The Marketing Automation space has been the connective tissue between the worlds of CRM and CMS. Marketing Automation helps target content delivery, lead nurturing, and lead generation. It also handles form management and landing page creation — a clear overlap with CMS capabilities. Solutions like Marketo, Eloqua, HubSpot, and Pardot have been leaders in the Marketing Automation space, and are on an equally impressive growth path as CMS over the last 2-3 years.
Customer Relationship Management
Customer relationship management (CRM) is a technology that manages your company’s relationships and interactions with potential, current, and previous customers with the objective of increasing return on investment, and retention. The CRM goal is to improve long-term business relationships and overall customer lifetime value. CRM systems help companies connect with their customers and improve processes and profitability. A variety of tools, software, and strategies can be used.
CRM technologies and tools came about in the 1950s to help avoid human error and increase efficiency. In the 1950s, Hildaur Neilsen, chief engineer at Arnold Neustadter, created the desk’s best friend, the Rolodex. The Rolodex was meant to “clean up the office space” and to help manage client/business information. Notebooks, papers, and analog pens before the 1950s. In the 1950s they launched the Rolodex. In the 1960s they released the Rolodex, folders in filing cabinets, and personal organizers. In the 1970’s it was used as a CRM as digital tool. Customer databases were stored on mainframe computers. Software-based lists and spreadsheets. In the 1990s, statistics are used to analyze/gather customer data. Database marketing becomes popular. Customer evaluation and contact management system (aka digital Rolodex). In 1993, Siebel Systems launches as the first CRM-focused product. CRM products include functions for marketing, shipping, and enterprise resource planning. The beginning of online CRM. In 1999, the first mobile CRM solution (introduced by Siebel) and the first cloud-based CRM SaaS (offered by Salesforce). In 2003, Microsoft Dynamics launches. In 2004, SugarCRM develops its first open-source CRM. The dominance of cloud-based CRMs. Social media integration with CRM. The 2000s brought CRM integration with business intelligence services and communications systems. There was an increase in CRM customization capabilities based on market/industry, line of business, and sales process. Rise of visual and intuitive CRMs (e.g., Pipedrive). Improvements in data analytics reporting and mobile access. Increase in use of artificial intelligence and machine learning It is Projected to become a $114.4 billion industry by 2027.
A spreadsheet can track Name, Email, Phone number, Address, Date purchased, Order amount, and Number of orders. With a CRM you can track these things as well, but also Lead scoring based on specific triggers, Current pipeline stage, Contact notes history, Detailed analytical reporting, Contact tags/segmentation, Contact interaction tracking, Social media, and email integration, Call tracking, and more. Whether for sales, marketing, or digital commerce, CRM tools help companies manage customer relationships across the whole customer lifecycle. A CRM combines all channels of customer interaction data into a centralized location, which companies can use to improve customer satisfaction and retention. You can enhance the customer experience by having insight into not only what marketing channels/assets potential customers are engaging with but also key demographic details, purchase history and buying preferences so you can personalize your marketing tactics and messaging that provide increased value. CRM tools provide the ability to automate many tasks such as data entry and reporting to minimize the amount of time spent on repetitive administrative tasks. CRM tools provide all associated teams with instant and detailed insight into how customers are interacting with each department (sales, account specialists, marketing, and customer service), thus increasing cross-team collaboration, productivity, and efficiency. CRM platforms also integrate data analytic tools, giving you both a high-level and in-depth understanding of team/client performance (pipeline velocity, average return on investment, customer lifetime value).
CRM Terms
- Lead: Potential buyers who have been pre-qualified as having a need for your product or service
- Sales pipeline: Overview of the entire sales process and each specific pipeline/funnel stage
- Sales forecast: Future projection of sales based on various data points including past customer sales data, current economic conditions, and overall competitive market landscape.
- Workflow: Automated sales/marketing program that activates once certain triggers are met/fulfilled and adjusts automatically based on said triggers/outcomes.
