Your Marketing Automation budget just got an extra $10,000. Where do you spend it and why?

Agreed with Jame. Next to content, I would suggest taking a good look at the quality (completeness, consistency, accuracy) of the data in your marketing database, and ensuring that you have the tools in place to handle cleansing that data automatically as it flows in from various sources (web forms, etc).

Marketing automation software, while critical, is a mere vessel for what goes into it. The three things worth spending money on to get more value from your marketing automation:

1) Strategy: Make sure how you're using marketing automation tools is fine-tuned to your customers, defined stages of their buying process, etc.

2) Content: In a variety of forms, formats, topics, etc. This is the lifeblood of the program.

3) More Prospects: Accelerate the impact of your marketing automation by getting more qualified prospects into the program. If what you're doing right now is already working, spend your money to make it work with more people - thereby increasing the yield of qualified prospects and sales for your organization.

I agree with all the items that the other respondents have highlighted. It is always tough to gauge without knowing the details of the situation, but content is where the biggest gap is at most companies. If it were me, here is how my list would look for $10k:

1) Content - get away from the traditional pieces, such as long white papers. Think of what else is useful and relevant to your audience. We have been seeing success with interactive content pieces such as checklists, workbooks, advice on how to build the business case, and ebooks. With marketing automation, a few short, but high-impact, pieces will go a longer way towards identifying the best leads than one long piece that uses up your whole budget.

2) Training - There still too many companies using too little of their marketing automation application. Invest in some training for yourself or for your team. There is so much great functionality in the applications today that it is a shame if it is not being used. For example, if you are not using lead scoring, pay an expert to teach you and maybe set-up the first scoring model. Another good area is advanced list segmentation techniques. Make sure you can quickly market to subsets of your master database..

3) Demand Generation Activities - One of my favorite things about marketing automation is how quickly you can learn about the effectiveness of various tactics to capture the contact information of suspects. One of my mentors told me that, "you are allowed to try anything once, but if it is going to fail make sure it fails quickly." They key message is don't through good money after bad. With marketing automation you will know quickly if something is working or not. If you have extra money to spend try something new. Instead of renting lists, try sponsoring newsletters. Rather than buying more pay-per-click keywords, syndicate some content on sites that are relevant to your audience.

Content and then automating a lot of your lead routing and other internal data processing. I have talked to a lot of people who have marketing automation but are very willing to handle too many things manually. Hiring a consultant or getting education to understand how to take full advantage of the application is where I'd put that money.

Assuming an overall strategy was in place I recommend focusing on content development. The beauty of well developed content is versatility. We recommend reviewing how to re-purpose and re-distribute content 3-5x for the different stages of the funnel.

In this market, I'd look to see how to leverage that money the most to bring in great clients and money.

I would look at:

1) CRM - how's the system we're using working and how is the process we developed for follow up working. If not, it's time to create a better system.

2) I'm with Brian Handsford about repurposing. I call it "The Power of Ten(TM)" Take what you've already created, already used, and find 10 other ways to repurpose it. Then take what you have newly created and do the same thing. Amazing how much time, effort and money you can save doing it this way.

3) Content - is it time to update our white paper, create an ecourse or some other way to gain ezine addresses and other information of folks who are visiting our site and want to learn more.

I'd advise a client company to spend the additional funds on improving their data, specifically, data enhancement. This is the addition or overlay of elements that describe the prospect or customer fully, such as demographics/firmographics, psychographics (attitudes, lifestyles) and most importantly behaviors. These elements are the basis for segmenting the consumer into groups such as best customers/prospects, most likely to upgrade or purchase additional products/services as well as for the creation of predictive models.

These elements enable the company to derive information (vs. data) about the consumer which in turn enhances targeting strategies - in my opinion, the key to profitable, incremental customer relationships.