and measurement of the outcomes (the sequel)

We’ll cover each in turn:

(1) The Ideas Stage

When directors conjure up an idea for an amazing new movie, they will generally have a rough idea of what the theme is going to be.  For example; if the film is going to be geared towards children then there’s no point creating an 18 rated horror movie. If the film is going to be geared towards 18 – 35 year old males then a rom-com is probably not the right way to go. They’ll have their fingers on the pulse of what movie goers are actually looking for (and this can be equated to some extent with SEO and SEM).   

Similarly, in the planning stages of a content marketing campaign, content marketing specialists like Superfluity  will usually have an idea of what kind of market the content will be targeted at. This will be done using the information gleaned from the client's bespoke customer persona's created by Superfluity which gives us a clearer idea of what sort of person/company the client is looking to attract - and engage with.  The persona's help create an end product that is designed with the individual in mind.  

So, with both film making and content marketing -  the theme must be appropriate for the ideal customer segment. Some content will be designed to be what Hollywood describe as having four quadrant appeal (i.e. it appeals to males and females, young and old), especially if it’s demand generation content aimed at a broad audience. You could call this the Michael Bay approach. Other content will be the equivalent of an arthouse movie because it is intentionally niche and specific. You could call this the Lars von Trier approach. Most content though will be somewhere in the middle – relatively broad in appeal but very, very high quality production values and an intelligent script. This is the Michael Mann approach.

"@SuperfluityUK are the Michael Mann of #ContentMarketing & #MarketingAutomation. It's about script, production values & smart distribution"
TWEET THIS

(2) Planning Stage

At this stage, the Superfluity team starts to really plan and map out the key features of the content.  This is a crucial part of the process because professional marketers and film makers alike both aspire to create content that will capture the audiences imagination through the art of storytelling.  

Conducting research in the film-making industry includes many things such as location scouting, finding the ideal format for the movie (digital, traditional film, hand-held etc.), costume design, speaking with subject experts etc.  For any director, finding the best location to shoot the movie is also imperative.  Shooting 'The Lego Movie' on a hand-held camera in the middle of the deepest, darkest, woods "Blair Witch Style" would be entirely inappropriate for both the audience and the theme. The same goes for a piece of content.  Good content marketers like Superfluity know from experience where the best locations to place any piece of particular content. At Superfluity, we know that if you're on a train and you open up a chunky PDF on your iPhone then you're probably not going to view it. In this situation we would instead maybe send an infographic or a meme since they’re both optimised to be more consumable from that location.  At Superfluity, we believe that content, context and format must always flow in unison. It's probably the same with a movie. Would you prefer to watch Gravity in 3D either at an IMAX or with BlueRay on a 70 inch LED TV or would you want to struggle to watch a tiny pixelated version of it on your smartphone?

"@SuperfluityUK we believe that content, context & format must always flow in unison #contentmarketing #marketingautomation #orchestration"
TWEET THIS

Given the complexion of our clients – many of whom are in the cloud/IT/technology sector (and thus often have highly technical products and services) – research really is a key element of what we do at Superfluity because our aim is to always create killer content no matter how complex, niche or technical the subject matter. It’s quite an art actually and is something that most agencies fall down on (by creating fluffy content that serves little or no purpose). However, given our unrivalled experience and our unique approach then it is something that we have proven to be tremendously good at - whether it’s writing content about Citrix XenApp hosting, creating guides on the environmental benefits of Microsoft SharePoint or demonstrating how Desktops-as-a-Service using VMware is the next big thing! We never forget too that you cannot sugar coat marketing content as content marketing because that’s the equivalent of a film that is absolutely littered with product placement!

(3) Production

During the pre-production stage, film makers begin to think about the cast that they want to feature in the film.  In content marketing terms, casting relates to the tools, techniques and resources we may use in order to achieve the desired results. For example, what marketing automation software will we use (e.g. Eloqua or SilverPop or Hubspot)? It's all very well paying £20m to have Sylvester Stallone in your movie (think Marketo) but if you're making a niche film which requires actual acting and a stellar, multi-layered performance then isn't it actually better to cast someone like Christian Bale for a tenth of the price (think Act-On Software)? Big and expensive is often not better.   

Film makers (the producers) then start to think about hiring an experienced, successful director suitable for their movie (along with other key team members like cinematographers).  They will look for directors who can give their film the right kind of look and feel in line with their vision for the movie and this is just the same for businesses looking to outsource elements of their content marketing because, naturally, they will always wish to retain experienced content marketing firms like Superfluity who can produce high quality, high impact content that fits seamlessly with their own brand.  

Production wise then, just like a movie, it’s rarely one person who does everything and the production will also need to have a solid start and finish date – deadlines for movies are just the same in the content marketing world! Depending on the content, the actual production team may straddle several areas – from someone working on the creative design to another person building the assets to frame the content (like landing pages and forms) to someone else creating the main content piece and then someone working on all the social media messaging. Like a movie production though, there is always someone who directs and oversees everything so that their vision is achieved. The vision must match or exceed the expectation of the films financial backers who, in Superfluity’s case, are the clients. Some film backers wish to remain at arms length and just trust the production team to create the movie with little or no involvement from them while others prefer a more collaborative approach. It’s just the same with us and our clients and we’re comfortable working either way. 