- Campaign: A sequence of marketing activities with the objective of converting leads
- Trigger: An action that initiates subsequent action
- Lead scoring: The process of assigning numeric values to leads in an effort to measure the overall likelihood of conversion
- Activity: An action or task that needs to be performed (e.g., customer outreach by call, email, scheduling of appointments or consultations)
- Deal: The closing or converting of a customer at the end of the sales process
Customer Acquisition
Customer acquisition refers to when a business brings in new customers or clients. Applying a customer acquisition strategy to your digital marketing plan presents multiple opportunities: Attract strangers to become visitors, Make money, Pay employees, Reinvest in growth, and show proof of traction. Acquisition marketing includes the strategies companies use to market their products/services to new customers. Customer retention refers to a company’s ability to retain its customers. -Measures the ability of a company to keep customers satisfied over time. Customer acquisition channels include the strategies and platforms companies use to acquire new customers and leads. The best channels depend on your audience, resources, and overall strategy. Consider it a cycle of events. Customer retention leads to affordability, higher return on investment, loyalty, and referrals.
- Attract: To attract a potential partner on a first date, you must get that person’s attention. Differentiate yourself (e.g., new outfit, haircut, or cologne).
- Convert: Provide value to convince them to say yes. (e.g., brighten their day, give a compliment, open the door).
- Close: This is the tough part! To close, ask them out.
- Delight: Delight your date by following through on the expectations you set in the earlier stages.
Strategies for customer retention include highlighting past accomplishments, setting clear expectations early and often, communicating results, creating a roadmap of the future, making memories, asking for feedback, Map customer experience, creating a customer relationship marketing strategy, Keep a record of communication and past issues, Ensure the customer has a relationship with you, Increase loyalty with reciprocity, Offer a loyalty program, and empower customers with tools and resources. Your CRM strategy will outline how your business plans to create, grow, and nurture long-term customer relationships by holistically connecting the business processes and systems that engage with prospects and customers. Streamline and scale your marketing as well as sales processes. Enhance the customer experience. Increase customer retention, customer lifetime value, and brand loyalty. Make data-driven decisions and forecast future business success.
Understand and align your company/business goals alongside your CRM goals.
S.M.A.R.T
What are your overall business objectives, and what incremental sales goals have you predetermined to ensure objectives are met? What are you looking to accomplish utilizing your CRM? Goals differ between varying business models. What information/data do you need and how will you leverage said information? Have a detailed understanding of your buyer persona as well as your buyer/customer journey. Your CRM strategy will be driven by whom you’re looking to target and how they currently interact with your company across all digital touchpoints. How do your prospects travel through your marketing or sales funnel? What pain points or challenges cause them to drop off along the way and prevent them from becoming buyers? Figure out which metrics will signal overall CRM efficacy, and determine what KPIs will serve as direct impactors on your company/business goals. Focus on differentiating micro vs. macro goals. Your marketing/sales process will outline a set of steps needed to move a prospective buyer from initial awareness to conversion/action. Common pipeline stages: Prospect, Lead, Discovery, Demo, Negotiation/proposal, and Deal closing. To complete your CRM strategy, you will need to invest in the CRM software that best aligns with your business processes and team needs such as Price, Capabilities, Features, and Integrations with current tools. CRM Tools support improved client/customer relations, help improve cross-functionality and thus can increase team collaboration, provide efficiency in serving clients, which can increase staff satisfaction, and they reduce cost and manual efforts.
CRM Tools to consider include Microsoft dynamics, salesmate, oracle Netsuite, sap CRM, salesforce, SugarCRM, HubSpot, Zoho, highlevel, monday.com, keap, and pipedrive.
Object: CRM objects represent a business’s different types of relationships and processes. Standard CRM objects include contacts, companies, deals, tickets, and custom objects you create (enterprise accounts only).
