Marketing Automation: Why the technology is growing
Marketing automation software is, by definition, a suite of
technologies that allows you to streamline, automate and
measure your marketing tasks and results. Of course,
most marketers already have something in place to
measure their marketing. But even advanced web
analytics can't keep track of every lead on your website.
With 79% of top performing businesses using marketing automation to “touch” every lead on their website, it is the logical next step for growing B2B businesses. We need to stop being scared of this technology and incorporate it within our own methods. To do that, we must first understand how we can work with the technology.Contents:
Understanding marketing automation
The ideal marketing automation platform
The reality of marketing automation
Making your marketing automation perform
The basics to create a performing platform
Why lead nurturing is not the focus area
How marketing automation can affect your workflows
Streamlining your marketing content
Measuring your marketing automation results
79% of top
performing
businesses use
Understanding marketing automation
With the marketing role expanding, driving results at every stage of the sales pipeline can be difficult. Even with lead generation tools and web analytics in place. Instead of using more tools to help marketing manage their ever-growing to do list, you can use a software suite to do a little of the work. It doesn’t do everything for marketing, but it does make their processes more efficient. Used effectively, marketing automation can improve performance results.
The 4 key benefits of marketing automation are:
It can help you prioritise tasks
Executes some marketing tasks on your behalf (such as email campaigns)
Makes you more productive without taking over your job
Helps you reach your goals sooner
The ideal marketing automation platform
Of course, the end goal when it comes to marketing automation is exactly the same as marketing’s original goal: to generate more revenue for the company. Ideally, the marketing automation platform you choose to use should also free up some of your time without compromising the integrity of your content, both in your emails and on your website.
The most effective marketing automation platforms on the market at the moment will nurture prospects with timely, compelling content and convert potential clients into repeat customers. This is because of the end goal. Marketing automation isn’t cheap and to get the ROI you are looking for, you need to invest in an automation system that focuses on generating a significant amount of new revenue.
With marketing automation, you need to water leads with just enough information to move them through the sales cycle on your behalf, while you focus on creating the content that will encourage them to interact, learn and grow.
But converting and closing is just half of the sales cycle. The first two stages – attracting and engaging – are still areas where marketing could use a helping hand. With the sheer amount of content they need to produce to convince leads to look at your company as a solution, marketing needs an automation suite that offers help in all areas – i.e. lead generation & lead nurturing technology within the suite too.
Attract Leads
Engage Prospects
Close Deals
Convert Leads
Lead Gen, Lead Nurture & Marketing Automation in one combined solution
The reality of marketing automation
Unfortunately, the term “marketing automation” has been connected to so many email marketing platforms that most companies believe marketing automation can only help with the last two stages. Admittedly, the last two stages are the most important areas, but sales should also be helping to convert and close deals. Marketing, on the other hand, are solely responsible for attracting and engaging leads. It is the area that generates the highest workload. While there used to be no technology to help in this area, there now is thanks to IP Lookup and visitor tracking tools. Technology is now growing and there are combined lead gen & marketing automated technologies that will be sold by the same company in one package.
The reality is that companies are buying marketing automation suites that don’t help them in every stage although they claim too. Instead, they buy a digital tool and buy email addresses and start nurturing prospects believing that this is how to generate “inbound” leads. However, this is how you get blacklisted and perceived as spam.
Making your marketing automation perform
As we mentioned, the marketing automation end goal is to generate new revenue. To do this, we
must not only focus on current leads in the pipeline but generate new leads with a fertile inbound
strategy. We need to drive traffic, convert website visitors and close leads into customers.
Of course, marketing automation software alone can’t do this. Instead, you need a suite of technologies which combines lead generation technology, lead management within your CRM and email marketing tools to create a revolutionised marketing automation platform.The basics to creating a performing platform
1. Integrate your lead gen strategy with your marketing automation
Find a company that offers both sets of technology in one full suite of software. Running separate technologies for different stages of the cycle becomes confusing. Instead, having one software solution that can attract and engage traffic as well as help you to nurture and close leads is the easiest and most effective method.
Note: Software that can offer this as well as integrate into your CRM is “the icing on the cake”.
2. Identify your different target audiences
The benefit of marketing automation is that it can send personalised emails in a timely and compelling manner to target leads at the right time in the buying process. This has proven to be the most effective way at nurturing leads who aren’t sales-ready.
Successful email campaigns:
Send emails with relevant content
Send emails at the right time (imagine sending a “pizza deal” email on Monday morning
instead of Friday night for example)
Send a personal message
3. Keep track of which leads receive each interaction
While the technology is in place to help us make those one-to-one interactions and save us
time, marketing automation cannot do all the work for us. The personalised touch only works if,
when the lead is ready, they are speaking to someone who is aware of what has happened in
their buyer journey.
looked at on the website. Failure to do this reveals the technology that the prospect has been
interacting with and ruins the human relationship you want to pursue.
