The dos and don‘ts of implementing marketing automation

Transgourmet is part of the COOP Group and a supplier for large restaurant and foodservice customers. Together with gateB, a consulting and implementation company and BSI partner, Transgourmet is getting started with data-driven marketing. At the BSI Customer Summit 2021, Adrian Albrecht, Head of Marketing at Transgourmet Schweiz AG, and gateB’s Robert Schumacher presented recommendations for making such a project a success.

Key facts

• A business plan to help you get started with marketing automation;
• Work with your data to improve data quality in the long term;
• The goal is to improve your operating results.

Building trust with numbers

Although data-driven marketing is gaining importance over “traditional” creation-driven marketing, many companies continue to hesitate to venture into marketing automation. It is company CEOs, in particular, who trust numbers and not technology solutions. Therefore, it is a big challenge to bring them around.

We should not view marketing automation as a mere marketing project. Initially, it is important to ask ourselves what we want to achieve. Setting a clearly defined goal has many advantages. So, we should have a business plan in place as a guidepost. Having a plan will keep us from getting bogged down by the myriad options marketing automation offers or starting projects for their own sake. It will also provide guidance along the way, and the metrics, as well as regular monitoring, will help build trust among stakeholders.

“Marketing automation and CRM are always a means to an end.”
Robert Schumacher, Director Customer Intelligence, gateB

“The approach we used was to think in terms of clear goals right from the beginning and demonstrate the potential applications.”
Adrian Albrecht, Head of Marketing at Transgourmet Schweiz AG

Adrian Albrecht (left) and Robert Schumacher at the BSI Customer Summit 2021

Data quality and marketing automation: The chicken or the egg

Another question companies are concerned about is whether the quality of their data is even sufficient for marketing automation. People often assume that they must first improve the quality of their data before they can start with marketing automation. Yet, according to Mr. Schumacher, this is a misconception because one must first work with the existing data before a quality assessment is possible. Only then will it become clear what is truly relevant to achieving the goals and what is not. Albrecht confirmed this. Transgourmet, a classic B2B company, has scores of data about its customers. Still, the company has not used this data as well as it could have to improve its communication with its customers. Once companies introduce data-driven marketing, the data becomes more important, and they start to notice what matters.

“You don’t find out about the quality of your data until you start working with it.”
Robert Schumacher, Director Customer Intelligence, gateB

From Robert Schumacher’s point of view, BSI makes it possible to check every step of a project in real time and, if necessary, make adjustments to achieve success quickly. Another advantage of BSI, according to him, is that the technology can be fully integrated into a company’s business structure, therefore becoming scalable.

In addition, Transgourmet does not consider marketing automation as solely a digital project because, according to Albrecht, it is always about integrating all channels, including POS and print. Doing so is the only way to determine the right channel for each customer, and it is the prerequisite for relevant communication. Transgourmet’s ultimate goal is to interlink marketing and sales effectively.

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