Marketing automation (MA) has become increasingly popular among B2B companies of all sizes and marketers. Despite its success, many struggle to get the most out of their tools. Marcin Malinowski, director of UK business unit at Outbox Group offers advice on to make the most out of your MA
Businesses have widely adopted CRM systems but it is time to think beyond this and use data in the best way to actively engage with customers and leads. Here are five best practices to achieve this:
Incorporate social media
As we all know, social media is becoming the preferred method of communication between customers and businesses. This particular type of platform allows instant reaction and response to business services, and often people would rather tweet than email a company. Ensuring your social media channels are accounted for when analysing data, will provide real-time information and improve your outreach strategies.
Keywords’ analysis or looking for a surge of popularity to a product release will allow your organisation to gain an insight into customer sentiment and understand how best communicate with them. Tailoring messages via social media or emailers to act upon this sentiment will then put your company on the path to execute an exceptional customer outreach strategy.
Set out a clear publishing and content strategy
Start by asking yourself, what do you want to achieve with your MA system in the short and long term? Your organisation needs to have it clear in its corporate plan what it is planning to release each quarter. Confusion during marketing outreach will not only complicate the process, it could mean important targets are not properly focused upon. Setting out a transparent strategy will make sure there are no clashes in content or publishing, while achieving your objectives.
Keep in mind your business goals when the outreach strategy is laid out. Think about whether this content release data is right, or should it be moved to the next quarter? Clashing content or overloading the customer with unspecified emails will lead them to label those emails as spam. Therefore, your marketing team need to pick the right moment for maximum impact, based on the data gathered from your MA system.
Validate your lead nurturing outreach
Basic errors often mean that lead nurturing fails to live up to expectation. It is vital that your team does an audit of your contacts, remove incorrect email addresses and contact information to ensure that everybody who is contacted is a genuine lead, thus preventing a high bounce back rates of emails. Using those features of your MA system will help you analyse data, and at the same time, personalise outreach attempts to turn those prospects into customers.
To improve your chances if gaining significant ROI, the removal all outdated information is one of the best practises to act on in the beginning of implementation. Once this is done companies can then gather information specific to each lead through analytics, enabling an automation of outreach efforts that is data driven and personalised.
Measure marketing ROI
ROI is the buzzword of the modern day company. As software capabilities evolve, companies need to continue investing to stay ahead of competition. If businesses use MA to calculate ROI on all of their marketing outreach, including social media, they can pinpoint what is working and what isn’t. Breaking all marketing elements into sections and manageable chunks to be analysed will ensure the task is not too overwhelming. Doing so will also provide you with a comprehensive overview of ROI.
It is all about breaking down the whole of the company’s outreach strategy into specific campaigns that can then be evaluated to see whether it had a good ROI. Marketing budgets are often tight so it is up to your team to prove they are securing new business or retaining it, through their outreach. MA systems will allow conversations surrounding this to rely on facts, and offer solutions to how a business can become more competitive.
Get to know your customers and their journeys
A customer is more than a statistic. Therefore, the customer journey needs to be analysed thoroughly to achieve the best results for outreach strategies. Use your MA technology to the granular level of what customer wants and how they are interacting with touch points, building a complete picture of the customer journey.
By using the tools available within your MA software, your organisation will be able to create a detailed account for each customers. From there, the experience can be customised, allowing a unique outreach strategy to be pursued across all platforms and helping your company to secure better customer acquisition and retention rates, while increasing ROI.