Records: A record is a single instance of an object that can store information and track interactions. You can make associations between records to understand the relationships between them.
Properties: A property represents the different types of information that can be stored on a record.
With marketing automation, a marketer has the technology and experience to increase the likelihood that email messages clear organizational spam filters and get delivered to the inbox. Marketing Automation allows you to trigger messages based on a visitor’s actions on your site, ideally sending messages when they are most relevant based on what they’ve done in the past and where they are in the buying process. Dynamic message content can be developed for different groups of buyers and to nurture prospects based on email behavior, relational data, web behavior, and offline behavior. This gives a better sense of which leads might offer more potential by lead scoring site visitors based on activities and behaviors they demonstrate on your website. Using the automation software and more relevant copy, images, calls to action, and trigger campaigns can move inactive users into the active-user status and bump up a company’s overall renewal rate. There are three core kinds of marketing automation software: those that compile lists, those that facilitate the transfer of information to those listed individuals, and those that maintain several versions of these lists to deliver messages designed to have some personal relevance to the recipients. In each instance, the software program has the same goal: to deliver ad content to potential customers. The difference is in the specificity and sophistication of the targeting. Marketing Automation evolves the Sales and Marketing Funnel. Here’s an example of selling to a teacher: With multi-channel marketing solutions including email, social, web ads, and online searches, companies can use automated programs, such as drip marketing, trigger-based email programs, and lead scoring to capture behavioral and demographic information, better qualify leads, and determine if they need more marketing nurturing and when they are ready to be passed onto Sales. “Nurturing programs keep people engaged with your company and products — instead of with your competitor — so that when they are ready to buy, they buy from you.,” says Matt Martelli, a demand generation expert. Automated lead nurturing benefits marketers by: increasing productivity through efficiency, using the behavior of leads to drive marketing activity, increasing revenue opportunity, focusing on acting on the right qualified lead at the right time, and creating a positive synergy between sales and marketing.
List of nurturing programs that can be effective with prospects:
- Welcome messages and Up-selling/cross-selling
- Abandoned shopping cart
- Re-engagement – activate inactively
- Time-sensitive offers and Event-driven campaigns
- Referral and loyalty programs
- Accelerated lead programs – Moving hot leads through the pipeline more quickly
Email Marketing
As a quick aside, email marketing basically ‘birthed’ the marketing automation industry, and 2012 marked a coming out party for the big boys in the space as Eloqua sold to Oracle for $871M and Pardot sold ~10x revenue to ExactTarget. According to GIA, email marketing will be a $15.7B industry by 2017. Just ask Mailchimp, Silverpop, and Pardot about the incredible growth the industry has seen in the last decade. These solutions tell you who receives, who opens, who reads, and who clicks your email marketing messages. They also allow you to search, segment and organize your email lists based on demographics, past behaviors, and custom fields you create.
Email marketing is still one of the most effective ways for marketers to reach their target audience and saw the 3rd highest investment rate in software among marketing departments in 2011 as automating emails as much as possible is the trend. Smart email marketers are increasingly combining behavior and automation to drive up response rates and ROI, increase relevance and timeliness, and make sure the lack of resources doesn’t prevent emails from going out. This automation process includes welcome email streams, re-engagement campaigns, abandoned cart emails, and many more. It also includes the import and export of data in segmentation done in the background and reports being created. This allows email marketers to focus on the more important analysis of campaign data and the overall strategy for the email programs. Email Marketers need to focus their efforts on minimizing inactive and activating “subscribers.” Both social media and email marketing should promote the other too. Additionally, messages will speak with more of a human voice, incorporating employees, customers, testimonials, reviews, humor, user-generated content, and content from social media and community sources.
