What's the first step to get marketing automation going?

Question

Looking to learn how other folks have gotten the entire process going.  From restructuring your web presence to SEO, CONTENT, KEYWORDS, etc...to get lead generation going?  Seems like a lot to tackle and I'd love to hear how others are doing it? Is it scale-able ?  Where do you start?  and how much will it cost? Thanks!

Answer 1

Having just finished my first year in Eloqua, I've learned a few lessons, and thought I'd share.
1. Share your hunger. For me, learning about Eloqua was an incredible experience - it tied together the marketing fundamentals I learned in school with the analytics practices I learned on the job. I thought I'd finally found marketing nirvana. My first real task was to help other people see the potential as well. This goes beyond cheerleading - it's getting people to commit some of their time and resources to supporting the effort. Figure out how you can create alignment between your stakeholders and marketing automation.
2(a). Focus on implementation. This took us way too long. When we were implementing, we had a beautifully redesigned 6-month old web site and it was mentally painful to think about ripping apart our meticulously designed on-site lead capture forms. We spun our wheels looking for a plugin that would work with our CMS, to no avail. When we finally decided to bite the bullet, it took about a week to embed the forms. No, they're not as pretty (only for lack of front-end dev resources on our side), but they work.
Having functional lead capture on our site pages has unlocked a good deal of the potential I saw in the beginning. Suddenly, the sales team is loving seeing data flow into the SDFC contact record and they're consistently helping me out with new ideas / assets.
2(b). Get training. Eloqua University is an amazing resource. If you have access, take as many classes as you can. They will help you understand the underlying strategy and the mechanics of putting everything together.
3. Start small and increment. Once you have your hands on the tools and everything is working, you're going to get excited about everything you can do. Focus on starting with small, simple things. Don't build huge, complex campaigns at first. Get good at the fundamentals - getting assets together quickly, being consistent with messaging and information collection, thinking through your customer's experience, both in the micro-transaction, in the campaign, and finally in their buying cycle.
4. Keep an eye on the future. Always have a plan for what you want to do in 1, 6, or 12 months. Right now, I'm looking at next investments - SEO, content writing, creative/design, targeting/retargeting and data augmentation - all of which require more budget and resources to leverage. With that in mind, I routinely validate my assumed needs (more tools) with the results I'm getting with what I have now. Do the results support the wish list, or do they call out an unexplored need?