Traffic in, revenue out.
Marketing Automation Consultant: Systems That Replace Manual Work
Automation / Fractional Growth
- Elementor100x$200K to $20M ARR as acquisition lead
- Riverside+337%MRR growth driven as a growth operator
- Across engagements$100M+ad budgets managed across paid social and search
From the problem to an executable decision
Automation should remove repeated work while preserving the decisions that need a person. I personally design and implement the agreed integrations, triggers and marketing workflows, with a named operating owner and a clear recovery path.
- Workflow baseline
- Rules and permissions
- Connected execution
- Monitoring and recovery
What I lead and implement, and what you receive
| Decision | Work and deliverable |
|---|---|
| Workflow specification | Record the current manual steps, inputs, business rules and permitted destinations. Choose deterministic rules for predictable decisions and human review for consequential ambiguity. |
| Integration delivery | I build agreed n8n, Zapier, CRM and email connections. Credentials stay in the approved system; retries and duplicate handling are part of the workflow. |
| Operating handoff | Deliver the workflow map, test cases, failure alerts and maintenance responsibilities. Review observed time saved alongside correction effort and unresolved cases. |
A measurement worksheet you can use with your team
Record the definition, source, eligible cohort or period, baseline, owner and review date. Leave unknowns blank; targets are not results.
- Manual handling time per completed case
- Workflow failure and correction rate
- Unresolved exceptions by age
Compare manual time per completed case before and after the workflow, including time spent correcting failures. Review the age of unresolved exceptions separately: moving work into a hidden queue is not time saved.
Relevant experience with clear attribution
I am Yaniv Goldenberg, a Fractional Head of Growth & CMO. I lead strategy and personally execute across the revenue funnel. cnvrg.io — growth and go-to-market work My published cnvrg.io case study describes growth and go-to-market work for a technical B2B product: translating the product into buyer-facing messages and acquisition paths. Historical results belong to that engagement and are not a forecast for your business.
At the start, we define the deliverables, the work I personally execute and the dependencies on your team. Access, budget, product truth and message approval come from their responsible owners. The handover records the implementation, checks, continuing owner and decisions still open.
What a marketing automation consultant actually does
"Automation multiplies whatever you feed it. Automate a broken funnel and you just break it faster, at scale."
Yaniv Goldenberg, fractional growth operator
Most automation projects fail for one reason. The tooling gets built before anyone agrees on the revenue it is supposed to produce. As a marketing automation consultant, I start at the end. I map your funnel from first touch to paid customer, find the steps where humans do work a system should do, and wire those steps together. The goal is never more emails sent. The goal is more revenue per lead, with less manual effort. From Traffic to Revenue. That is the only scoreboard I care about.
The first thing I build is the data layer. Automation runs on events: a signup, a trial start, a cart abandon, a sales call booked. If those events are not captured cleanly, every downstream workflow is guessing. So a marketing automation consultant worth hiring spends the first week auditing your tracking, not picking a fancy drip sequence. I check that every key action fires once, lands in your CRM, and carries the source attribution it started with. Broken attribution is the single most common reason teams cannot tell which automation is paying for itself.
Then I design the lifecycle. Not a generic welcome series, but the specific moments where a contact is most likely to move forward or quietly leave. A trial that has not activated needs a different nudge than a trial that activated and stalled on price. I segment by behavior, write the triggers, and connect the handoffs between marketing, product, and sales. When I led growth at Elementor and took the company to 100x ARR, the lifecycle work was a large part of why expansion revenue compounded instead of leaking.
Tooling comes last, and it stays boring on purpose. HubSpot, Customer.io, Braze, Klaviyo, n8n, or a stack you already pay for. A good marketing automation consultant fits the system to your data and your team, not to whatever platform pays the highest partner commission. If you already run a tool, I would rather fix the workflows inside it than sell you a migration you do not need. I check which existing capabilities are useful and available before proposing another tool.
Measurement is built in from day one. Every workflow ships with a clear question it answers: did this sequence move trial-to-paid, did this re-engagement campaign recover churned revenue, did this lead-scoring model send better-fit leads to sales. I instrument the workflow and agree a review window that fits its event volume and business cycle, including failures and correction effort. This is the discipline that separates a marketing automation consultant from someone who just installs templates. For the standards I hold every workflow to, I lean on guidance like the GDPR compliance checklist, because automation that ignores consent and data rules is a liability, not an asset.