Overview of Marketing Automation Solutions
Given the volume of hundreds of marketing automation solutions available today, there’s a platform for every size organization and these lists are inherently incomplete. With the help of the marketing community, we are continually evolving and refining the directory of products in the space. Marketing Automation software can be difficult to understand, evaluation cycles are longer, buyers are well informed and hyper-critical, and the value or benefit is often far removed from the point of purchase. See our list for our thoughts on the most successful and popular out there:
- Marketing automation: Marketo, Pardot, Eloqua, Hubspot, Neolane, Loopfuse, Mintigo, Bizo
- Email Marketing: Silverpop, ExactTarget
Marketo is a web-based marketing automation software system that helps sales and marketing professionals automate the marketing process and collaborate throughout the sales cycle. The software provides lead management and sales insight solutions to help reps automate focused marketing campaigns based on highly targeted criteria, with a goal of “warming up” leads over time. Primary features include lead capture and nurturing, email marketing, data management, social media integration, SEO management, Event and resource management, email deliverability testing, additional support, special integration and IT series, Dedicated IP address, smart lead capture forms, database management tools, lead management, batch email marketing, web activity tracking, automated drip marketing, custom security controls, campaign reporting analytics, email deliverability tools, secure partner/channel access, territory assignment, and real-time sales alerts.
Key differentiators:
- Combined sales and marketing solution: fastest growing marketing automation vendor
- Out-of-the-box integration with Salesforce.com and other CRM systems
- Revenue cycle analytics and enhanced scalability
- “Sandbox” application for testing, development, and training purposes
- A process-driven automated campaign builder, which offers flexibility and scalability over traditional graphical if/then campaign builders
Marketo Pricing is priced per month with a usage cap of different packages for different-sized companies. Total monthly pricing ranges from $1,200/month for 3 users in the SMB edition up to $3,600/month for 25 users in the Enterprise edition. Those prices can also fluctuate depending on the number of database records. Marketo Sales Insight is priced per user per month starting at $49/user for 1-10 users, with the price dropping as users increase. Packages are available for integration with Microsoft, Oracle, and SAP systems ranging from $6,000-$10,000/year. Finally, each edition comes with a level of support, and add-on packages are available.
Pardot is a web-based marketing automation system for mid-size B2B marketing organizations. As a SaaS application that is hosted and backed up remotely, it is built on the Force.com platform and integrates seamlessly with Salesforce.com, Microsoft CRM, Sugar CRM, and NetSuite. Primary features include lead nurturing and generation, database segmentation, lead management, list management, smart lead capture forms, batch email marketing, social media integration, tracking, automated drip marketing, analytics/reporting, email deliverability tools, and custom security controls.
Key differentiators:
- Powerful lead scoring engine, API for custom CRM system integrations, free training, and free iPhone app for customers
- Desktop application that provides real-time alerts to sales and marketing
- No contract and setup costs with pay-as-you-go monthly pricing, including an unlimited number of database users and contacts
Pardot is used by over 300 companies in 10 countries and the vendor boasts a 96% customer retention rate without a contract. The Pardot Pricing has four editions that range in price from $500 to $3,000 per month. Heavy email users may encounter additional charges for exceeding monthly maximums.
Hubspot, Inc. offers an all-in-one marketing software platform that has helped more than 5,500 companies in 34 countries attract leads and convert them into customers. HubSpot is also the developer of a website analytics tool, WebsiteGrader.com, which has more than 3 million users. The primary features include web content management, service, and app marketplace, SEO tools, A/B testing, behavior-driven MA, email marketing, prospect/lead intelligence, multichannel marketing analytics, blogging, and social media monitoring tools, lead nurturing and management, landing pages, closed-loop reporting, and landing pages. HubSpot is an entirely web-based application offering a range of APIs that allow you to integrate with commercial and custom software, read and write data, and customize.
Key differentiators:
- All-in-one system that combines sales and marketing activities
- Cross-channel communications with triggered responses and out-of-the-box integrations for eCommerce and CRM.
