Marketing automation is continuing to grow through the recession; Will Schnabel, vice-president of international markets at lead generation software provider Silverpop, reports that his company’s automation products are enjoying 100 per cent year-on-year growth, much of it amongst B2B companies.
Schnabel recently attended a conference organised by B2B Marketing. “Marketing automation came up,” he recalls. “You could see the light bulbs popping on as people began to see what it could do.”
Marketing automation is about making straightforward, repetitive tasks happen automatically. The benefits are significant: automation can help you to do more in less time and with less money. Such attractions explain its growing popularity. However, those involved in the industry also point to the greater proportion of marketing done online, and the demand for accountability, as further contributory factors.
A success story
Most observers agree that the technology sector is leading the way within B2B marketing, and the story of software company Sant demonstrates the potential benefits of automation. It provides software for sales proposals, and had until recently communicated with customers and prospects by using several cobbled-together email marketing solutions. None were integrated with its CRM system, and the process left the marketing team uncertain about the effectiveness of campaigns.
“Our initial efforts at lead nurturing were manual,” says Brian Vass, vice president of marketing. “They involved managing spreadsheets of people at different steps of the campaign and trying to make sure they were getting the right communications at the right time. It became too daunting.”
Vass decided to try Silverpop’s B2B automation product, Engage B2B. It has allowed Sant’s team to automate large parts of its lead nurturing campaigns; its customer newsletter; and maintenance announcements for its support organisation. All leads coming through the website are scored automatically, based on job title, website activity and downloads. They are then routed to sales when they reach a certain score.
Sant has experienced a threefold increase in open and click-through rates on its email marketing. It has also had a clearer view of the impact of its campaigns on revenue. And it has saved enough time to allow it to focus more attention on tailoring content to new vertical markets.
Resistance to automation
There can be few B2B marketers who are not keen to emulate the success of Sant. However, there are several factors holding many of them back from greater automation. Tim Norman, sales director at web content management company SDL Tridion, believes that many are afraid of automation: “Too often we like the non-automated approach as we can show everyone how busy we are. In reality marketing automation would free up time to be creative and concentrate on activities that actually add value. But many resist because they’re afraid that it could show up failings and force us to try something new.”
Others point to more practical concerns. Leigh Whitney, MD at marketing agency Design UK, says, “Legacy systems make automation quite difficult. IT departments have been over-stretched, so marketers have had to take the initiative and set up their own systems. This means that data is now spread across disparate locations.”
The cost barrier
However, by far the greatest obstacle is cost. B2B marketers tend to assume that they will need to spend tens of thousands of pounds on lead generation software before they can even think about automation.
Yet as Stuart Wheldon, director of client services, Asia-Pac and EMEA at Eloqua, another provider of lead generation software points out, these systems can be less expensive than expected. “Our software is provided online as a service, so there are no high upfront costs and no long term commitments,” he says. “And there are four tiers of product, so there’s something suitable for even the smallest budget.”
However, it remains equally true that these systems are not essential if a company wants to begin to automate its marketing. Just as customer relationship management is not the same thing as CRM software, so marketing automation can be done without expensive lead generation software. It will probably involve some software, but it can be much simpler and cheaper than most B2B marketers would expect.
As Grant Keller, MD at Acceleration, advises, “Marketing automation can quickly become complex – don’t let it. Take baby steps; there is no need to launch an entire automated system at once.”
Five easy (and cheap) wins
So, what can you automate without spending a fortune on a lead generation system? It will vary by organisation. The question to ask yourself is: what are the straightforward, repetitive tasks that take up the time of your creative, experienced and highly paid marketing staff? Those are the tasks that ought to be automated. Here are five quick wins that should get you started, and hopefully spark further ideas.
1. Online interaction
Marcel Holsheimer, vice president of marketing for EMEA at Unica, says, “Companies can automate “For example, build a profile of how visitors are using your company’s website through basic analytics, such as length of visit, number of visitors, number of repeat visitors, number of visitors who download information or request follow up, and ensure you capture contact details of visitors. You can then have the details of people with a certain profile automatically sent to sales to take appropriate action.”
2. Email marketing
Craig Whiston, client services manager for EMEA at web analytics provider Coremetrics, says, “Complicated automation systems may not always be the most appropriate solution for a small or straightforward business, especially if the system is not easy to use.” However, he says automation is the future, particularly of email, and marketers should try to use it whenever they can. Most reasonably advanced email marketing platforms will have some form of marketing automation functionality built in, even though at the moment it’s not likely to be particularly rich. Marketers should seek out such attributes and use what is available, as its likely that more advanced functionality will be in development by the vendor.
3. Paid search marketing
Rob Pierre, MD at search marketing agency Jellyfish, believes that paid search can be simply and cheaply automated. He says, “You can use autobidding to ensure some poorly performing or irrelevant keywords are kept out of the process. Also, automated systems can allow you to easily scale a campaign and to focus on the higher value activities such as copywriting. However, remember that search marketing is predominantly a human activity and automated systems have their limitations.”
4. Rules based campaigns
While much automation takes place in the online sphere it is also possible to automate much of your offline marketing. Simon Hughes, customer intelligence expert at SAS UK, explains, “Scoring software allows campaigns to be executed automatically by the system. Prospects are scored on factors such as attendance at events and brochure requests. Once they reach a certain score they are passed to marketing. This means you can track campaigns ad that sales teams receive more suitable leads, and have more information.”
5. Triggered campaigns
Finally, you can use software to automate campaigns in response to specific triggers. The classic example is the birthday campaign. Ian Liddicoat, managing director at EMB Marketing Sciences, is working on campaigns in the fleet sector, in which tailored brochures are produced for individual customers, using digital print on demand. The content is automatically defined by events such as the car they test drove.
A must-have?
Liddicoat adds that success depends on getting the rules right in the first place. He explains, “There are examples of multi-stage B2B campaigns in which the rules governing the next step in the campaign have not been defined correctly.”
If you can succeed in defining rules correctly, then you should be able to save time and money, and improve not only the number of people you speak to, but the quality of interactions. As Kristin Hambelton, senior director of marketing at software provider Neolane, concludes, “I believe that by 2012 every large organisation will have automated many of its marketing activities. Every B2B marketer ought to be working out whether they will be able to stay in business without doing some form of automation.”
