Marketing automation systems are a bit of a swiss army knife. They bring different value to different organizations. Below are the biggest benefits we have seen our clients realize by implementing a marketing automation system.
- Consistent Presence With Leads. By establishing a lead nurturing program that is based on the prospect’s interests and needs, you can stay in front of the prospect with email, and in some cases, social media and snail mail. Even if your messaging was nonsense, you’d breed familiarity with your prospects by leveraging the mere-exposure effect, a well-studied principle that by regularly exposing your prospects to your brand, they will come to find it familiar and likable. Add to that some thought leadership (instead of nonsense) and now your brand has the opportunity to build familiarity, likability and authority before the prospect begins the sales process.
- Do More with Less: Sales teams consistently struggle with the best place to put their time. Repetitive nurturing of cold leads is never high on the priority list. When things get busy, this is usually one of the first activities to drop. Marketing automation can take the brunt of this burden off of sales, allowing the sales team more time to focus on sales-ready leads.
- Segment & Personalize: Your prospects are sending you countless signals of their intent, needs, and state of mind through the actions they take online. Are you listening? Marketing automation allows you to monitor and trigger prospect activity via web, email, mobile apps and social media. Each signal can be used to personalize future messaging, ensuring the right prospect gets the right message at the right time.
- Get Sales in Front of the Prospect Sooner: According to CEB, 57% of the buying process occurs before the prospect reaches out to sales. This cripples the strengths of your best salespeople because they no longer have the opportunity to develop rapport and trust prior to engaging in the sales process. Marketing automation allows the marketing department to send personalized emails from a sales rep to a cold contact the moment that contact is identified and segmented. Now that familiarity, likability and authority we mentioned previously is attached to not only your brand, but the sales rep with whom they will be working.
- Make More Sales-Ready Leads From Existing Efforts: What are you doing with the leads that come in but aren’t ready to buy? Most organizations just toss them aside and focus on the “hottest” leads – the ones most likely to convert into sales in the near future. Marketing automation makes it easy to nurture these leads by taking your existing lead-generation efforts and increasing the number of closed sales that result.
- Bridge Marketing and Sales: In most organizations, marketing and sales live in their own separate worlds. When marketing generates leads, they flip them over the wall to the sales team. When sales needs collateral, they ask marketing to create something. Rarely is there dialogue about how sales and marketing work together. The process of implementing and refining a marketing automation system presents a phenomenal opportunity to get marketing and sales at the same table to talk about the overall prospect experience. Once implemented, the marketing automation system can give the sales team a clear picture of the prospect’s journey prior to sales activity. It then gives marketing the feedback needed to determine which activities produce the best leads.
- Report on Success: Marketing automation systems are one of the few systems in the company to track a prospect from before you even know their name to after you close the sale. This allows for rich reporting, including return on marketing investment. Better data means better decision-making in the future.
Benefits are not limited to these seven opportunities, either. Tracking anonymous traffic on your site, personalizing the web experience, easily administering gated content… the list goes on and on.
So what are the next steps? Take a peek at our favorite marketing automation systems: Mautic and Marketo. If you choose to implement one, start small. And of course, if you need it, we’re here to help make sure your implementation is successful.