- Multichannel marketing and mobile deployment for easy implementation and integration
HubSpot CRM can manage your contact, details, inbound emails, and customer feedback in one place. Organize data to be accessible and streamlined. Have a customizable experience and an intuitive interface. HubSpot integrations include Microsoft Outlook, Slack, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Zoom, Google Ads, Gmail, Zendesk, Mailchimp, Canva, and YouTube. HubSpot CRM supports separate collections of tools categorized by their purpose and function, called “hubs.” All of these hubs are operated directly within the HubSpot CRM. With forms, you can retrieve information about your visitors and contacts. HubSpot allows you to create forms and add them to your website. Contact forms are one of the most important parts of your digital marketing strategy and will help you build the foundation of your business.
- Contacts tab: Contacts, Companies, Calls, Activity Feed, and Lists.
- Conversations: Inbox, Chatflows, Snippets, and Templates
- Marketing: Ads, Email, Landing Pages, Social, SEO, Campaigns, Forms
- Sales: Deals, Forecast, Tasks, Documents, Meetings, Playbooks, Quotes
- Service: Tickets, Service Hub
- Automation: Sequences, Workflow
- Reports: Analytical Tools, Dashboards, Reports
Hubspot pricing has lead scoring and nurturing campaigns that are included in basic and professional level packages which start at $2,700/year. Advanced marketing automation, which includes multi-channel and cross-platform triggers, is offered in the enterprise package starting at $9,600/year
Eloqua is a market leader in on-demand marketing automation solutions for both B2B and B2C organizations. Their existing customer of the base of 700+ customers positions them to increase market share as the marketing automation software industry grows. Primary features include listing segmentation, lead capture, lead nurturing and scoring, smart lead capture forms, database management tools, lead management, web activity tracking, custom security controls, automated drip marketing, multi-channel campaigns, campaign analytics, revenue cycle analytics, real-time sales alerts, list and data management, reporting and analytics, social media, and SEO and resource management. Eloqua offers rich multi-channel marketing management tools for email, print, and phone campaigns. It’s popular amongst technology, media, and professional services firms. Eloqua’s SaaS system is hosted and backed up in a secure data center with guaranteed server uptimes of 99%.
Key differentiators:
- B2B and B2C campaign support with optional email deliverability tools (Return Path)
- “One click” integration with Salesforce.com, Microsoft CRM, and Oracle/Siebel
- Custom integrations with CRM and custom microsite builder
- Multi-channel marketing, marketing event, and budget management
- “Sandbox” application for testing, development, and training purposes
- Social media integration, special integration, SMS, VM, mail services, and Dedicated IP
Eloqua Pricing consists of four different packages that range in price from $1,200 per month for a lightweight package to $6,400 per month for its Enterprise edition. Although priced monthly, customers are expected to pay quarterly with additional setup costs that are related to the customer’s needs. Training is included and support options vary per package. Eloqua offers customers a money-back guarantee if the implementation is unsuccessful.
Neolane is a marketing automation solution used by B2B/B2C enterprise marketing organizations. It has 3 options for deployment: on-premise, on-demand, or mid-source – that provides ease of hosting and the security of keeping important information on site. It offers functionality to help marketers execute across traditional and modern channels (direct mail, email, and mobile). It helps marketers manage campaigns, resources, customer data, and analytics from a single, open platform. Neolane is popular for banking and financial services, B2B high tech, retail, media and entertainment, travel and hospitality, and organizations with $100M+ in annual revenue. Primary features include lead generation and scoring, channel ROI tracking, marketing resource management, lead segmenting and management, multi-channel campaigns, campaign analytics, automated workflows, contact management, batch email marketing, rules-based triggers, and custom user interface. It does not have solutions for small-to-medium-sized organizations.
Key differentiators:
- Coordination of emerging technology with traditional channels
- Shared code base across all NeoLane applications and user-definable workflow
- Combined deployment models (i.e. on-premise supplemented with hosted)
- Integration with major CRM/SFA vendors (Salesforce, Oracle/Siebel, Microsoft, etc.)
