Streamlining Integration of Marketing Automation

We’ve previously discussed what marketing automation is, the benefit of automation software for your marketing strategy, and specific ways you can use automated systems to improve performance — such as for audience segmentation. Automation is exciting stuff and the right automation platform for your business can potentially revolutionise the way you do sales and marketing. However, resist the temptation to rush out and implement everything all at once, since this can lead you to end up feeling like you’ve bitten off more than you can chew!

Instead, we’re going to show you how to take a sustainable, phased approach towards integrating automation that’s more evolutionary. This will help prevent you from getting overwhelmed and allow you to get the most out of your automation tools from the very beginning.

Automation Service Provider vs. Software Provider

In the early days of marketing automation, it used to be that you would have to work with various software providers to assemble a comprehensive martech stack for your business. These days, service agencies, like 1827 Marketing, offer a much more streamlined approach by providing comprehensive and integrated marketing platforms that already have automation tools built-in.

The right marketing partner will make implementing automation into your marketing strategy feel easy and seamless by breaking the process into a series of highly achievable goals. This will help you develop the skills and confidence to optimise performance with automated workflows.

Know What You Hope to Achieve

The first step towards automating is taking a good look at the state of your current marketing efforts and to understand what role automation software will play in your overall strategy. Trying to automate a poorly design campaign won’t do your business any good. As Bill Gates famously said:

The first rule of any technology used in a business is that automation applied to an efficient operation will magnify the efficiency. The second is that automation applied to an inefficient operation will magnify the inefficiency.

According to SmartInsights, 44 per cent of industry respondents to their survey reported that their firm only uses a few core features of their marketing automation software. Don’t make this mistake. Rather than haphazardly sticking automation tools wherever they seem to fit, we'll map out a phased approach to deliberately incorporate all the relevant features provided by your marketing automation platform (more on this later).

Develop SMART (specific, measurable, action-oriented, realistic, timely) goals for how you’ll implement and utilise marketing automation. We’ll meet with your marketing and sales teams and work with them to determine:

• What is the overall goal of automation implementation and what features would be most useful for your business?

• How to balance of automation and human touch, regarding which routine tasks should be automated and what tasks are better not automated?

• Who “owns” the automation project and what teams will be involved?

• How quickly does implementation need to be done?

This will allow you to get valuable input (and buy-in) from the people who handle the day-to-day management of your marketing campaign, which will go a long way towards streamlining integration.

Start Tracking!

Effective automation depends on effective tracking. It’s what will allow you to transition from a traditional one size fits all marketing approach to a highly focused, personalised, tailored marketing strategy.

Luckily, completing your first automation goal can be done effortlessly in a manner of minutes. You copy and paste a tracking code into your website. That’s it. It really is just that simple. By the end of day one, your new marketing automation platform is collecting valuable information about your visitors to help tailor your site, your content and your marketing process for maximum results.

Enhance Lead Generation Strategy

As the data starts flowing in it's time to turn our attention to integrating your automation platform with your other business tools. We’ll identify what behaviours correspond with readiness to convert and use lead scoring to prioritise your efforts. For example, creating a scoring rubric based on how many pages a potential lead has visited, which part of the sales cycle they’re in, whether or not they’re a repeat customer, etc. Lead ranking helps you to focus on your energy on the ones that have the greatest potential for converting.

We’ll also use visitor data to help segment your audience and build more accurate buyer personas. Research has shown that the more specific you can make your personas, the higher your conversions rates will be. In one case study, the example company moulded its website around detailed buyer personas, creating a customised experience for visitors. As a result:

• Website visit duration increased 900%

• Email open rates rose by 111%

• Marketing-generated revenue jumped by 171%

• Conversions increased by 46%.

In turn, the insights revealed by this enhanced lead intelligence will kick start and evidence-based approach to improving your content marketing game, especially as we get automation tools set up for targeted email campaigns and social scheduling. Furthermore, we’ll use email syncing and import your contact lists so you can reach out to people who are already engaging with your business.

Streamline Day to Day Operations

Returning to our initial point about goal setting and planning new workflows around automation, remember that you don’t have to (and really shouldn't!) automate everything all at once. First, focus on automating your most important routine marketing workflows, such as those related to lead tracking and content strategy enhancement. As you gain more familiarity with your automation platform, we’ll continue to incorporate more features to optimise marketing activities, such as:

• Auto-responses

• Form-fill notifications

• Remarketing campaigns

• Posting blogs

Automation can also be used to help streamline internal workflow, for instance:

• Creating customer profiles so that the marketing team can see which leads are ready to be handed to sales.

• Consolidating contact information and keeping lists updated.

• Monitoring campaign performance and alerting team members when specific marketing or sales events have occurred.

A Word About Measurement

Measuring how your audience responds to your marketing is what allows you to get the most out of automation, so you can do more of what works and less of what doesn’t. By starting to track your visitors and interactions, you will establish a performance baseline and begin to account for other factors that might skew the effectiveness of your marketing strategy. Your data might point to a need to improve your audience segmentation or to improve sales efficiency by aligning your sales and marketing teams.

When your automation system is set up properly and paired with a good strategy, you’ll see an uptick in activity metrics like site traffic, open and click-through rates (CTR), reconversions as well as a drop in unsubscribes. You will also start getting higher quality data for metrics like leads sources as well as marketing and sales cycle length.

At the end of the day, you should notice an improvement in ROI metrics like conversion rates, customer lifetime value, customer acquisition cost, and revenue generated. These ROI metrics are often the most tangible ones that can be used for determining the effectiveness of marketing automation.

Best Practices for Streamlining Marketing Automation

In summary, here are some best practices that will help smoothly integrate automation into your B2B marketing strategy:

• Identify SMART goals for your marketing automation efforts.

• Fuel your automation system by segmenting your market, defining buyer personas, and creating high-quality, personalised content for each stage of the buyer’s journey.

• Align sales and marketing, ensure your team is comfortable using the automation platform and map workflows for how they’ll utilise relevant tools to improve efficiency.

• Don’t just hit start and walk off — monitor and analyse data to ensure your business automation system is doing what you need.

Marketing automation can help your business gain an advantage, but don’t assume that you need every tool available or that you can simply "plug and play" automation into your existing marketing strategy. This is where the value of partnering with a marketing agency, such as 1827 Marketing, really comes into light. We will help you get the most out of your investment by providing automation tools, get you set up according to your priorities, and guide you through each implementation step.