There’s no point making a Gandhi (which used something like 300,000 extras alone) if what you really need is a cost-effective yet incredibly successful film like Slumdog Millionaire so production budgets are very important too. We excel at making the most for yours and we really work hard and focus on the detail so that your movie looks like it has Avatar level budgets and production values even if it only cost the same as The Kings Speech. 

In terms of post-production, once the content is completed (i.e. the film has been shot) then the tools we use, like marketing automation, allow us to edit the content into its final format and really fine-tune the movie so that it’s ready for multi-channel, omni-directional distribution.  One of the greatest things about our overall "Mission Control" approach to content marketing, marketing automation and marketing orchestration is that - given our unparallelled experience of filming and releasing more ‘’blockbuster movies’’ than anyone else in Europe – we can produce superb quality films faster and probably better than you ever could yourself because we have all the kit, all the hard fought-for best practice, all the crew and all the bleeding edge technology already in place.

(4) Distribution

When it comes to distribution, film makers have to think about whether they want their movie to hit all the big screens or if they'd prefer it to go straight to DVD (or even just exclusively through something like Netflix). Should the movie only be released in certain countries? Is it some kind of viral, guerrilla movie that’s only going to appear on social media? Will it be showing on the screens of every multiplex or at just a handful of key locations? 

Content marketers like Superfluity think just like this about how and where your content should be released. We consider different time zones, different geographic markets and locations, different formats for different audiences and we always look to optimise the content distribution across all the right channels (including email, social media, watering holes, SEO, websites and mobile). We even think about whether we spell words the English or the American way depending on the audience. We also have to consider things such as the buying cycle because we get the fact that customers at different stages of the cycle require different types of content if we’re going to help them efficiently move through the buying process with velocity.  

Although trying to package marketing content as marketing content is a no-no, there’s still a place for calls-to-action once you’ve got the viewers attention so we always ensure that our movies are 3D i.e. that they are interactive. Think of it as all the popcorn and sweets you buy at the cinema.

(5) Tracking & Measurement

Ultimately, there’s no getting away from the fact that everything boils down to the number of leads created and converted or, in movie parlance, how many bums on seats did we achieve and what was the box office take?

After successfully releasing the film/ the content, we always start planning ahead for the sequel. Marketing automation technology allows content marketers like us to know: 

a) Who looked at the movie trailers/adverts
b) Who walked into the cinema (and what their contact details are) or whether they saw the content through another medium (device) 
c) Precisely what they thought of the movie/the content 
d) All their behaviours and attitudes before, during and after the film
e) Whether they told anyone else about the movie – and then whether they saw it
f) Where that viewer ranks in the food chain (lead scoring)

In fact, every single thing we do is 100% measurable and all of this tracking information is scrutinised, absorbed and then used to help shape the next piece of content i.e. the sequel. Best of all, demand generation, lead nurturing and drip marketing using our marketing automation and marketing orchestration allows us to drag precisely the right audience into see the movie and ensure that the movie is totally personalised towards them in terms of their needs, their sensibilities, their preferred viewing habits and their previous behaviour. We effectively make hundreds (or even thousands) of versions of the same film which are all optimised to the individual viewer. This is just one of the reasons why people queue to see our "movies", it’s why they virtually never walk out or complain, it’s why they tell their friends and peers about it, it's why they visit the movies website and it's why they can't wait for the next instalment.

At the end of the day, if your business wants to ‘make movies’ (i.e. deploy content marketing) then of course - you can do it yourself. However, audiences have a voracious appetite for content and you may either just not have time to keep up with demand or even have the right tools. If that's the case then we can help you to “top up” your content on top of what you already doing yourself (and even re-task old ‘movies’ that you’ve made to suit a contemporary audience). Alternatively, you may just want the viewers and outsource the whole process to us for a very economical price. Maybe you need help on distribution and want to leverage our pioneering watering hole marketing techniques or social media expertise. Either way, it's absolutely essential for any business to employ the right content marketing specialists with the right tools. Not doing so is often the difference between you winning an Oscar and smashing all box office records or having your movie go straight to DVD (and end up being stuck at the bottom of the £1 bargain bin at your corner shop!). 

10 Tough Questions You Should Ask Any Outsourced Marketing Automation & Content Marketing Agency

10 Tough Questions You Should Ask Any Outsourced
Marketing Automation & Content Marketing Agency

There’s no question that content marketing and marketing automation are some of the biggest buzzwords in sales and marketing right now so it’s no surprise that numerous agencies and third party providers have jumped on the good ship automation to offer outsourced solutions. Given the fact that many internal marketing automation projects fail (see our blog on that very subject here) then if marketing automation is something you are considering then it does make complete commercial sense to seriously consider using a professional and credible provider to outsource some or all of the solution for you. Whether that’s to help you adopt and fully manage an automation platform, whether it’s just to offer you professional advice and best practice on your implementation or whether it’s to simply top up your content output and extend your distribution channels then a quality outsourced partner can prove to be an astonishingly powerful asset.