- Combined, intuitive GUI personalization solutions for both B2C and B2B Marketing
- Supports multiple languages, currencies, and marketing processes for global organizations
Neolane’s pricing is dependent on the number of records in the Neolane database (usually $5,000 per 100,000 records per month for the on-demand version). A perpetual license (on-premise) is about $90,000 with an 18 % maintenance fee per year. Pricing is customized for the hybrid model, which allows organizations to secure data behind their firewall, but have processes occur in the cloud.
“Loopfuse offers a B2B marketing automation platform that tells you who is visiting your website, captures their information, sends lead nurturing emails, scores the best opportunities, and integrates it all into your CRM system with advanced reporting. Primary features include CRM configuration, lead nurturing, autoresponder, campaign assignments, lead scoring, smart lead capture forms, ‘Watch List’ flag for prospects to follow up with in the future, and a company ‘Fuse Bar’ that provides a visual indicator of how well a prospect has been marketed to. The Salesforce integration shows pageviews, emails opened, marketing score, first activity, website registration, emails clicked, marketing grade, and last activity. The site implementation wizard walks you through adding website tracking code on where to place, and how to track lead capture forms. There is no formal implementation process in place for every customer and it has a weak Salesforce integration. Loopfuse pricing has a free trial that allows users to see functionality called FreeView for $0. Free accounts do not get formal support, but there is a support webpage and community message boards available. Implementation services are available upon request. All paid accounts receive up to 2,500 prospects, 5,000 emails, 100,000 pageviews, unlimited users, CRM integration, and Premium Support. Price tiers:
- $350/per month – Up to 10,000 prospects
- $750/per month – Up to 25,000 prospects
- $1,250/per month – Up to 50,0000 prospects
- $2,000/per month – Up to 100,000 prospects
- $3,000/per month – up to 250,000 prospects
Mintigo offers a customer acquisition solution with unparalleled targeting accuracy and prospects’ conversion levels. Its solution focuses on deciphering your unique customer code and scanning the entire potential market for similar receptive prospects. The result is a large-scale set of triggers that are unique and indicative of highly-receptive prospects. Founded in June 2009, Mintigo is backed by Sequoia Capital and has offices in Silicon Valley, Israel, and Spain. It is the world’s first customer search engine.
Bizo is used by B2B marketers to identify and reach their target audiences online. Fueled by an audience of 120 million professionals around the world, including more than 85% of the U.S. business population, the Bizo Marketing Platform can precisely target business people by specific business demographic criteria. Bizo’s customers use the platform’s data management and targeting capabilities to reach audiences anywhere they travel online and engage those that come to their websites, landing pages, and social channels. Bizo has earned the confidence of more than 600 SMB marketers and large global brands including AMEX, Mercedes Benz, Monster, Salesforce.com, Porsche, Microsoft, and AT&T.
Silverpop is a completely on-demand marketing platform for email marketing and marketing automation. The system helps to align marketing and sales efforts by scoring sales leads, nurturing them through the sales pipeline, and measuring campaign ROI with real-time reports and analytics. Silverpop offers several best-of-breed solutions, including email marketing, marketing automation, and lead management, which is now the fastest growing part of their business after experiencing a 60 % growth over 2008. Silverpop is hosted in a secure data center and backed up daily to ensure safety. It also uses SSL to secure the transmission of client information over the Internet. It can be used for lead capture and nurturing, email marketing, data management, integrated surveys, real-time sales alerts, lead management, multi-channel marketing, web activity tracking, automated lead routing, data and list management, email deliverability tools, automated segmentation, and SEO management.
