Start with defining your business goals
The first step in selecting an adaptive marketing platform is to identify your goal.
Don’t try to solve just massive goals, such as increase revenue, because those are hard to measure. Your goals should be specific things tied to the types of marketing programs you hope to execute with the platform.
And your goal needs to be quantifiable. For example, you want to find a platform that will help you drive a 10 percent increase in retention. Or help you achieve a 10 percent improvement in your conversion rate. Or a 10 percent increase in leads that are qualified and sent on to sales.
Those are examples of specific and quantifiable goals.
Match your goals to requirements
Once you have the goals, you begin to define the processes you need to achieve those goals. And then once you’ve defined the processes, now you can begin to think about your technology requirements. The process is what drives your requirements.
You have to be very, very granular to translate those general goals into specific processes, and then the processes into the requirements.
Evaluate use-case scenarios with marketing automation vendors
Once you know your requirements, you can begin to think in terms of use cases and scenarios. The biggest mistake in this area, and one of the most common, is that marketers don’t develop specific scenarios based on those processes.
Go through a thorough evaluation process. Consider multiple vendors. Get expert help if you need it because people who’ve had experience doing this have got a much broader perspective and can give you help with best practices.
See how the proposed platform fits together with your existing stack. Is it seamless, or will you one or two other pieces of technology to make it work? Is it out of the box, or are you going to need a custom install? If there’s a bit of awkwardness, it comes here.
You also want to take a look at the underlying technology and scalability. Will the platform be able to grow with over the next few years. Is it positioned to take advantage of the latest innovations?
Go beyond just the system that’s in front of you, beyond the features and benefits, and look at what’s going to happen after the sale. What’s the support going to be like, what’s the training going to be like?