Diametrically, if you’re not careful, you could end up choosing a provider who, instead of empowering you to fully align all your sales and marketing across every channel, ends up shackling you and consigning your brand to enduring a commoditized, painting-by-numbers approach to marketing automation and content marketing. Worse still, you could end up handing over control of something that should be central to your business to a junior account manager, fresh out of university, who is trying to juggle two dozen other accounts (many of whom may even be your competitors). Do you really want to pay a third party to just churn out fluffy and formulaic content in Microsoft Word?

When deployed correctly with a high quality agency - and we are certainly not the only agency who fit that bracket – and when deployed in an omni-channel, multi-directional way; marketing automation and content marketing have the potential to revolutionise your business in an extremely cost-effective way. Deployed incorrectly; it can not only be an expensive and flawed exercise in futility but can end up being incredibly damaging to your brand - and hinder your sales efforts. 

Outsourced Marketing
Automation - The Truth

Superfluity recommend that you do look at outsourcing some or all of the marketing automation implementation and management process to a professional agency as, in most cases, the agency will then afford you incredible agility, scalability and economies of scale (among many other things). Picking the right partner can give you access to all their hard fought-for best practice and allow you to enjoy price points that you would unlikely be able to replicate yourselves. 

Our competitors won’t thank us for this (but hey, we’re certainly not known for being scared to speak our mind and be brutally transparent) but it’s clearly an important decision and we want to help ensure that you do end up picking a partner that’s right. You should ask any potential provider questions based around the following 10 areas:

(1) When it comes to the various marketing automation platforms available - is your potential partner genuinely supplier neutral?

You may not know this but most outsourced providers are completely tethered to a single automation platform. While there’s nothing wrong with having a preferred platform (we certainly do - Act-On Software) nobody likes a Hobson’s choice. Your partners chosen platform may not prove to be right for you because different platforms have different benefits depending on a whole range of factors (not least industry, business size, budget, primary channels etc.).  While marketing automation should be bleeding edge and outside the box, most providers have built a box inside a box and are refusing to come out…

Is your partner "vendor agnostic"?
Really? Are you sure?

Ask yourself whether you should be coerced into committing to a particular automation platform just because that’s the one your chosen agency is embedded with (likely the one they get the most kickbacks from) and for which their staff have probably only ever had exposure to? Does your vendor claim to be vendor agnostic with one hand while banging the drum for a particular platform with the other? Is your provider busy running timeshare-style sales presentations and seminars with one automation software partner while recommending you then pay them to assess the different platforms on your behalf? Are they really likely to be objective? 

You must assess the alternatives and you must do so independently. Be exceptionally cautious in paying a provider to do your due-diligence and your platform selection for you because more often than not they will have vested interests. Our advice is that before you commit to any platform - either directly or via a partner - be sure to personally check out at least half a dozen of the alternatives yourself, even if you think you will never be using it directly. Feel free to ask us for a full list of the platforms you should look at (but if you want a good spread then we immediately recommend you look at Act-On, Hubspot, Oracle Eloqua, IBM Silverpop, SimplyCast and Salesforce Pardot).

If you find your partner is being intransigent on you using/purchasing their preferred marketing automation platform and if you find yourself being pressured and over-sold into going with that choice then it’s a simple option… just go find another partner who won’t straightjacket you!

(2) What’s the partners position on knowledge transfer?

It’s worth stressing that outsourcing your marketing automation and/or content marketing to a professional agency can allow you to mitigate many of the costs usually involved in its implementation – especially in terms of expensive training plus the overall speed to adoption.

One day though you may wish to pull things back in-house - either entirely or at least in phases. It’s vital that you clarify, very precisely, what your partners position is on knowledge transfer. Many agencies intentionally keep their clients at arm’s length and as far away as possible from the marketing automation platform the client is paying for. Why? Because not only can they maintain a level of mystique about what they do for you but because they are locking you in by making themselves completely indispensible. There’s nothing particularly sinister about that (and it’s a completely understandable yet short-sighted tactic from a commercial perspective) but marketing automation is a long-term and sustainable approach to sales and marketing so it is essential you take an over the horizon view on it. Ultimately you will need to be completely comfortable using your own platform, even if it’s just to benchmark the value you are (or aren’t) receiving from the provider.  Don’t ever let a provider raise barriers to you receiving long term value.

At Superfluity we look at it this way - if we keep doing a tremendous job for clients and if we keep delivering them incredible value then there is no reason why a client would ever wish to walk away. So why would we ever want to prevent our clients from really getting underneath their marketing automation platform? We take the time to expose them to every element of it and we train them - for free – not just on the platform but on our overall Mission Control approach to marketing automation, inbound marketing and content marketing. As a boutique agency we have found that providing a structured knowledge transfer programme to our clients means they end up becoming even more committed to our commercial relationship than they otherwise would have been. Why? Because they visibly appreciate the remarkable value of what we do an awful lot more and they are able to fully quantify our output across every area. To not do so is, in our humble opinion, incredibly avaricious and myopic. Over time we aim to help our clients become more strategic via knowledge transfer while we become more tactical. This leads to more collaborative relationships where we are not just a provider but a partner.