Key Differentiators:
- No, IT assistance is required for setup and 100% purely web-based deployment
- Social media marketing tracking, real-time reporting, and behavior tracking
- Optimized landing pages, microsites, and forms, reporting, and analytics
- Salesforce.com, Netsuite, and Microsoft CRM integration
- SMS campaign capabilities and Intuitive drag-and-drop campaign planning
Silverpop pricing is based on database size (measured in leads or contacts) or email distribution volume. Subscription pricing may be based on the cost per record within database tiers with additional fees for customer support and optional add-on products, API integration, and implementation services. Silverpop customers are charged 10 % of their monthly fee (capped at $500/month) for customer support. Pricing is based on individual needs and is available upon request.
According to Crunchbase, “ExactTarget, Inc. is a provider of on-demand email marketing software solutions. Their suite of on-demand one-to-one marketing applications enables clients to send business-critical and event-triggered communications to increase sales, optimize marketing investments, and strengthen customer relationships. They offer four editions of their on-demand software application along with integrated solutions such as ExactTarget for AppExchange and ExactTarget for Microsoft Dynamics CRM.” ExactTarget pricing?
Marketers Must Stay on Top of Marketing Automation Solutions and Digital Landscape. In conclusion, there are a lot of great options out there in order to grow your bottom line and increase KPIs. As it stands now, digital is the direct marketing is going, but the reality is that many marketers need to do both: augment traditional marketing with digital channels. The two strategies diverge down different paths of creation, execution, and distribution but the main thing to remember when creating a marketing campaign is to offer relevant information to your target audience, whether through traditional or digital channels. Marketing automation is defined as the business processes and supporting technology that focuses on segmentation and targeting of prospects, defining those campaigns, and feeding the data back into the technology system. Estimates of marketing automation adoption is projected to hit 50% by the year 2015, meaning plenty of companies will be sifting through the various vendors to determine what solution fits best. For many marketers, purchasing this type of technology is unchartered territory and it’s vital to understand what they’ll need in order to make their technology investment successful:
1. Lead Management Process: Even with staggering statistics on the adoption and benefits of marketing automation, organizations need to consider analyzing and developing a Lead Management Process. This alone will help you to get the maximum return from your investment. Use a whiteboard to draw your process out and then formally document it for all involved departments to review. How does this technology integrate with your existing services?
- Identifying your leads. Develop your personas and what their buying questions are.
- Creating a scoring or grading structure for your leads. What would make a prospect an “A” lead?
- Mapping out a nurture campaign for your different personas starting small and then growing it.
- Identifying when marketing will pass leads to sales. A good place to start is if a prospect hits a certain score/grade.
2. Team’s Skills: A study conducted in 2010 by Frost & Sullivan and Bulldog Solutions showed that of 250 respondents, 109 (44%) said that not having the right people was a roadblock to their automation success. Make sure your people have a strong understanding of your buyers, a willingness to collaborate with sales, a focus on revenue as an outcome, and that they know the place technology will play in reaching the buyer. Does this technology fit within the structure of your company and are these technologies usable and relevant??
3. Content Strategy: You can’t automate marketing if you don’t have anything to send to your leads, so it is imperative that you have relevant content that will foster dialogue along each stage of the buying cycle. A quarterly newsletter and sending lots of emails are the biggest trends for marketers, but most have no content strategy or framework. Consequently, their results are falling quite flat. Developing your buyer personas (or ideal customer profiles), and documenting the typical buyer’s journey will help you develop a content map that corresponds to the journey and the personas. Acknowledge different platforms that apply to each category.
4. Overall Goals & Objectives: In this new era of B2B Marketing there has been a shift from art to science. Marketers are no longer looked to as the team that only provides fancy brochures, trade show swag, and PowerPoint presentations, but organizations are looking to their marketing teams to help drive revenue. Yet, many marketing departments have not yet adopted this frame of mind when looking into marketing automation. Before you purchase marketing automation, be sure to determine the goals and objectives of marketing from a revenue perspective. Once the implementation occurs, use the solution along with your CRM reporting to track, benchmark, and report on these metrics. Is there a valid business reason why you need this new technology?
