Marketing automation (MA) is still the cause of much frustration for marketers. Following the publication of B2B Marketing’s Marketing Automation Benchmarking Report, we quizzed some of the vendors and agencies championing MA about implementation and the benefits of the technology
You gave us five questions you wanted the answers to, below is what the experts had to say:
What do you already need to have in place to make marketing automation work?
Silverpop: The three ingredients that you need are:
1) A vision for what is possible. Getting executive buy-in is also helpful. If the executives can really understand what is possible, they are more likely to get behind your initiative.
2) Quality data is essential. You might only have names and email addresses to start, but you can become a much more relevant marketer if you leverage behaviours and if you can integrate other useful enterprise data such as order history, support calls and shopping basket data.
3) Skills. You don’t necessarily need to have the skills before you get your MA solution, but you should build training into your implementation schedule and budget.
Dotmailer: It’s important you have the support of your information services team because while data might exist in the business, it needs to be readily accessible and in the right format for an MA tool to use properly. Often that means someone needs to work on data formats and feeds, and that usually means one of the tech team – who tend to appreciate being involved early in the strategy and the detail.
But probably the most important thing is to have someone who is responsible for making MA work. Someone needs to have
the vision, the knowledge and the drive to make it happen every day and to continually improve and extend it to deliver ever-improving results.
Pardot: When starting out with MA you should consider how you want to generate leads and interact with them. Your plan might include content housed behind forms or landing pages, some basic email and nurturing campaigns, and parameters for determining a good lead. Don’t worry, you can start out with just a few assets and then build over time.
It also helps if you have a partner on the sales team who is committed to making MA a success. You should involve them from the beginning as you look at how you can find efficiencies and improvements in your lead management process.
Clevertouch: There are two must haves: a website and a customer base, typically B2B or high-value B2C. It really is that ubiquitous. A nice to have is a desire for marketing to drive a new agenda, rather than being a subservient service provider to sales.
Oracle Marketing Cloud: There is no easy answer to this question. There are several areas that would be useful to think about and plan for in a best-case scenario. It would be good to have a marketing strategy in place, with a clearly defined goal of where you want to be and the steps that are needed to get there. Key areas to develop include; defining target personas, developing content for each stage of the buying cycle, lead scoring and lead nurturing plans and defining how success is measured.
Bluprint: As well as having the right people, processes and data in place, it’s important to have the right technology as well. Ask yourself: Do you have the correct technology? Presumably you have an MA platform in place but is it integrated with your CRM system? Are the correct analytics and reporting applications in place to review your marketing automation campaigns?
What tangible difference has automation delivered to those doing it?
Clevertouch: The biggest benefit is forcing companies to plan for it properly. Implementing MA encourages marketers to rethink their go-to-market strategy, their campaign sophistication, their alignment and reporting metrics.
It is not just about ROI, the smarter marketers are forecasting contribution to funnel and impact on future revenues based on past experiences and are helping their businesses take out cost through smarter framework design, nurturing, recycling and closed-loop reporting.
Oracle Marketing Cloud: Time – MA makes it possible for marketers to create multiple campaigns and social posts in advance and schedule their delivery at the right stage of the buying cycle. Reducing the time and effort needed to create and track successful campaigns frees up staff
and resources to focus on other initiatives in the business.
Analytics – many MA solutions provide detailed metrics and analytics for each individual channel. These performance results help marketers make the necessary changes to drive more success in the future.
Better relationship with sales through lead scoring – get the best leads into the hands of sales fast by scoring all marketing responses so sales doesn’t
waste time following up on leads that are not ready to buy.
Money saved – think of all the money you spend to acquire new contacts. Nurture the contacts you have so when they are ready to buy, your company is front-of-mind.
Pardot: One of the biggest ROI impacts reported by MA users is that they are seeing their sales cycle move much faster. MA allows you to do personalisation at scale, giving you the chance to deliver customised messages to each one of your prospects more frequently and more accurately than you could do as an individual.
