Marketing Automation: Save Time, Sell More

Marketing Automation: Save Time, Sell More

You’ve taken the leap and implemented a marketing automation process. Now you’re faced with feeding the tiger and hoping it works for your B2B business. It can and it will, but hope is not a business strategy even though right now strategy is what you may need along with what looks like a daunting, time-consuming process. It doesn’t have to be that way.

While there are many software solutions, very few marketing automation systems include a strategic process (out-of-the-box) into how marketing automation can help your business. Here are a few thoughts to consider at the planning stage along your journey to an integrated B2B demand generation and lead nurturing system:

Marketing Content and Inventory

Although it may be simple, it’s not necessarily easy.

  • Take inventory of your content so you know what you have
  • Develop personas of each customer/audience you want to reach and cultivate —– include media/editors, partners/distributors, and end-use customers
  • Identify gaps where new content will fit with the needs of your customers

Having a deep, easily-accessible and well-organized inventory of quality content is the foundation of a successful marketing automation program. In addition, lead nurturing requires marketers to create relevant, thought leader content at each stage to build trust and maintain a consistent dialogue throughout the nurturing process. Starting with a good inventory of white papers, case studies, eBooks, and articles is critical. Keeping it fresh is a necessity, which leads to the next step.

Matching Content to Personas and the Journey Stage

Demand generation requires good content and a good story to lead prospects down the road to a decision. Enticing incremental engagement decisions along the way is an important part of the process. Build a process to generate ideas and repurpose content to fill the gaps you’ve identified while evaluating your inventory, then implement an ongoing process to generate and refresh all the great work your organization is doing. Author and social guru Jeff Bullas provides a good road map for creating a process map within your organization. Highlights include

  • Map the content and key touch points with relevant messages directed at audiences
  • Build in call-to-action steps at each stage to keep customers engaged

Measure Progress and Success

Creating connections from your CMS to your content and ultimately your sales team is critical to making the whole system work. In the digital era, it is imperative for marketing to deliver Marketing Qualified Leads (MQL’s) to the sales team — leads that have indicated interest in your company and product. They may not be ready to buy, but they are open to nurturing.

Further along the continuum are Sales Qualified Leads (SQL) — leads that are ready for some one-on-one time with your sales team. Often, SQLs are the result of nurturing at the MQL stage. Work with your sales team to determine how to score new leads entering the system, assign scores to each type of content, stage and action to determine the value threshold for handing over a nurtured lead to sales. Actions here include:

  • Developing a lead scoring methodology
  • Cross-collaboration from other departments (Sales, IT, HR, etc.

And finally, test and analyze the results of your content and automation. Lead scoring should be fluid and flexible. Take the time to assess which content works best in certain situations. Then, adjust your criteria to make your program more effective over time.

Marketing and sales automation tools should work for you, not create more work. At Axiom, we help our clients implement programs that can clear the way for accelerated growth. Our systems and tools have assisted decision makers in taking the automation leap and empowered their sales teams with meaningful positioning, effective selling tools and dynamic content to help marketing and sales do their jobs better and faster.

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