5. All of the Above: Take a look at the maturity of your marketing efforts. Buying an automation platform is only as good as the people, content, and processes you’ve put in place. You’re on the right track for successfully automating your marketing efforts if you know your target leads, collaborate with sales, produce content to educate your audience, and have a team that sees revenue generation as a key aspect of their job. How do all the technologies relate?
Every business is different — figure out which SM platforms are most relevant to your organization. For example, the best solution for a Healthcare company might be Facebook. For a Finance company, LinkedIn optimization software might be the answer. Know your customer and audience, sales cycle, and buyer habits, and plan accordingly. By using integrated web development, you can see the value it adds to overall marketing goals for an organization. Here’s an example:
Publishing and Distributing Content
Optimize your article “How to Use Social Media to Make Sales” for search through your CMS and publish it to your website. Based on the tags you assigned to the document, your CMS presents web visitors with a selection of similar articles, presentations, and research previously published. You assign a call-to-action to the content — inviting users to sign-up to receive similar content, where it’s most convenient like in their inbox. In your marketing automation platform, you draft a short “teaser” email to share this new content to subscribers of your content. You route this email to your master opt-in email database of leads and prospects and because your marketing automation system is integrated with your CRM, you easily make this email available as a template to your business development team directly through a CRM. Your business development team can now easily send this email personally to other prospects they’re cultivating outside your master list. Additionally, you distribute the content via a list of relevant LinkedIn groups and a few tweets to your followers.
Attracting and Cultivating a Lead
CMS informs you that a converted lead found the article via a Google search for “fiscal cliff impact on community banks.” It also tells you that this user subsequently viewed 10 pages of your website in the last 24 hours. It reaches out to the public Internet to find additional information on the visitor including her employer, title, and primary social media profiles. Your marketing automation platform recognizes this visitor as a hot lead based on the activities the user demonstrated while on your site. All of this information is delivered to your CRM along with a notice to business development that a new, hot lead could use attention. Your business development associate reaches out to the lead with a short email thanking her for signing up for your newsletter along with an invite for the prospect to share some of her most pressing business challenges. After exchanging a few conversational emails, your business development lead schedules a short introductory telephone meeting.
Closing and Measuring
A few months later, an opportunity emerges within the prospect’s business and the person contacts a firm for advice. With the opportunity closed in your CRM, your business development team can easily see the original source of the closed business, and your marketing team can aggregate this information against its other marketing initiatives seamlessly closing the loop for both of the firm’s business functions. Social media has the power to transform how technology companies articulate brands. Companies no longer have to depend solely on the marketing department to brand the business. Instead, employees, customers, and partners can act as brand ambassadors. Marketers’ favorite way of finding out about products is now talking to others, not talking to the vendor at all. So those ‘others’ are now an important part of communicating your brand. That means that marketing is no longer a department – everyone who works for the company, every customer and user (current and past), and any influencer in the product area is a potential benefit or problem for the brand.
The final question is: “What do you know about your prospects or customers on social?” Who haven’t you reached who may be interested in your offer on social? Enter Social Marketing Automation. Social Marketing Automation includes social prospecting or the gathering of social profile data from across the social web-based on custom criteria. It also includes social scoring the segmentation logic to meet the specific goals of a business, based on weighted activity and demographic information. The result is hyper-targeted messaging for greater. By combining the power of social media insights and marketing automation technology, you can create a social strategy that is relevant and responsive. So how exactly do social sales enable more successful outreach and engagement with Customer 2.0? It starts with listening before talking. Know your audience by intelligently monitoring the social conversation with tools like Insightpool to allow sales teams to gain unique customer insights that wouldn’t be otherwise available through traditional news sources – insights that can mean the difference between losing a deal to “catching a lead in mid-air.” There’s a lot of noise out there and not enough time to “listen,” which makes the use of social intelligence solutions to identify what’s relevant and critical to success.
So what do you think?
Is your marketing department using marketing automation right now, if so, which one?
Do you think social marketing automation can be as big as traditional marketing automation?