What Is Marketing Automation?
Marketing automation is a process supported by dynamic software (e.g. Eloqua/Oracle, Hubspot or Sales Fusion) which allows companies to provide valuable content in a timely fashion, personalised to prospects, based upon the actions you know your prospects have taken. Using website visitor tracking, email campaign open/click reports, purchase histories and social media marketing, automation can determine how best to go about lead nurturing on a segmented lead profile basis. The ultimate goal being to increase sales through high level sales lead conversion rates.
Content Marketing
Content Comes First
The difficulty with marketing automation is that the process will not create great content for you. In order for marketing automation to be successful you must already have a proven lead nurturing strategy and compelling content. Marketing automation only helps with scaling your efforts, which while invaluable, is not worth it if you are yet to build a solid pipeline of inbound leads using quality content.
Even if you meet these criteria, having a successful marketing automation program isn’t easy. Building optimised content for numerous interests takes time but ultimately creates leads and increases lead conversion rates.
Sales Lead Nurturing Ideas
Why Do You Need Marketing Automation?
If you are finding success in your inbound marketing, content which is producing consistent, relevant leads to your Sales team, a marketing automation strategy is the next step. Nurturing those prospects into qualified leads automatically is a huge long term boost.
- The adoption of marketing automation technology is expected to increase 50% by 2015. (Sirius Decisions)
- Businesses that use marketing automation to nurture prospects experience a 451% increase in qualified leads. (The Annuitas Group)
- 84% of top performing companies are using or plan to start using marketing automation between 2012 and 2015. (Gleanster)
- Marketing automation drives a 14.5% increase in sales productivity and a 12.2% reduction in marketing overhead. (Nucleus Research)
- 77% of CMOs at top performing companies indicate that their most compelling reason for implementing marketing automation is to increase revenue. (Gleanster)
Marketing Automation Processes.
4 Key Steps To Effective Marketing Automation:KPIs
(1) Key Performance Indicators
KPI’s will help you to recognise where your marketing automation platform has a high ROI. Being able to make reports and adjustments to the data that you find is key to your platform’s success as it is a continuous project.
Prospect Profiling.
(2) Personalise
Your lead nurturing content must be prepared with a segmented contact list in mind. You will want as much information as possible about each segment. This is so that your marketing automation platform will be capable of personalising content, based on the prospect’s details, such as their title, department, whether they are decision makers, what type of decision maker (e.g. procurement, marketing, IT etc), what stage they’re at in the buying cycle and more. The other information necessary for effective personalisation is prospect engagement/activities from your website visitor tracking, such as which pages they have visited, which page they visited last and how long they stayed on the site and each page.
Multi-Channel Sales Campaigns.
(3) Multiple channel campaign
Email marketing may be the face of marketing automation and lead nurturing, but it is just as crucial to include social media. The likes of LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter are still very important to engage with the customer and develop an interest.
Analysing Sales Campaign Results.
(4) Test
If you’ve made it this far you can give yourself a pat on the back. Well almost. Even if you run tests and they are successful; not only is everything running smoothly, but you are getting many responses; there are always improvements to be made.
How To Execute A Lead Nurturing Strategy
As Long As You Meet The Criteria:
- A proven lead nurturing strategy worth scaling
- Clear communication between Sales & Marketing
- Content strategy mapped throughout buyer’s process/cycle
- Multiple channel integration within your campaigns
…..There is no reason to not plan towards the introduction of a Marketing Automation platform.
How To Convert More Sales Leads.
If you would like any help with this topic, Call the Sales Accelerant team TODAY on 0845 3058145 or Email Us and experience the sales approach difference that makes the difference.
