How to Make the Business Case for Marketing Automation

Automation is a major boardroom topic. A recent McKinsey & Company's automation survey found that companies are increasingly pursuing the automation of business functions as a strategic priority. Marketing Automation stands out among many automation solutions because it blends process efficiency with growth acceleration and optimisation.

Your board may already appreciate how marketing automation tools can help organisations with:

• connecting with the right customers at the right time

• cost savings

• pipeline efficiency

• consistent and quality lead generation

Marketing Automation platforms, combined with other elements of a MarTech stack (a collection of interoperating marketing tools and technologies) offer complex and sophisticated functionality.

To make the case, it’s important to focus on benefits more than features and functions. There are four main areas of business benefit, all of which revolve around creating growth through efficiently delivering personalised customer experiences at scale, or what we call beautifully effective marketing.

1: Meet Your Customers’ Expectations

Automation is an essential component of the digital marketing toolkit. Without it you cannot provide the digital-first customer experience B2B buyers are increasingly coming to expect.

A 2021 McKinsey study  revealed that 75% of B2B customers prefer learning about products and services through online "self-service" and remote support when needed.

And did you know that according to Gartner, a sales rep is only involved in about 5% of the B2B customer's journey? That is without a doubt a critical 5%. No one is diminishing the role of our sales teams in closing deals. However, customers now spend 45% of their time researching independently in a mix of online (27%) and offline (18%). 

Will you even get the opportunity to pitch if you don’t have the ability to enter into a digital conversation to uncover their requirements and connect your offer to their needs?

Automation is how you build that streamlined customer journey, creating the conditions to accelerate the buying process and making it more predictable. With it you can: 

• Attract more of your target audience using content, social media, and paid advertising.

• Capture more leads through targeted, highly relevant content, personalised landing pages, and dynamic lead capture forms.

• Engage leads with a personalised customer journey, using email marketing that employs analytics to continually improve how you nurture to shorten the sales cycle.

• Convert them to paying customers by managing contacts and outreach, and understanding their needs through their interactions with your company online.

• Know precisely when they're ready to buy through automated lead scoring and automated notifications.

• Scale up what's working and course correct quickly when things aren’t using deep insights from customer data gathered across all touchpoints.

This final point is crucial. Being able to develop customer relationships in a digital world relies on data. 

Your most effective sales people are adept at reading buying signals as they interact with prospects. In a digital ecosystem, automation is what allows you to collect and make sense of the wealth of signals created by a customer’s digital interactions with your company. 

2: Effective Account Based Marketing and Customer Experience

The impact of marketing automation tools for your customers will be felt in their individual and team experiences of your business. As people interact with your team, social networks, and website, marketing automation builds a fuller view of your customer.

Naturally, this detailed data on your customer’s interests and priorities feeds back into your marketing. This improves your ability to create highly targeted and personalised communications through automated segmentation.

But understanding your customers does more than just enabling the delivery of the right content to the right people at the right time. Imagine being able to anticipate the main interests and concerns of your key decision makers on a personal and account basis as you prepare for important meetings.

Building a picture of your contacts through their interactions with your website, social media, and emails lets you do exactly that. When your team knows the pages members of the buying committee have visited and the downloads they’ve been requesting, they can focus their pitches and outreach on the issues most relevant to them. 

Targeted Remarketing 

The vast majority of people who visit your website will not return. That's a missed opportunity, unless, of course, you use remarketing ads.

Knowing more about your visitors allows you to customise ads based on the pages the visitor was looking at, and automatically deliver the most relevant content to bring them back. Any additional information you hold, either due to the tracking code on your website or from data gathered through lead capture, further enhances personalisation and your chances of bringing that customer back. 

If you can re-engage them, you get another chance to build the relationship. You'll also keep your brand top of mind as you reinforce brand messaging across platforms through social media remarketing and AdWords remarketing. This helps you stay in their consideration set.

Personalisation

You can personalise the text and imagery of ads, emails, landing pages, and even your web pages, based on what you know about your customers. You can even adopt hyper-personalisation strategies for your most valuable clients and prospects.

If, for example, a contact lands on a sales page, automation can switch out sections of copy and images to speak to issues relevant to that contact’s industry or job role. 

Events and Gated Content 

Do you offer webinar signups to acquire contact information and generate a lead? Through automation, you can keep track of who has been invited and who is coming. You can do the same with gated content, such as white papers. 

With automation, knowing the actions leads have taken, and how they’ve followed up on their initial interest, means you can be more targeted in your subsequent communications. Branching customer journeys can trigger different responses depending on the actions your prospect takes. 

Say, for example, a lead registers for a live event but doesn’t turn up on the day. You can follow up with a ‘we’re sorry you couldn’t make it’ email containing a link to the replay. Furthermore, if they click on the link and watch the replay, you can trigger another follow up inviting them to book in for a call with your team if they have any questions. 

3: Achieve Your Revenue Goals

Automation enables you to impact productivity and effectiveness across your sales and marketing teams, and help you achieve your revenue goals. It delivers:

• Multi touch marketing attribution, so you can optimise on activities and campaigns across multiple channels for improved ROI.

• Increased marketing efficiency, ensuring your marketing budget delivers a cohesive and targeted strategy.

• Improved sales and marketing alignment, allowing your teams to work together seamlessly and develop a workflow for qualifying and converting leads.

• Accurate and up-to-date reporting for swift and strategic decision-making.

