Delivering more, higher-quality leads to the sales team is a hard task, but having the right marketing automation platform in place can give marketers a competitive advantage, says Martin Smith, head of marketing at Neolane
Marketing automation systems enable marketers to execute more engaging, personalised communications more often, and across more channels. The result? Competitive advantage – an increase in ‘hot’ sales leads and maximised revenue opportunities along with evidence of precisely where marketing efforts are adding value and how much.
Is marketing automation right for you?
In essence, marketing automation proposes to make demand generation processes more effective. None more so than in environments where lead generation, lead nurturing and the transfer of qualified leads to sales is a volume activity demanding the creation of a large number of one-to-one personalised messages. If you’re struggling with highly manual processes and/or a reliance on spreadsheets, or if you have multiple-point solutions in place, you’ll find marketing automation to be worth investigating.
1. Advantages
Here’s some opportunities marketing automation presents:
- Lead scoring and optimisation. Place prospects in the right phase of your lead funnel so you can take them on the right journey, adding value each time you connect and accelerate the sales cycle.
- Differentiation. Move from mass and large segment marketing to one-to-one campaigns, improving response and lead retention rates and deliver a better customer experience.
- Brand perception. Present relevant and timely content so you’ll be top of the list when a customer is ready to buy or consider a repeat purchase.
- Smarter, faster timing. Know when a customer is interacting and trigger the next step automatically to interact further with them.
- Right content, every time. Track behaviours and use rules to determine the true nature of a prospect’s interest and then automatically select the most relevant response.
- Cross-channel coordination. Engage with customers via multiple channels in a consistent, coordinated manner.
- Frequency management. Manage frequency of contact, eliminating over-soliciting and marketing fatigue.
- Workflow management. Design advanced, personalised and cross-channel nurturing processes.
- Better integration. Exchange data with sales automation systems, allowing sales to view leads on a platform they are familiar with.
- A single point of control. Identify who is doing what well, share learning and best practices, devolve local responsibility and introduce a single point of control.
- Replace point and siloed solutions. Consolidate multiple specialised solutions, improving process and data integration and execution. Reduce training, product licensing and maintenance costs.
- Compliance. Manage compliance and data privacy requirements in real-time.
- New channel integration. Easily and quickly accommodate new channels within the lead management process.
- Inbound/outbound fusion. Tie inbound and outbound marketing conversations together in real-time to seed new demand and trigger outbound lead nurturing campaigns, as well as deliver a positive customer experience.
2. Implications to consider before committing
Marketing automation technologies aren’t cheap. So, in the first instance, a clear management strategy is essential as is a willingness to define and integrate marketing processes.
Secondly, note that you may need to build a central marketing data mart to provide a single system of record for customer and prospect information. The automation vendor or its partners will probably offer to support this, and you’ll need to make decisions here with your IT department and data management people.
Finally, don’t forget about data quality. The pertinence of the content you present is very much dependent upon the accuracy of your data, both historical and incoming. Make sure you have a quality regime in place to ensure that you can be confident in your data.
3. Challenges and obstacles
Marketing automation often comes as part of a wider change management project and can face certain obstacles to success. It’s worth getting acquainted with what these might be before you start. You may need to gain sponsorship at a senior level in your organisation to help you to drive change through:
- Budget. Don’t dumb down your lead management solution to fit the budget. Instead, look for ways at the outset to make the business case for investing at the appropriate level.
- Culture. Shifting to automated processes and one-to-one personalisation presents a big change so engagement and training will be important.
- Office politics. Define demarcation and ownership and convince both sales and marketing teams that openness and sharing will deliver better results for everyone.
- Channel politics. Consider any exclusivity arrangements you have around customer contact with channel partners, such as resellers and dealers.
- IT and data security. Prove to IT, whether you select to run your system inhouse or operate it via a SaaS option, that security has been well tested and is compliant with your IT policy.
While there are costs and the complexities of change to consider, ‘always-on’ marketing can offer significant competitive advantage and cannot be ignored. A marketing automation platform will allow you to plan and execute demand generation, implement personalised customer communications programmes, and nurture leads – all while demonstrating accountability to your sales teams, finance and the CEO.