Your Best Next Step: Leveraging Technology
As you utilize the internet and online marketing strategies, you'll soon find that to do this well, it's necessary to employ tools that make it EASIER rather than HARDER to manage your leads and marketing messages. Multiple different tools contain the metrics for their specific activities separately from all of your other tools. That leads to massive inefficiencies in your ability to manage your leads well.
Marketing Automation Pulls it all together
Marketing automation, at its simplest, is replacing repetitive marketing processes with technology.
This includes lead generation, lead segmentation, and identification of sales ready leads. The tools of marketing automation assist in implementation and reporting. They are used to educate, qualify and stay in touch with leads and prospects throughout their buying process, and help you efficiently manage your leads and how you engage them.
The benefits of Marketing Automation are:
- Increase prospect engagement with no extra time (After set-up costs)
- Consistent message delivery
- Segment prospects for targeted communication
- Low cost contact for long sales cycles
- Identification of hot leads
- Handoff between marketing and sales
- Frees up time to focus on the prospects who are ready to buy
To be effective the tools of marketing automation are employed when marketing processes are mature enough to have repetitive components, such as prepared email sequences.
But it is a mistake to wait until you have fully developed processes before thinking about marketing automation.
Marketing Automation Mindset
Developing a mindset of marketing automation is best way to develop the processes required to fully realize the benefits. Marketing is and always has been a process—that is the mindset of marketing automation.
You Know What Prospects Want From You
Prospects need information, they need questions answered, and they need to know about your company and your products. They need to understand why they should do business with you rather than someone else and they do that by going through predictable stages (sales funnel) and asking predictable questions. (Go here to see the 5 conversations in lead nurturing.)
Marketing Automation integrates data across platforms to:
- Deliver content across platforms
- Learn prospect profile
Examples of marketing automation campaigns
- Automatically triggered email sequences e.g. auto responders
- Reporting on web traffic generated from social media sharing
- Automatic transfer of marketing prospect to sales lead based on activity e.g. time spent on specific pricing page triggers email alert to sales
Tying the major components together
One of the challenges with marketing automation is the creation of overlapping databases. For example, your email database may be different from your web analytics and your CRM package. If your email software dumps data after one year and your sales cycle is longer than one year, you lose valuable information about the beginning of their engagement with you.
Fully featured Marketing Automation packages address most of these issues by tying together the main components into one database.
- Web site
- Registrations
- Email marketing
- Social media
- Lead scoring Auto completion of prospect profile across platforms
- Sales data is usually a data import
| COMPONENTS OF MARKETING AUTOMATION |
As with lead generation and lead nurturing there is no shortage of marketing automation tools.
Most tools address a component of your marketing activities such as social media, and email and a few pull sales data from a CRM program.
If you are just getting started or if you want to take your marketing automation to the next level we can help.
