Marketing Strategist's Playbook for Marketing Automation
Marketing automation has fundamentally changed the landscape for businesses that want to see the concrete outcomes from their marketing investments, want to reduce budgets and effectively use new tools to make their sales and marketing teams more strategic—and free their teams to focus on value-added functions. What sets the most successful teams apart is a strategist who can create the foundation to unite technology, process and people toward a shared goal.
Successful automation depends on more than deploying a platform or creating a few workflows. You need someone who can bridge leadership priorities, stakeholder needs—and, most particularly, can act as a translator between leadership/sales/marketing and the IT/dev implementation team. This guide lays out the essential steps and tactics that strategists should follow to help organizations of any size get the most value from automation.
Strategic Setup
- Start Small. Define measurable targets with leadership—such as new lead numbers, optimized automation workflows, or customer retention rates, be sure targets and metrics are attainable and make sense for your organization.
- Document, document, document. Document your current state by mapping workflows, logging process pain points with every team, and reviewing CRM data quality—especially if your environment includes Salesforce and marketing automation integration.
- Review and improve. Analyze past campaign results and establish your baseline for improvement.
Build and Optimize Automation
- Focus on customers. Start with customer journey mapping. Work with sales and support, laying out each potential touchpoint from discovery through post-sale. Pinpoint where marketing automation workflows—like onboarding emails, evergreen content drips (thought leadership, case studies, product education content, etc.) deliver the most value.
- Segmentation is your friend. Use CRM integration best practices to segment your database by filters and behavioral data so each workflow targets a distinct audience. Keep every segment actionable and in sync with Salesforce Marketing Cloud Account Engagement, HubSpot Marketing Hub, or your specific CRM.
- Work together with sales. Design and implement lead scoring setup in tight partnership with sales. Qualify leads using real, measurable engagement—newsletter registration, content downloads, site visits, event attendance, etc.—rather than basic metrics. Ensure your qualifying logic only passes sales-ready leads, maintaining alignment between Salesforce and your marketing automation platform.
Asset Creation
- Make life easier. Script core marketing automation workflows, such as automated email sequences and nurture campaigns.
- Connect. Develop and connect landing pages, web forms and lead magnets, testing each for mobile compatibility and solid tracking. If needed, bring in outside designers and marketing automation strategists to speed up delivery.
- Get insights. Build dashboards to track leads, key workflow metrics, pipeline metrics and attribution. Ensure that dashboards are designed to support the needs of sales, marketing, operations and executive stakeholders.
Skills and Team
Success relies on having team members with experience in HubSpot or Account Engagement deployment, workflow creation, lead scoring setup, customer journey mapping and marketing automation strategy.
- Ensure outputs are aligned with objectives and support specific strategic outcomes, users have required training and IT can effectively support implementation and ongoing management.
- Ensure the team includes sales & marketing strategists, IT/dev, executive and operations representatives.
Launch, Train, Iterate and Grow
Direct integration using CRM integration best practices—work side-by-side with IT or external experts to get seamless, real-time sync between your automation platform and CRM. Pilot one automated campaign to spot issues, adjust fast, then deploy automation in phases to control quality. Train sales and marketing on day-to-day workflow processes, reporting, and lead handoff.
- Monitor metrics daily and maintain fast feedback cycles. Use A/B testing for all email and workflow changes, iterating on assets and sequences as actual performance data rolls in.
- Check compliance and security continually. Stay in line with GDPR and CCPA, review access and data movement every quarter.