My definition of Marketing Automation is:
Marketing automation is the use of technology to manage and automate the process of converting prospective customers into actual buyers. By automating the various tasks and workflows involved in demand generation, lead management, and sales and marketing alignment, marketing automation contributes to shorter sales cycles, increased revenue, and better marketing ROI.

I created an entire ‘cheat sheet’ on marketing automation that can be found here (without registration): http://www.marketo.com/b2b-marketing-resources/documents/cheatsheet/MA_cheatsheet2_10.pdf

Eric, here’s a challenge: Turn your wordy comment into a one or two short bullet points summarizing the key benefits of marketing automation

Christopher, I understand what you are saying, but how do we turn it from more of a feature statement into a benefit *(the “you get…” part) that can be summarized in a bullet point?

Tom, Your definition of marketing automation is more fun and thought provoking than mine, but immediately made me think marketing automation must be hard to implement. That bothers me a bit as I believe marketing automation makes marketers jobs easier, not more difficult.

-Mac

This is what I’ve come up with so far…

A systematic and largely automated process to attract qualified buyers [using art, science, research and finesse] who over time become great clients with sexy project opportunities as defined in your Perfect Client Profile.

I like you definition. The one area I would build out on is the value marketing automation adds in developing a business process to effectively manage the marketing funnel. While many marketing automation platforms can be used “to track and measure the results of their campaigns”, the real value is at a higher level for managing the entire demand generation process.

And to show you why I like it so, here’s the way we break the Process of Inbound Marketing Automation down into 4 stages or phases of activity:

1) Attract more visitors to your website using SEO, Social Media Marketing or SMM, and PPC. (Your generate demand part).

2) Engage their attention with industry leading content (website copy, white papers, videos, podcasts, etc.)

3) Qualify these visitors by grading their profiles and using their digital footprints to rack up a score and hence “know” their quality. And, while you are qualifying them, nurture them from cold leads to hot prospects with multi-touch drip email campaigns.

4) Automatically feed these hot sales ready prospects directly into your CRM and automatically notify the assigned sales rep (based on product or territory or whatever…).

Agree totally with your benefits statements, but would refine the 2nd one, as yes you can and should implement a Process of Continuous Process Improvements (CPI), but doing so also allows one to continuously learn more about your ideal prospects. We called this, “How to get Priceless Market Insight for Free”, in the white paper we wrote about it and which is available free on our website.

And also available on our website is a post which describes a formal Process Specification which details “How to run a Social Media Marketing (SMM) Campaign” using the ideas of CPI. And because this post suggests using ROI as one of the metrics to monitor during the Process, there are also posts on this same link which describe how to do this, and where to find the 10 best free ROI calculators on the web. Here’s the link: http://bit.ly/cEc0ln