In order to make sure there are no miscommunications between sales and marketing, your lead
gen and marketing automation software will need to integrate into your CRM or have a lead
management system in place that allows you to view/track an individual’s buyer journey.
4. Have alerts in place to close leads at the right time
Just as emailing leads at the right time can affect how a prospect interacts with your website, so
too can when you call them to close a sale. Lead gen & marketing automation, however, don’t
reveal when a lead becomes sales-ready. Instead, you will need to identify which steps or how
many interactions determine what make a qualified lead. If you would like a mathematical
equation that solves this for you, take a look at lead scoring methodology and how it can assist
in this area.
With these four basic steps in place, you have a marketing automation suite that is functioning
on every level. The result will ease leads’ buying decisions in your favour and improve your
conversion (and revenue) rate.
Why lead nurturing is not the focus area
Now that we understand the basics, we can identify the true strengths of marketing automation and it’s surprisingly not the end goal of creating more revenue. A number of things alone can drive the revenue, such as the hard sell from sales or generating the right leads in the first place.
Marketing automation, on the other hand, clearly drives leads with the soft sell. With a personalised journey for each lead and the right systems in place, you can drive leads through the system with hardly any human interaction required until the close.
It is safe to say that marketing automation technology has been developed enough to successfully nurture leads through the sales pipeline when implemented correctly. That’s exactly why it should not be your focus. Instead, you should look for a platform that provides you with the analytics to improve your larger inbound marketing strategy.
Your main goal, as a marketer and a business, should be to drive high-quality leads to your website. Successful marketing
automation will give you good enough visibility to see how those leads interact on your website. It will also give you an educated idea as to what successfully drove them through the pipeline. You can use these key indicators as promotions in your lead gen strategy to produce higher-quality inbound lead results.
For more on successful lead generation strategies, please read our whitepaper on lead generation. .
Lead Nurturing is the
3
rdtop objective of
UK businesses in 2016,
following
How marketing automation can affect your workflows
Every business and their website has a different demographic for their target audience. They might even have multiple audiences they want to attract. For example, they may want to market to both sales & marketing.
The email aspect of marketing automation only works if the personalised messages are sent to the right person. As an example, you don’t want to send an email about female footwear to a male who isn’t interested in exercise. As you can imagine, used incorrectly, personalised messaging within marketing automation can go horribly wrong.
Therefore, it is imperative that you create user journeys for EACH of your target audiences and a wireframe of how your email workflows can nurture them in different ways. Otherwise, you risk harming your marketing automation results.
Streamlining your marketing content
Marketing automation, by definition, streamlines your marketing strategies. From engaging leads to converting them with lead nurturing campaigns. However, as we mentioned before, it is important you appeal to all target audiences on your website. To convert as many leads as possible, you need to make their experience within your marketing automation system as personal as possible. It sounds challenging, but it can be done with dynamic content.
To put it simply, dynamic content is HTML content on your website (such as emails or landing pages) that can change based on the viewer. For example, a homepage could ask whether you are a sales or marketing person. By clicking your respective button, you will be presented with content that is relevant to your needs and the business, instead of the marketing content.
Obviously, this seems like a lot of extra work for your content marketing and website team. However, as an initial stage, you can just implement dynamic content within your emails and direct them to the products, services or blog posts that are the MOST relevant to them.
The most common form of dynamic content that you are probably already aware of is when your first name
Dymanic content can:
Personalise your emails
Tailor your leads website journey
Enhance your landing page results
automation suites can customise entire paragraphs of content. If you have the time and resource to customise this copy, you could expect your results to triple just streamlining your content to each audience.
Measuring your marketing automation results
Before marketing automation software solutions could include other tools such as IP Lookup, they were measured based on the traditional performance structure of an email campaign. I.e. open rates, click rates and unsubscribe rates.
However, advanced solutions allow you to measure more than just your email engagement levels. You should also be able to measure the improvement in the quality & quantity of your leads as well as how many convert month on month. To do this, use your pre-marketing automation results as a benchmark when you start using your marketing automation system.
You can still track the email marketing automation in the same manner, but you will find that you have to measure your lead attraction and conversion rates in a different way. With a system that features lead nurturing tools, CRM integration and web analytic capabilities, you will be able to monitor and measure each stage of your sales pipeline.
Overall, if you use your software as we have recommended in this whitepaper, you should see an improvement in:
The quality of your leads
The quantity of your leads
Your marketing productivity
A higher conversion rate, even if there is a slower sales cycle speed
