Maximising marketing automation ROI: How to get the most from your marketing tech

Measuring marketing ROI has never been more important. With squeezed budgets and streamlined teams, understanding how efficient and effective your marketing efforts is becoming an increasingly critical business KPI.

While marketing automation tools are a key contributor to overall marketing efficiency, they also need to be scrutinised to ensure they’re delivering the capabilities you need.

That’s where a System Health Check becomes invaluable.

The importance of a System Health Check

With marketing automation platforms forming the backbone of all your marketing activities, it’s important that they’re regularly reviewed to ensure they’re meeting your marketing and wider business requirements.  

The reality for many marketing teams is that the complexity of today’s marketing platforms can actually be a barrier to getting the most out of them. 

Not only do platform capabilities change frequently, but your marketing programmes will also be continually evolving, affecting what technologies you do and don’t need. 

System Health Check is therefore fundamental to driving marketing performance improvements for the long-term.  

A health check will give you a clear overview of what is set up, implemented and utilised within your marketing automation platforms. It will also deliver a baseline view of your marketing automation maturity, highlighting what’s working well, what’s not working and what’s missing. 

By highlighting gaps or lack of utilisation of marketing automation capabilities, you can map current and future marketing needs against the functionality you need – and whether your existing platforms are able to deliver this.

Are you getting the most out of your marketing automation platforms?

There are myriad reasons why it’s likely most marketing teams aren’t using marketing platforms to their full potential.  

It’s often the case that your marketing team has inherited one or more platforms from predecessors or through integration or acquisition. Understanding how these inherited tools can meet the needs of your current marketing programmes takes time and resource. 

Similarly, your platforms may have been in place for a long time and you’re in need of a refresh about how they can meet new marketing requirements. 

For many more teams, internal teams are so focused on their day jobs that they simply don’t have the time to explore the functionality that your platforms can deliver. 

Whatever the reason, key opportunities to maximise the work your platforms can do are likely being missed. And since using automation has been proven to improve productivity and lead generation, as well as increasing customer engagement, ROI benefits are being missed too. 

The first step towards a marketing operations roadmap

Just as with any audit, a System Health Check is the critical first step in understanding where your marketing efforts currently stand, where you want to be, and how you’re able to get there. 

In a nutshell, it provides the insight you need to create a clear strategy for how to take your platform – and your marketing operations efforts – to the next stage.  

From here, you’re in a much stronger position to build a Marketing Operations Roadmap – a strategic tool that aligns your marketing objectives with clear, step-by-step action. 

Taking the next step towards marketing operations excellence

Uncovering the full potential of the marketing automation platforms at your disposal is just the first step in maximising your marketing ROI. 

A System Health Check will help you pinpoint WHAT you need to do next to improve marketing efficiency and effectiveness. The insight you gather from this will then help you define HOW you are going to achieve that.  

You can find out more about those steps in our other blogs – or get in touch today!