Study: Marketing automation lacks experienced users, demands more resources

Mid-sized B2B companies and corporations that use marketing automation platforms (MAPs) lack experienced users and underestimate the amount of resource needed to drive effective MAP adoption. Those are just two of the conclusions from SiriusDecisions‘  annual marketing automation report, which focuses on the emerging trends in the adoption and use of marketing automation platforms across a wide variety of B2B organizations.

We asked Jay Famico, VP Technology at SiriusDecisions, for more background on the training and resource gap in marketing automation.

“What we’ve seen is that those who have experience with MAP have been promoted quickly,” Famico explains, “and, as MAP matures in vertical markets outside of high-tech, you see a lot of users recently working with MAP for the first time. Expertise will certainly improve and grow over time across the board to support MAP initiatives.”

And while the data shows that there are nearly 11 times more B2B organizations using marketing automation solutions now than in 2011, the total number of businesses using them is still small. We’ve reported before that only about three percent of non-tech companies have yet adopted marketing automation, and SiriusDecisions’ data appears to support that statement.

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It isn’t all bad news, though. The survey shows that nurturing tactics are evolving. More MAP users are coming to grips with taking email communications beyond the ‘on-rails drip campaign’ that has dominated early marketing automation adoption.

Here’s all the data, in infographic form: