Lessons Learned: A Reflection on Marketing Automation | B2B Marketing Blog.

Expectations: Flash back two years. I was at my previous employer, a small high-tech company. With only two marketers, we were struggling to keep up with our growing database across multiple systems. We found that using our CRM to handle our lead management and reporting ended up creating more problems, such as duplication. We decided to exploremarketing automation to help simplify our marketing efforts, namely in the areas of lead management,lead nurturing, and campaign tracking. We went forward with an entry-level automation solution, which we felt would let us do everything we needed.

New Expectations: Being a new user of marketing automation, my expectations were fairly low, as I was fixated on the potential it had to make marketing easier. I read marketing automation white papers, sat through marketing best practices webinars, and participated in community forums, trying to optimize my marketing automation know-how. Since I was the primary user of marketing automation, I developed a great understanding of features, capabilities, and limitations quite fast. It seemed the more I used and read, the more my expectations increased.

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