The engagements I run are short and outcome-bound. A diagnostic to map the funnel and find the leaks, then a build phase where I stand up the highest-value workflows and hand you running documentation. I have managed $100M+ in budgets and driven Riverside to +337% Net MRR, and the pattern is always the same: the money is in the handoffs between systems, not inside any single one. A marketing automation consultant earns the fee by closing those gaps, then making the whole thing run without me.
If you want fewer manual tasks, cleaner data, and a funnel where every contact has a clear next step, that is the work. No dashboards for the sake of dashboards. No automation theater. Just systems that turn the traffic you already pay for into revenue you can bank.
For each agreed workflow, I document the trigger, required fields, permitted destinations and expected result. Your process owner approves the business rules and provides access. Before handoff, we check a normal run, missing inputs, duplicates and failed connections, then record unresolved cases and the person who responds. The scope names any monitoring after delivery.
Frequently asked questions
What does a marketing automation consultant do that my in-house team cannot?
I close the gaps between your tools. Your team knows the product and the customers. I bring the funnel-mapping, event tracking, and cross-system wiring that connects marketing, product, and sales into one running pipeline. I also kill workflows that do not move revenue, which is hard for an internal team that built them. The result is fewer manual tasks and cleaner attribution your team keeps owning after I leave.
Which marketing automation platforms do you work with?
Whatever fits your data and budget. I build in HubSpot, Customer.io, Braze, Klaviyo, and n8n, and I am happy to fix the stack you already pay for. I do not push migrations for commission. I check the useful capabilities and limits of the current platform before proposing a rebuild or migration.
How do you measure whether the automation actually works?
We agree the completed outcome and a baseline before building. Illustrative example: an inbound demo request reaches its sales owner with the agreed company and source fields. Missing fields go to a visible review queue, and a repeated request does not create a second handoff. The receiving owner confirms acceptance or rejection. Compare manual minutes per completed request, including corrections, alongside accepted opportunities after the agreed sales window; faster routing alone does not prove extra revenue.
Why do most marketing automation projects fail?
Two reasons. First, the tooling gets built before anyone agrees on the revenue it should produce, so success is undefined. Second, the event tracking underneath is broken, which makes every workflow guess and ruins attribution. I fix the data layer first, auditing that each key action fires once and carries its source. Get those right and the workflows compound; skip them and you automate noise.
What does working with you look like, start to finish?
First I map the relevant workflow and data sources with your team. Then I build the agreed automation, test inputs, permissions, failure handling and output, and document the handover. The review window follows the event volume and business cycle; a short observation period does not automatically prove a revenue effect.
What does a marketing automation consultant actually do?
I find the repetitive manual work and funnel leaks in your marketing, then build systems that run those tasks automatically, on the lightest stack that does the job, tied to a revenue or efficiency outcome.
Which automation tool should I use?
Is automation just connecting my tools together?
No. That is how automation projects fail. I start from the manual work that costs hours and the handoffs that leak conversions, then automate exactly those, not a wishlist of integrations.
Do you do this as a standalone project or a retainer?
Both. Discrete builds run as AI marketing infrastructure projects; when automation is part of a broader growth role it folds into an operator engagement. See fractional CMO.
What happens when the engagement ends?
You keep a documented system your team can operate and extend. I build for handoff, so the automation is not a black box that breaks the day I leave.
Can you automate our reporting?
Yes. I build dashboards and recurring reports that pull from one source of truth, so nobody rebuilds the same spreadsheet every week.
Do you use AI agents in your automation?
Yes. I embed Claude-powered agents for content drafting, research, classification, and reporting directly in the pipelines, the same way I run my own operation. See AI marketing.
How much does it cost?
Diagnostic, infrastructure and embedded Operator pricing depend on the engagement. Scope, time commitment, delivery milestones and contract terms are agreed before work starts.
When is marketing automation the wrong move?
Automation is the wrong move when your process is still changing weekly or you are pre product-market fit, because automating a moving target just freezes the wrong workflow. It pays off when you have repeatable processes consuming real hours, growing volume, and tools that already hold your data. If a task is run once a quarter, automating it rarely pays back. I will tell you which work is worth encoding and which to leave manual.
What happens on the 15-minute call, and how fast do you reply?
On the 15-minute call I map your highest-impact automation, recommend the lightest stack, and tell you what is not worth automating yet. If you write to me instead, I read every message myself and reply within one day. You reach me directly, not an agency inbox.