How do you make the best use of MA when you have a small budget, a wide product portfolio and an even smaller marketing team?
Silverpop: MA can make a small team so much more efficient by automating messages. Rule-based communications capabilities allows you to set up one-off emails, simple drip communications or lifecycle campaigns which will then go to the right person at the right time in their consideration process – automatically without further staff intervention. Marketing teams as small as three to four people can be tremendously successful.
Pardot: MA is perfect for small budgets and small teams. At its core, it helps you maximise marketing spending and resources. It does take a little planning to get started, but once you have automations and nurturing set up it saves your team a lot of time.
One of the concerns people have when starting out is content marketing – how can they create enough content to fuel conversions and then nurture prospects? Here are two thrifty tips for content creation: you can recycle and you can borrow.
Recycling: think about how to use one topic across a number of different mediums. For example, a collection of blog posts on a similar topic can become a whitepaper. That same content can be re-formatted as a webinar. Not only does this reduce your workload, but it instantly creates a cohesive campaign.
Borrowing from others (with attribution, of course): articles, blog posts and other content from industry experts is actually great for your nurturing tracks. It helps to position you as a helpful, friendly resource and provides a low-calorie touchpoint for your campaign.
What are the most common processes that are used for marketing automation?
Dotmailer: MA is most commonly used for either regular and repeatable customer journeys like welcome programmes, contract renewals and so on. Those programmes are likely already in place but carried out manually or are easily visualised and measured so tend to be the most obvious automated programmes for a business to begin with.
Another common use is for complicated discrete campaigns like event management. For example, a customer registers for an event and gets a series of automated messages confirming the booking, detailing agendas, reminders etc.
Oracle Marketing Cloud: The most common process and features should include proper campaign management and lead nurturing, lead scoring, email campaigns, email and landing page creation, social media functionality, integration capabilities including an open API, and impressive reporting and analytics. It is always important to consider the cost of this type of investment, but even more essential to purchase a system that will be reliable and capitalise on existing marketing efforts.
Bluprint: While it’s not necessarily the most common process used within an MA project, we found the most valuable process has to be consultancy to accompany your MA implementation. The right consultancy will help you take stock of your current position, your end goal and – most crucially – provide
a roadmap for you to follow. Consultancy lays the foundations for ensuring MA users know why they’re using the platform and to what end.
How much time should you spend to set the MA programme for your business?
Oracle Marketing Cloud: It’s a continuous job. Many companies have implemented marketing operations departments in order to streamline all the marketing technologies they have or plan to acquire in order for them to work best together.
Dotmailer: That’s a really tricky one. Of course it will be different for each business but the short answer is that if you take the ‘just do something’ approach, it needn’t take long either from a planning, creation or roll-out standpoint. It’s mostly about willpower and setting yourself the goal of getting things done.
In my experience building a programme – like a welcome programme – is pretty quick as any decent MA platform will have drag and drop functionality and an intuitive interface. A 10-15 step programme might only take 30 minutes to build.
Of course, building new segments, developing new creative or offers and getting access to new data sources can really ramp up the time, but most often you’ll be using or adapting existing creative.
Honestly, if a programme is taking more than a couple of hours to build then it’s time to consider whether it is too complicated and you’re biting off too much in one go, or whether you need to swap to a platform that is easier to use.
Silverpop: First you’ll want to migrate over your existing messaging templates and database. The time to do this will depend on the size and scope of what you want to move. Then you’ll most likely spend a few weeks whitelisting your new sending IP with the new provider. As you’re doing this ramp up, you will be designing your new automated programmes. Companies can get new functions up such as abandoned basket in as little as 60 days with focused attention and a crisp project plan.
Marketing Automation Benchmarking Report
Download B2B Marketing’s MA Benchmarking Report for further insights into the industy. The report contains research analysis into the current trends and challenges in the industry with a handy infographic, best practice advice from thought leaders, as well as a vendor comparison table to ensure you choose the right MA platform for your brand.
