Marketing Automation
The Magic of Doing More with LessMarketing Automation improves the quality, quantity and targeting of your marketing. Automatically nurture interest into sales leads.
Automatically create individual marketing profiles for groups and individuals, based on their interactions with website, social media and email.
Create an automated communication flow from initial interest, through nurture and into sales-qualified leads.
What is Marketing Automation?
Marketing Automation is the automation of marketing processes such as emailing, lead qualification, social media posts and the personalisation of website content.
You maintain complete control through constructing or modifying automation programmes and lead scoring. After that, the system runs itself – taking initial interest through to sales qualified leads.
Marketing automation requires good marketing content. Visitors are enticed, through high quality content, to sign-up to receive more relevant content.
Once a visitor provides their email address, you can drip-feed relevant content to them through emails and respond automatically to interactions with specific content via the website, social media or in emails.
Visitors are tracked from the first time they visit your site, if they accept the cookie tracking. Even if you do not have an email address, name or any other information about them. Regardless, the marketing automation platform starts to build a profile of their interactions.
At the point a visitor signs up for anything – providing their email address – there will already be a rich history of their interactions with the site.
Put a value on everything…
Lead Scoring in Marketing Automation
Lead scoring is the attribution of a score to contacts for any interaction with your site or communications. These scores add up over time, showing contacts with a high volume of interactions with your brand as having a high score.
Different content, or different types of interaction (e.g. clicking a link in an email) can be set to attribute a higher score than other basic interactions (e.g. browsed between 1 and 5 pages of your site).
Typically, lead scoring rules are designed to attribute highest scores to content and behaviour which implies sales readiness.
These scores can be used to trigger an alert, send an email, or personalise content on pages of your site. For example, a score over 100 points could generate an alert to the sales team to call this contact, as they appear very engaged with the brand.
Scores can also be reduced. This is useful to prevent low-level engagement over a long period ranking in the same way as high-scoring engagement over a short timeframe. The latter is a better indication of sales readiness, whereas the former implies browsing rather than eagerness to engage.
Nurture Programmes and Drip-Feeding Content
Don’t be Too Eager
In a medium to long B2B sales cycle, the first time a visitor reaches your site, it is unlikely they will want to buy immediately. Consequently, there’s no sense in sales picking up the phone and calling them right away. You wouldn’t know much about their interests anyway.
Perhaps, occasionally, visitors may want to buy quickly. Therefore, you should allow easy access to contact sales, schedule a sales call, download a brochure or evaluate pricing.
These sales-readiness indicators should either directly connect with sales or generate a very high lead score, to alert sales of their interest.
Get to Know Each Other
Most visitors will come looking for information on a particular topic. What they seek will depend on their role in the buying process and stage in the sales cycle. If you have a variety of content on your site, it’s likely they will find information of value and have a positive experience of your brand.
Marketing automation tracks how they reached your site and what they searched for. Furthermore, the marketing automation platform also records which pages they have visited and what they have downloaded.
When a visitor wants to download more valuable content, or sign up for a webinar, you may choose to request an email address and name. As a result, you can use this to contact them with relevant information in the future. If the visitor consents to this, they can be placed (automatically) into a marketing automation programme.
Give Them What They Want
We structure marketing automation flows for clients based on a variety of criteria. Ultimately, the key is to ensure the contacts in each programme receive relevant and engaging communications on an ongoing basis. After this, when a recipient engages with these communications, we learn more about their interests. Perhaps they only open/click/download content on a particular topic.
This insight helps us group them, based on their interests. Moreover, this helps refine what we send them, so it is more relevant and their engagement with content improves.
When a contact starts engaging with content towards the latter stages in the buying cycle (e.g. competitor evaluation, licensing/pricing documents), this spikes their lead score and sales are alerted to them as a hot lead.
Integrating Sales and Marketing
In our experience, sales teams love marketing automation. The biggest complaint, from sales, about marketing is the quality of leads provided to them. Sales waste too much valuable time and effort contacting poorly qualified leads. However, marketing automation solves this classic problem.
Leads are only classified as sales qualified leads (SQLs) when they have reached a high enough lead score. This means they will either have engaged with a large volume of content recently, or specific content which implies they are sales ready.
Each contact has an associated record of what they have engaged with, recorded against their profile. Furthermore, when sales people check their CRM, prior to calling a lead, they see a link to this content, or it is pulled into the CRM and displayed in the contact’s notes.
Sales teams are thus furnished with deep insight into which topics interest any given lead. Additional qualification, such as service/product area may also be included in this insight. Sales people can therefore start a relevant conversation, focussing on the lead’s interests.
If a lead is poorly qualified, sales can feed this information back to marketing. On receipt of this, scoring rules in the marketing automation system are updated to improve future qualification of leads. The whole process becomes more accurate and efficient as time goes on.
Marketing Automation Platforms
We have experience of all of the major marketing automation platforms, including Act-On, Marketo, Eloqua and others. Most marketing automation platforms offer the same range of capabilities, but the interface with each is different.
We can recommend a marketing automation approach appropriate for any budget.
Do More with Less
A small marketing team can be empowered to deliver personalised and highly relevant communications and content to a very large audience through marketing automation.
Automation removes human error from the equation and frees up your marketing team to focus on more valuable (and less boring!) tasks.
For the investment a few days in crafting detailed automation programmes, aligning content and communications, the return can be huge. Marketing automation programmes benefit from occasional refinement and review but have the capacity to run on their own indefinitely.
Get in touch to find out how much difference marketing automation could make to your marketing success.
Get In Touch
Glastonbury, Somerset, UK
+44 747 666 2948
marc@glastonbury-marketing.co.uk