Automation fails when it is a pile of integrations
Most automation projects start from the wrong end. Someone lists every tool they want connected, a consultant wires them together, and six months later there is a tangle of brittle zaps nobody understands and half of them have quietly broken. Automation is not about connecting tools. It is about removing specific manual work that costs your team hours and your funnel conversions.
I start from the work, not the tools. I find the repetitive tasks and the leaks where manual handoffs drop the ball, then automate exactly those, on the lightest stack that does the job. Sometimes that is a single Zapier flow. Sometimes it is self-hosted n8n with AI agents. The decision follows the problem, not a vendor preference.
The automation stack I build on
Marketing automation is not one tool. It is a stack matched to the job. Here are the layers I work across, each with its own deeper page.
n8n marketing automation
A self-hosted workflow option where the operating, access, licensing and maintenance requirements fit the team. See n8n automation.
Zapier automation
The fastest path for lean teams: connect supported SaaS tools for agreed handoffs, with access, field mapping, tests and maintenance scoped explicitly. See Zapier automation.
Email lifecycle
Behavior-triggered flows in Klaviyo, Braze, or HubSpot that recover intent and bring customers back automatically. See email marketing.
AI agents
Claude-powered agents for content drafting, research, classification, and reporting, embedded directly in your pipelines. See AI marketing.
What I build, and how it fits a fractional engagement
Automation is a means, not the goal. As your fractional head of growth I own the strategy first, then automate the parts of it that should not need a human. That keeps the build tied to revenue rather than to a list of integrations, and it means the automation is maintained as your funnel changes rather than abandoned the day a freelancer leaves.
Lead and data flows
Enrichment, scoring, routing, and CRM sync so leads move through your funnel without manual copy-paste.
Reporting automation
Dashboards and recurring reports that pull from one source of truth, so nobody rebuilds the same spreadsheet every Monday.
Lifecycle triggers
Behavioral flows across email and product that fire on what users do, wired into the same data as everything else.
Team handoff
Documentation and training so your team operates and extends the system, not a black box only the consultant understands.
How I decide what to automate
Start from the manual work. I map where your team spends repetitive hours and where handoffs leak, then automate those exact points first. That sequencing puts the time savings where they are felt soonest.
Lightest stack that works. Zapier when speed matters and the tools already exist; n8n when you need ownership, scale, or AI control. The tool follows the problem.
Build for handoff. Every workflow is documented and named so your team can read and maintain it. Automation that only the builder understands is a liability, not an asset.
Tie it to a number. Each automation maps to a revenue or efficiency outcome, so we can tell which ones earn their keep and which to retire.
When automation is right, and when it is not
Right when
You have repeatable processes consuming real hours, growing volume, and tools that already hold your data. Automation compounds when there is a stable process to encode.
Wrong when
Your process is still changing weekly or you are pre product-market fit. Automating a moving target just freezes the wrong workflow. Find the repeatable shape first.
The honest call
If a task is run once a quarter, automating it rarely pays back. I will tell you which work is worth encoding and which to leave manual.
I run my own operation on this stack
This is not theory I read about. I run my own marketing operation on automation: content pipelines, client reporting, research, and AI-search monitoring all flow through n8n and Claude agents I built and debug in production. As a growth operator I led acquisition at Elementor from roughly $200K to over $20M ARR as it passed five million users, led growth at cnvrg.io ahead of its acquisition by Intel announced November 2020 (TechCrunch), and drove +337% Net MRR growth at Riverside. When I automate your marketing, I am handing over patterns I depend on myself. See the Claude Code SEO and GEO skill build story.
Pricing
I personally investigate, build and test the agreed automation, whether it is a discrete project or part of an operator role. Advice without implementation is available only through Advisory.
An audit of your growth stack on an agreed timeline, plus a 90-day roadmap. Fixed scope; any follow-on retainer is agreed separately.
- Workflow build on n8n or Zapier
- AI agent integration
- Reporting and lifecycle flows
- Team handoff and docs
Full fractional role with automation owned alongside the rest of growth. See fractional CMO.
Stop doing by hand what a system should run
Book a 15-min call. I will map your highest-impact automation, recommend the lightest stack, and tell you what is not worth automating yet.
Next step
Let's turn this into measurable revenue
Book a 15-min call. I will tell you whether this is your next move, or whether your money is better spent elsewhere.
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