This is a question that will have varied answers from different marketers. So we have come up with some common objectives at Marketbright for B2B marketers. Common objectives for marketing automation include the ability to:

- Easily produce efficient, coordinated email, web and event marketing activities
- Track response/success rates for website and campaign effectiveness
- Develop and implement productive online surveys that capture relevant prospect data and furnish quality leads
- Quickly analyze and calculate meaningful ROI with clean data
- Segment and nurture prospects while reducing the time and resources needed for the campaign-to-execution cycle

For organizations that have limited marketing budgets, are just starting out with e-marketing, or want to inexpensively augment existing programs, on-demand marketing automation is a great solution. Marketbright has created a Marketing Automation Buyer’s Guide that can help B2B marketers identify what is most important to them.

Of course, you should use a structured assessment process to choose the best provider for you. First, identify and quantify your goals and objectives of your marketing automation initiative. Then determine your budget and personnel available to participate and oversee the initiative. Once your objectives and budgets are established, the next step is to analyze how you would apply marketing automation to achieve your objectives. This step requires a combination of self-education on what can be automated and forecasting of efficiency improvements gained by applying specific automation.

Finally, evaluate alternative vendors for marketing automation. To assist with that evaluation, Marketbright created this checklist. It’s assembled from Marketbright’s experience supporting its customers and provides a top-level starting point for your evaluations.

http://www.marketbright.com/go/buyer_checklist

Take a look, it’s very informative and helpful!