Never forget that whatever your agency creates and deploys for you and whatever the level of knowledge transfer; all of the output and IP is yours – the content assets, the data, the personas, the analytics etc. It’s your brand. Be sure to understand how easy it is for you to take control of that output if ever (and whenever) you wanted to. What's their roadmap should you ever wish to extricate yourself from the relationship.

(3) Who is actually creating/writing/designing/deploying your content?

Marketing automation is a voracious consumer of content and creating engaging content that works is far from an easy task (plus it can certainly be time-consuming – not least to create but also to correctly deploy). Having an experienced provider on hand who can completely take care of it for you (or at least supplement your own efforts) can really liberate you in this area and allow you to focus on the more important things. Retaining a quality agency is a smart and usually highly cost-effective move. Problem is that there’s a huge spread out there in terms of quality between the different agencies...

Do agencies with slides & ballponds create better content?

First there are the more classic creative agencies who are generally able to craft incredibly beautiful and innovative looking content. The key issue is this content can frequently be style over substance with the actual meat of the content being fluffy (maybe because it is often written by purely ‘artistic’ types with little or no real world commercial experience). If you need your content to ultimately drive sales – and you probably do – do you want vanity content or do you want something that actually drives revenue? The two are not (and should not be) mutually exclusive but, sadly, for some agencies they just are. And remember too that just because your ‘quirky’ agency has beanbags, ballponds and grass carpeting in their office; this will have absolutely no impact on the ROI of your outsourced marketing automation and content marketing campaigns!

  

Do you want inexperienced kids writing content for you?

Next there are what we not-so-politely label the mutton-dressed-as-lamb, sales lead generation/telemarketing agencies who are all about just accumulating clients and who have only recently jumped ship into low-level content marketing and marketing automation as a vehicle to dress-up and differentiate their pay-as-you-go leads. Vital as leads are; there’s a whole lot more to marketing automation and content marketing than leads alone and it should form part of an overall business strategy designed to supercharge your investments in everything sales and marketing orientated. These lead generation agencies tend to really only use marketing automation in a very linear and closeted way so as to pay lip-service to their clients and mask what is still just basic email and interruption marketing. In our experience, their content is usually designed by interns or kids fresh out of university so there tends to be a glaring lack of commercial acumen and/or creative sensibilities in their output. Content created by these providers can often be prescriptive, derivative and dull - at least after the first piece of ‘showcase’ content has been created. Worse - it may have been re-spun or plagiarized from other content they’ve either done themselves for another client or worse - just ripped from the web. Lead generation agencies have a nasty habit of reverting to type i.e. abandoning content marketing and marketing automation sensibilities to just go for the short-term, route one approach.

Finally there are the small handful of dedicated content marketing and automation agencies that are actually any good! We’re not afraid of saying that there are surprisingly few with good all-round capability (but ask us who and we'll tell you!). Offering proven and harmonised services across every channel and digital discipline is (and should be) important. You should look very carefully at your provider across a number of benchmarks. Look at their existing content in terms of its complexion, aesthetics, innovation, interactivity and commercial appeal. Look at what marketing automation platform they use (and how they use it). How harmonised are they across every channel and technique? What is their own social media prowess. You should also carefully examine the individual commercial experience of the team who will be directly working for you - easily done these days via LinkedIn. Does the collar match the cuffs in all the areas that matter to you? Will their team be able to write and design compelling content for you - no matter how complex or technical your product or service is?

(4) Does the agency re-spin content (and even data) between competitive clients?

Too shocking a question to even ask? Think it’s a rare scenario? 

It’s not as rare as you’d hope….

We know of more than one agency who not only churn out the same pieces of clichéd content in more-or-less the same format for half a dozen competitive clients but who are also happy to take the top responding data from one clients managed marketing automation instance to use with new clients they’re onboarding to give themselves a successful headstart - at the expense of their existing customer. They even serve the same hot leads from one client to several others so they can maximise their yield from pay-per-lead pricing elements. 

Is your partners team overworked & are they cross
contaminating with others in your industry?

This is, thankfully, an extreme case and it’s certainly unethical but it’s the kind of worst-case scenario that you will definitely wish to avoid. Interrogate your potential provider carefully on which clients they’re working with and how they ringfence not just your competitors but all of their accounts. If they claim dozens of automation clients then, unless they have a seriously large global team, how many staff do they actually have and how many of them actually create content? If they only have a few marketing automation and content marketing centric staff versus a large claimed client base then it’s of course inevitable that the person(s) managing your account will not only be overworked (and far from dedicated to your project) but they may well also be cross-contaminating with others in your industry either intentionally or not. It’s such a problem for some agencies that they often claim headcount that doesn’t even exist! 

As a business, we limit our team to working on no more than 3 non-competing clients each. When we onboard new clients we simply scale our resource and we never distribute ever-increasing workloads across the same headcount because that means every other client would get a poorer service. Does this approach cost us more? Yes. Do we believe that our own business growth should be a positive factor to clients, never a negative one? Yes.

(5) What’s their profile like on social media?

Social media is a crucial but at times under-utilised or overlooked area of marketing automation. We’re not just talking here about the ability to send Tweets or Facebook posts – anyone should be able to do that. We’re talking about using social media to truly engage with – and grow – your audience. Using it to dovetail and add value to everything else such as SEO. Using social media to proactively generate inbound leads. Using it to listen. Turning it into a high performing sales and CRM channel for your business.  

While there are some incredibly talented agencies out there across social media (and we’re not afraid of giving you a list of the various ones we admire – just ask) there are many who position themselves as automation and content marketing experts who really couldn’t tell the difference between a tweet and a loaf of bread! We were looking at an agency yesterday who we rate very highly in terms of their client list and also in the general quality of their content. They have good marketing automation experience and are entrenched with an automation platform which happens to be one of the best out there for social media. We were thus very surprised to learn that, for an agency who are self-proclaimed experts in content driven social media marketing, they only had a handful of Twitter followers and had posted the same one line tweet over 140 times this year alone (accounting for over 90% of their Twitter activity)! If we were a client then no matter how good their content was and no matter how great their MA platform; their lack of social media credibility would not give us any confidence in their ability to deploy anything socially let alone in their ability to fashion unique content. 

Social media should be a key channel alongside email, watering hole marketing and syndication so it has to be treated seriously by any prospective partner. Anyone providing any kind of managed marketing automation or content marketing service is B2B by design so check them out on Twitter and LinkedIn to see what their own profile is like. Are their tweets engaging, timely and contextual or are they just auto-tweeting statistics and generic flannel? Are they thought leaders with thousands and thousands of followers or are they just tweeting to the ether? If they’ve not got a credible presence - and if they are struggling to position themselves socially - then ask yourself how good a job do you think they will do for your brand?

(6) What do they create their content in?

What does your agency use
to create your content?

Sound like an obvious thing? We see (and enthuse) over seriously stunning examples of world class content every day from many of our peers. There are some exceptionally talented people out there. 

Just as frequently though we see shocking quality content that has clearly been quickly cobbled together with no attention to detail and then packaged into maybe a basic pdf using MS Word. 

Many clients new to content marketing just haven’t yet got the experience or enough of a critical eye to tell the difference between great content – content that can help their business - and basic marketing content that has been sugar coated as content marketing (and then often poorly deployed out of context). If your partner can’t be bothered (or isn’t able) to even create a pdf in something as simple as Adobe In-Design then you should really worry. If they have to resort to using off-the-shelf packages like Piktochart to build you an infographic then they clearly have little or no in-house design capabilities. If you see a document that doesn’t have the basics encapsulated in it – be it tweetable quotes or working hyperlinks – they have no attention to detail. 

Bad content can be as damaging to your brand as interruption marketing.

(7) What’s their pricing model? 

The cost of providing managed services for marketing automation and content marketing is largely driven by time plus the cost of the marketing automation license itself (in terms of the number of contacts you have under management). 

If you’re paying several thousand of pounds a month (or possibly more) to a provider then you’ll probably be a little aggrieved if you then discover they’re only really spending a day or two a month on your campaign. Are they merely creating and deploying one or two pieces of original content for you and perhaps sending the odd tweet? Do they seem like the type of partner who will charge you on a unit basis for everything e.g. per lead nurturing programme? Seriously? On top of the actual services they are providing you with (demand generation, lead nurturing, drip marketing, RPM, SMM etc.), are they charging you anywhere near the listed price for your marketing automation platform i.e the price for the number of ‘contacts under management’ that they are managing for you? If so you are likely being enormously mislead because they should be passing on the massive savings that they are no doubt making for being an agency partner. Your partner should only be asking you for a contribution towards their real cost. Feel free to ask us for an opinion on any element of a quote you have received and we’ll tell you the real truth behind the numbers.

What hidden extras and premiums are there? Account management? Training costs? Get out of town! We’ve even heard of people being charged a premium just because their staff are pseudo “certified” on the automation platform they were press-ganged into purchasing. Staggering as it is to hear, there are one or two marketing automation platforms out there (like Marketo) who physically charge their customers/users to become “accredited” users of the platform. In this case, this type of accreditation is to be frank a complete misnomer and is a redundant, non-independent, made-up, non-certification that has no real value or credibility. It’s certainly not a badge of honour - it’s like a taxi driver in a Ford Focus charging you an extra fee just because they have a piece of paper from Ford saying that they are a Ford Focus driver!  Duh!

What are their upfront contract terms? If it’s anything more restrictive than an initial proof of concept over two or three months then think very, very carefully. Do they demand you pay everything upfront? Why? Think carefully about how you are being locked in and how you can extricate yourself should you ever need to.

(8) What are their content distribution channels?

We’ve touched on some points relevant to this earlier so we’ll keep this one short. In addition to content driven email marketing then if you partner isn’t also absolutely all over every area of social media marketing, watering hole marketing, curation/syndication then ask why not. If they’re not also dovetailing and harmonising those channels with all the other important things like SEO, SEM and RPM then ask even more questions. If you’re buying into just emailing people and then either them or you following them up by phone then trust us – you’re actually not really doing content marketing and marketing automation. If that's what you want then that's fine - just don't be sold something as one thing that's actually another. 

(9) Do they provide a boutique or a commoditized service?