• Hyper-personalisation that makes your content and marketing messaging highly relevant and more likely to convert.

Lead Scoring

With lead scoring you can identify and prioritise your most profitable leads. Automatically scoring your leads based on the interactions they have with your company allows you to segment your audience and tailor your activities, for example: 

• High engagement / Ideal customer - These prospects are actively engaging with you and also possess the qualities you've identified as an ideal customer. These leads are a top priority for your sales team.

• Low engagement / Ideal customer - This group is a second priority. Marketing or sales outreach could help them overcome barriers and become customers.

• High engagement / Non-ideal customer - This group engages with you but they probably don't need what you offer right now. That may change in the future. Continue to engage them through marketing automation. It doesn't cost you anything extra to do so.

• Low engagement / Non-ideal customer - You might continue to communicate with them through marketing automation for a time, but if there is no engagement you can include them in a re-engagement campaign or unsubscribe them to clean up your email list.

This allows you to remain hands-off, giving the customer the space they want for independent research,  until it is clear that they are ready for outreach. For example, if a lead has downloaded a white paper and spent time reviewing the service pages and case studies on your website, they'll have a high lead score. This can trigger a notification to a rep indicating it is time to reach out.

Campaign Tracking

Tracking is vital for efficient campaign planning. Campaign codes inserted across your marketing channels allow you to track the performance of each activity. In this way, you can see which efforts drive the most engagement, and ultimately sales. 

If your C-Suite is keen to see the ROI of your marketing budget, multi-touch attribution and the ability to hone the effectiveness of your campaigns over time will be a big selling point. 

Campaign codes provide a much-needed missing link between your content marketing efforts and your paid advertising efforts. It's easier to see how your content marketing, social media, and organic search directly impact advert click-through rates, conversion rates, and revenues.

Sales & Pipeline Management

An integrated sales and marketing automation solution allows you to track opportunities at an account level in the pipeline. This means you will always have an up-to-date report at your fingertips. You can understand each opportunity’s readiness to buy, where they are in the customer journey, and how long they've been there.

Pipeline reporting also helps members of your business development team to reach their targets on the number of meetings or calls they need to take. It also creates accountability on the actions required to consistently close sales.

Sometimes it takes something as simple as a timely interaction to tip an undecided prospect one way or another. With automation you can trigger follow ups using social media and automated email to keep engaging people in the early stages. As leads progress and increase their lead score, you can also trigger reminders and notifications to prompt team members to reach out, so that hot opportunities never go stale.

Making things easy and staying in touch with qualified leads during the critical final stages of the buying process ensures they don't fall through the cracks.

Even small automation features, such as having calendar-booking links available through email and on your website, can reduce the time to close and bring forward the start of projects by weeks. In addition to bringing in revenues faster, eliminating the back and forth that goes along with trying to organise a meeting over email creates a more professional impression and a better experience for your user.

All of this combines to allow you to reliably develop revenue projections based on the number of prospects at each stage in your pipeline. It also enables other key leaders to make decisions and allocate resources as needed. Sales can prepare for a certain number of leads to contact at a given time rather than facing a bottleneck of leads at once. And service and production lines can ramp up or down to meet future demand as predicted by effective pipeline management. 

4: Benefit from Cost Savings

The cost savings found in automation come from several angles, compounding the money you can save in the short term and over time.

Fewer Tools and Platforms to Pay For

In today’s multichannel marketing ecosystem where customers expect consistency of messaging and experience, integration and automation are essential. If your tools don’t talk to each other, delivering on the promise of digital marketing becomes extremely difficult.

Many marketing departments use a stack of different tools that don't integrate easily or speak to each other. One piece of software manages emails. Another social media. And yet another customer outreach. The data you collect is siloed within that platform. You can't see the whole picture or how these areas of marketing and sales work together.

This creates extra work, making you switch between multiple platforms to complete tasks. However, it also creates disjointed information and can cause miscommunication between marketing, sales, and account managers.

To make matters worse, you'll pay more because you pay to license or subscribe to each piece of software individually. You might also pay more for labour as tasks take longer. And there maybe additional training costs as it takes more time to learn and work with multiple platforms.

In short, an integrated marketing automation platform saves you from these headaches and reduces the number of tools you need, creating associated software savings.

Reduce Admin Overhead

What can we say about the tedium of managing spreadsheets full of data? Who enjoys keeping track of performance manually? Not only does it numb the minds of your creative talent. It also creates errors and inefficiencies. 

Switching to marketing automation changes everything. Automate repetitive tasks with:

• dynamic lists

• scheduled emails

• automated task allocation

• automated workflows

• automated content publishing

• automated social media posts

• triggered email responses

However, while time savings and administration costs are important to the efficiency of your marketing operation, it is by far the least sexy thing it does. 

When pitching to the board, focus on how it optimises the sales pipeline, increases revenues, improves the customer experience, and delivers brand value. 

Demonstrate how more and better data will help you to streamline your marketing processes, how it will improve performance beyond what is humanly possible without it, and how that will lead to cost savings. 

Focus on the revenue benefits associated with a more effective account-based marketing strategy.

Show them how a more tightly aligned sales and marketing team can consistently generate, advance, and close leads to customers. 

Automation forms the foundation of the customer experience B2B buyers want and expect as of yesterday. These changes are accelerating and you're here, so we know you already recognise there’s a danger of being left behind.

If you need more assistance generating interest in marketing automation within your organisation, we encourage you to contact 1827 Marketing today.