Will you hire an expert, someone with experience or someone with a certification badge? Is there a difference? YES! And your success relies on it.
Certification — the necessary evil
You can hire someone with the certification badge in the appropriate marketing automation (MA) software (Marketo, Act-On, HubSpot, Eloqua, Pardot, etc.). Don’t get me wrong, these software packages are extremely complicated, and the certification process is difficult; however, we require our team to get the certification to be sure that they know the ins and outs to quickly build effective, working campaigns.
Experience — gets you through the tough times
An even better plan is to hire someone with credentials and experience. This means that they have actually created programs in the appropriate environment — an environment that is changing regularly and is full of bugs. No matter which automation software we need to use, our team develops workarounds for known bugs.
Expertise — delivers the results
The best plan is to hire a team that has experience, credentials and expertise. Expertise is different from experience in our eyes. Expertise is knowledge gained from practice. We develop a core plan for each of our marketing automation experts to follow and require them to get a certification in whatever new program is introduced that our clients want to use. It is the marketing expertise acquired over decades-long careers that makes the difference.
At the end of the day, marketing automation still requires marketing principles and strategy to work best. The funny thing is, you pay almost as much for the software as you do for the marketing expertise. Buying MA software without the expertise is like buying the car, but not the gas.
You can reach more people and nurture them through the process with regular frequency and turn brand loyalists (with great brand recall) into brand evangelists faster than ever before with marketing automation, if you apply the marketing expertise to your process. It’s still about frequency, reach and recall, but on a much larger scale in a much more cluttered environment.
Buy the Chevy or the Benz, but don’t forget to buy the gas.