From a service perspective, how accessible is your partner? We know a couple who try and kettle their customers into only calling them after 5pm just to make their own lives easier!

How proactive are they with you (because they should constantly be giving you ideas and taking the initiative)? How flexible are they? Will they whip out your service level agreement every time you need something? How long does it take to just get things done? Since being pitched by one of their directors, have you been relegated to a junior thereafter? How easy are they to deal with on a day-to-day basis? Are they hassle-free?

From a product and solution perspective, how bespoke and specialised is it? Does it feel like an off-the-shelf, menu style, formulaic solution or do you genuinely get the impression they are working with you intimately and collaboratively to achieve common goals? Do they constantly push the envelope to craft innovative, outside the box content and campaigns across multiple mediums and channels or are they very prescriptive and rigid?

(10) Do their testimonials and case studies stack-up?

We guess the same goes for most products and services you may ever buy but you'd be amazed by some of the false claims we regularly hear from providers.

While we won't say anything potentially litigious; we would urge you to carefully check case studies and client testimonials against what the end client says to you in person. Outsourced marketing automation is pretty new so did they really provide the service they claimed to years ago or have they just reinvented the narrative to suit the here and now? Was the customer really happy or have quotes been taken out of context (or even blatantly fabicated)?

And on that bombshell...

As we said, we're not afraid to say it how it is. We may do so in a tongue in cheek way but it's a serious subject. Are we perfect ourselves? Probably not but all of these issues were front of mind when we built Superfluity so we intentionally looked to eliminate them all at source. That's one of the reasons we developed our Mission Control approach, it's why we provide a genuine boutique service and it's shaped everything from our technology to our HR policy. Others have done the same - but not all. Forewarned is as they say forearmed so, hopefully, you'll take some of these tough questions and put them to your partner. Feel free to email us or comment on this blog and do let us know how you get on - we're happy to hear the horror stories but even better; we love to hear about what other providers are doing right (because maybe we can learn something ourselves).

The Top 10 Reasons Why Internal Marketing Automation Projects Fail

While the power and ROI of the various marketing automation platforms out there is, quite frankly, incontestable - many companies who try to adopt and manage marketing automation by themselves to transform their businesses at best struggle or at worst fail completely. 

That of course is one of the reasons Superfluity exist - our team has all the hard-fought best practice and front-line experience gained from more marketing automation implementations than any other provider we're aware of. We've built our agency from the ground up to mitigate all the mistakes, failures and shortcomings of other agencies whilst incorporating all the fundamentals and value adds into our offering, Even still, we know full well how difficult and challenging it can be to deliver a successful marketing automation project.

There are many good (and often full appreciable) reasons why marketing automation implementation projects fail and we're keen to give you a comprehensive heads-up on precisely what those reasons are. In our experience, the Top 10 Reasons Why Internal Marketing Automation Projects Fail are as follows:

(1) Inability To Use All The Functionality

It generally holds true that you don’t have to be an IT genius to use many of the leading marketing automation (MA) platforms. Aside from nightmarish, inflated platforms like Marketo, most of them are relatively user friendly – at least to those already experienced in using digital marketing technology. 

However; there is a huge difference between being a casual user of a platform and a power user and the former will often ignore (or not even notice) many areas of the available functionality offered by any given platform. Someone familiar with classic email marketing tasked with implementing an automation solution may not also be, for example, familiar with persona driven content marketing, social media, SEM, SEO, website forensics, RPM and inbound marketing as a discipline. 

Consequently, many companies - and even agencies - using MA find themselves using it as a glorified email broadcast tool [tweet this]. Equally, we speak with many companies who think they're using the full capabilities of a platform only to find from discussion with us that they could be doing so much more - and better. Only 25% of businesses who have adopted MA think that they are using anywhere near the full capabilities of their platform (Forrester Research) [tweet this].

(2) Inability To Craft The Right Type Of Content

Content is very much king - not just for marketing automation but also for virtually everything these days, including SEO. The ability to craft the right type and complexion of contemporary content and balance that with all the other important things like aesthetics, context, watering hole marketing, device used etc. is a lot easier said than done. 

Using a platform is one thing. Knowing how to craft and distribute compelling and engaging content that delivers results is another thing altogether.  It can also be very time consuming and prohibitively expensive for many businesses to do right.

Common sense dictates that the subset of people who are fully able to (a) use a platform to its true potential, (b) create the right content and (c) then strategically distribute that content effectively (and not just via email but also via watering holes, syndication, curation etc.) is fractional. Having the requisite commercial acumen, real world experience and sales expertise on top of that - to tie everything into actual results - is even more uncommon. We know a lot of people in this space who - while great at using the actual platform - just can't help but sugar-coat marketing content as content marketing and/or create fluffy pseudo content. Why? Because they know no better and they do not understand the big social and digital picture, especially in the context of marketing automation and marketing orchestration. 

Genuine all-rounder's are not only hard to come by but they are very expensive. The recent jobs and salaries listed below are just for entry-level, account executive style staff so imagine what you would need to pay for experts! Even on the agency side - it's no surprise that many of the more stack-it-high, sell-it-low providers of outsourced marketing automation sacrifice quality for cost in this area by watering down their offering and by using interns and apprentices to manage their client campaigns. We've seen ratios as high as 30 clients per member of staff at other agencies (with barely hours a week spent on individual campaigns). As a leading boutique provider, we cap our own client to staff ratios at no more than 3 and we just don't employ fresh faced kids - the stakes are just too high for our clients.

