Marketing Automation Framework

If you're heading to the ski slopes this winter, you may see a familiar sight. A skier decked out in the best gear money can buy — you know the one — sleek new goggles, $3,000 skis, brand-name jacket and high-tech boots.

But here's the kicker — he can barely ski.

If this mystery skier were a company, his investors would not be happy. He's missing a vital element in his repertoire, and just like in business, that element is experience and skills.

A marketing automation framework that unlocks your company's potential

Marketing automation products create efficient workflows, save time and help increase conversions. But even the best products on the market need the right people to unlock their full potential.

To create a marketing automation framework, it’s critical to hire the right people and implement the right product. To improve your hiring process, here are some key skills to look out for:

Natural curiosity for customer behaviors
Openness to experimenting and sharing ideas
Respect for the importance of analytics and marketing science
Enthusiastic about technology — especially to create and measure ideas
Focus on engaging customers to drive revenue
Strong communication skills – especially written
Strategic mindset and project management skills

So all those points are relatively generic qualities — almost anyone would love to see people like this on their team.

But when it comes to marketing automation, who are the major players?

The marketing automation manager

Your marketing automation manager ensures all the products in your digital stack are playing nice together. Generally, they’ll be the most experienced person in your team — unafraid to get into the nuts and bolts of your marketing automation platform, CRM system and content management system.

The marketing automation manager ties your entire marketing framework together. They'll have an in-depth knowledge of digital marketing, advertising and lead generation across a variety of platforms and channels. Working closely with your analyst, they'll use data to validate their strategies, monitor performance and increase revenue.

Recommended skills for your marketing automation manager include:

Highly experienced in digital marketing and lead generation
Expert marketing automation skills on all platforms and channels
Efficient in moving the sales/marketing funnel between marketing automation and CRM platforms
Analytical skills for content testing, lead scoring, workflow optimizing and improvement tactics
Natural business acumen and workflow management
Ideally, web development and digital design skills (HTML at a minimum)
API integration skills
Strong experience using and managing CRM systems

The lead nurture manager

As someone who understands your personas and customer journey inside out, the lead nurture manager ensures the right content is reaching the right customers at the right time. They're ideally a creative, flexible organizer who can work with your team to meet aggressive deadlines.

They manage marketing programs on a granular level, creating journeys that ensure customers are nurtured effectively — without feeling harassed. They're familiar with paid advertising, content marketing, multi-channel marketing, analytics and digital advertising strategies.

This is an incredibly important role: a skilled lead nurture manager can produce an average of 20 percent increase in sales opportunities from nurtured leads.

Recommended skills for your lead nurture manager include:

Highly experienced in digital advertising and marketing
Experienced with digital targeting algorithms across all channels
Customer retention/marketing expert
Content management skills including mapping out a customer journey
Highly familiar with persona use and creation
Multi-channel marketing experience (online and offline)
Results measuring through analytics and insights
Sales enablement through the creation of customer journeys that compliment the sales funnel

The analyst

Any good marketing automation framework needs to be built on data. And analysts love data. Their job is to turn numbers and trends into meaningful insights that a company can use. By monitoring the performance of your marketing activities, the analyst's work allows you to optimize your customer and sales journeys.

Ensure your analytics specialist is working closely with the marketing automation manager to ensure automation and CRM systems are capturing accurate and useful information. Reports generated by the analyst are especially helpful for stakeholders and executives like the CMO (Chief Marketing Officer), CFO (Chief Financial Officer), CSO (Chief Security Officer) or CEO (Chief Executive Officer).

Recommended skills for your analyst include:

Develop and implement reporting programs in marketing automation and CRM platforms
Identifies lead generation opportunity and performance patterns
The knowledge to recognize and focus on data that accurately measures results
Some marketing automation skills for developing reports
Skilled in analytics and insights software like Google Analytics, Heap and Autopilot Insights
Macro-level data analysis
Can communicate data clearly with the CMO, CFO, CSO and CEO
Collaborates with managers to identify campaign and advertising opportunities

Creative team

Finally, creative teams are the ones who produce customer-facing content. This team usually contains a designer, copywriter and content marketer — depending on the needs of your company.

The creative team is guided by senior staff to plan and create content. It's critical that they communicate with managers to gain a strong understanding of the marketing automation framework and strategy.

A good creative team will create content that is effective, interesting and sufficiently personalized for each stage of the customer journey. That's a huge part of making your marketing automation work; delivering content that:

Customers want to see
Generates leads
Nurtures leads towards a purchase
Grows loyal customer bases

When you invest in great marketing automation software, don't forget to also invest in great people. A great marketing automation team will use a product like Autopilot to it's fullest potential.