There’s an awful lot more under the marketing automation bonnet than just sending emails and tracking results and there is a fine art to crafting and distributing compelling content that not only delivers world class results but which harmonises all your investments across your social and digital landscape.

With automation, you have to keep ‘feeding the machine’ with original content and that takes time - even with the incredible efficiencies and tools these platforms offer. While most businesses have at least some quantity of existing content that can be used content marketing; most just don't have anywhere enough of it.  Even if you think you have a good bank of content already then it will still need to be adapted, framed and packaged up into contemporary content and then distributed innovatively – not just by email but also across social media, online watering holes etc. If the content isn’t good enough - or in the right context and format - you won't get results and you won't extract maximum ROI from your platform [tweet this]

(3) Inability To Find - And Retain - The Internal Resource
One of the key challenges for businesses is finding the internal resource to adopt, implement and manage the platform in the first place - and capitalise on the significant investment in marketing automation. 

Many companies struggle for 6 months or more to implement a platform only to find that they’re only really using it as an expensive email broadcast or website visitor tracking tool. Others struggle to retain the staff they have just paid thousands to get trained since there is an extraordinary brain drain (with many companies prepared to offer a great deal of money to acquire those very few people who genuinely have high impact MA experience in content marketing using these platforms). 

On the other hand - many agencies try and keep their clients at arm's length to maintain the mystique of their work (or just hide it) and desperately try to avoid letting their clients build skills on the platform that they're paying the agency to manage (out of a fear of the client taking things in-house). Personally, we're big believers in knowledge transfer and taking the client on the marketing automation journey [tweet this] that they're actually paying for so from day one we build a roadmap for all our clients to transition some or all of their managed service in-house and we then work with them over the course of the relationship - at no additional cost - to make this happen. Client relationships should be collaborative, not competitive.

It's very important to note that while you may think your automation platform partner will train you on everything you need to know the fact is that they won't - they'll provide basic support. Some/most will charge for training and set-up for starters and if they don't, the support you get will be retrospective and not on-demand. If you need to know anything then all of them will either first refer you to a video or a digital guide or they will, at best, book a quick 20 minute online call with you and that will usually be several days later at their convenience. You may have a sexy sounding "customer success manager" assigned to you but picture it like this. You've bought a car. They expect you to know how to drive so they of course won't teach you any of that. They're not management consultants nor will they know - or be expected to know - how to help you with marketing strategy. At their discretion, they'll merely show you round the cockpit of the car, explain how to turn the windscreen wipers on, point out where the cupholders are and show you how to use the radio. What they won't show you is how to really get under the bonnet to supercharge your car (or fix it). They won't show you how to hook your car up to the 3rd party caravan or trailer which you need to bolt on. They won't show you how to use advanced techniques like toe and heel driving because they only expect you to use the car for the basics (like lead nurturing) and not for advanced track racing (like content curation, true demand generation etc.). They certainly won't tell you about the raft of workarounds you have to find, learn and implement to mitigate the many naunces and flaws they have in their product (and trust us - they all have them!).

(4) Inability To Join The Dots

Although generally user friendly; most of the good systems are still relatively complex for the uninitiated and will ultimately require trained, talented and dedicated professionals able to operate them - if they’re going to be used to their full potential. Best case scenario is someone new to any given platform will usually require 3 to 6 months of dedicated usage to become what we would describe as a semi-competent, casual user. 

Furthermore, those operators must be able to build the right processes and frameworks to tether all their social, digital and even offline channels together so that they work in complete unison - all using best practice. It’s hard to know what best practice is though if you have never it done it before - and done so multiple times. The technology and the overall approach is so new to the UK that there just aren’t many power users out there and those who do exist command six figure packages.

This is an equally large problem for some agencies who think that just having a couple of kids fresh out of university creating content and using a platform mostly for email marketing (with maybe the odd tweet or LinkedIn post thrown in for lip service) is good enough. It isn’t. Neither is spinning content between competing clients, sharing data or having such a high staff to client ratio that clients only really get a few hours a week. It's like an oligarch hiring a full-time bodyguard who turns out to be a kid who juggles the protection of 20 other oligarch's with the limitations of only having a pea-shooter! 33% of companies that outsource their content marketing claim their agencies do not fully understand the content needs of their audience.

Writing content that is attractive, relevant to the prospects place in the buying cycle and correctly geared commercially usually requires years of practical business experience if it’s not going to end up being labelled as fluffy pseudo marketing. Bad content marketing is just as ineffective as interruption marketing [tweet this]. 

(5) Inability To Fully Benefit From Best Practice

Being able to use marketing automation as part of a complete ‘Mission Control’ marketing orchestration solution is often a huge challenge to businesses. While there is plenty of best practice material available on the internet, until you have physically been involved in a number of wide-scope implementations then you will, understandably, make mistakes. Mistakes cost you time, money and even reputation in extreme cases and they certainly delay ROI. We made countless mistakes over the years and it is this hard fought-for experience which now allows us to dramatically improve every other project we will ever implement and manage which saves our clients time and money by providing them with an agile solution that works first time, on time. 

Businesses who fail with their automation programme rarely blame the platform. Instead they just wished they had done things better/differently with the benefit of 20/20 hindsight [tweet this].

(6) Limited Access To Training & Support 

Access to ongoing training, support and knowledge transfer is a critical element of adopting marketing automation. As alluded to earlier, most of the marketing automation providers do not provide on demand support and certainly not to their non-enterprise customers (or at least not after a short honeymoon period). Those who do offer support usually charge for any additional training and/or helpdesk style assistance (with Marketo being one of the worst and most expensive culprits). 

Charging people through the nose to become certified on their product is like Mercedes charging everyone who buys one of their cars a big additional fee just to be called a Mercedes driver! Even Act-On (the most complete and competitive platform on the market who, to their enduring credit, assign Customer Success Managers to every client for free) are now charging new clients between $399 and $2,499 for basic set-up, implementation and training but as stated, with or without that the training is very limited and is more basic support.  Marketo charge £4,800 per year just to integrate Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 so imagine how much they charge for training and support (and then double that figure) [tweet this]! 

Superfluity, by the way, allow clients to entirely avoid all these costs. All the time.

(7) Not Starting With The End In Mind

Marketing automation is essentially a process enabler that underpins a larger strategy and is generally not a strategy in itself. It is essential to build clear objectives where the outcomes that you require are fully defined from the get-go.  Although short term gains are fully achievable with MA, it is ultimately a medium to long term, sustainable business strategy (and often a complete paradigm shift) that needs to start with the end in mind.  It’s no good, for example, automating processes and/or your buying cycle if you don’t first audit and understand what your processes and buying cycles are to begin with - and establish how they should be best flexed.

Many businesses whose automation projects failed found that, on reflection, their objectives just weren’t clear or coherent from the get go and that they weren’t ready - or even able - to expose themselves to the full suite of features. The net result was that they found their chosen platform was expensive overkill compared to their available skillset and/or resource.

(8) Not Enough Sales & Marketing Alignment

It takes time to build processes and to really get underneath both the existing and the optimum relationship between sales and marketing, especially in terms of how they each impact on the buying cycle in their own unique way. As a result, marketing teams using MA can get confused by what stage they should be taking opportunities to and, diametrically, sales teams can find themselves harvesting leads too early in their lifecycle.  

We've seen salespeople attempt to prevent the marketing team accessing their customers and prospects and resist passing leads back to marketing for them to be recycled (leaving them to fallow instead) and they frequently avoid sharing information. As a consequence, the lead nurturing, cross-sell, upsell and CRM capabilities of marketing automation can often not be used to their full potential. Equally, we've seen marketing teams become overly precious about leads that they're creating. Factor in an overpriced agency trying to fit square pegs into round holes with a formulaic, by-the-book approach to marketing automation implementation (instead of a bespoke, boutique solution that's designed to work for the client - not the agency) and clients sales and marketing teams often end up remaining in their respective bunkers. 

(9) Not Bringing All Stakeholders Into The Process & On The Journey

Numerous companies who failed with marketing automation implementations had asked their marketing team to implement the solution and had not brought other stakeholders in the business - sales and commercial for example - into the process from the start. A true understanding of important things like sales processes and the buying cycle were thus absent and had to be re-engineered into the project late in the day as a bolt-

It's important to be sensitive and transparent with the people involved in your project. Your marketing team may feel that marketing automation will ultimately replace them and see them out of a job. In reality, marketing automation should actually bring them closer to the centre of the business, make what they do more appreciated and visible and allow them to become a lot more strategic and front-foot. Equally, sales people may think that it's such a paragon of virtue that they'll never have to pick up the phone again. That may well happen but it will not happen overnight - and perhaps never happen if you're implementation fails - so expectations have to be tempered and realistic.

All the stakeholders in a business have to work together as a team when it comes to adopting marketing automation. If you're looking to outsource the process to an agency (and we strongly recommend you do - even if it's not us!) then look for one who can demonstrate an ability to think outside the box and offer you a bespoke solution. Too many agencies have built a box within a box and are refusing to come out [tweet this]!

(10) No Economies Of Scale

By default, companies purchasing marketing automation themselves will generally not have access to economies of scale when it comes to the price. The pricing model used by most marketing automation platforms means that the greater the number of overall ‘contacts under management’ within a platform then the lower the overall unit cost per contact. 

Clients doing it themselves will never receive the financial benefit of leveraging rates from all the other clients who have contacts under management through a leading agency like Superfluity. As the UK's fastest growing and most cost-effective provider of outsourced marketing automation services and multi-touch, omni-channel content marketing and inbound marketing solutions with literally millions of contacts under management - we're proud to guarantee that our clients will always enjoy a dramatically lower rate purchasing marketing automation through us then they could ever hope to receive themselves by purchasing it directly. They'll get better contract terms too (no 12 month contracts from the get-go for starters). They avoid all training and support costs and they get knowledge transfer from our experts (who even the automation platforms themselves ask advice from).