Marketing automation is a significant investment of time and resources, particularly for B2B businesses that rely on long-term lead generation and nurturing. Yet for all the energy businesses put into marketing automation, many of them don’t see results as quickly as they’d like – if they see them at all.
What’s responsible for the gap between vision and reality when it comes to automation, and what can you do to close it?
Rethink Your Strategy
Marketing automation is more than just a new tool for blasting out batch emails more efficiently. It requires a whole new way of thinking that’s more holistic, looking at entire lead lifecycles and incorporating behavioral data with demographic and firmographic information. Customizing marketing programs and building on deeper lead knowledge goes far beyond simply automating the same old processes. Working with a marketing automation consultant can help your organization make the step up to full implementation.
Create More Content
Marketing automation is content-hungry, and companies that create too little content risk starving their automation-assisted program before it can truly thrive. While quality content is always important, quantity also matters. Without enough content, you’re missing out on the opportunity to reach leads with messages tailored to their specific market niche, needs, and point on the buying journey. If your content is more about you than about your leads and how you can help them personally, you’re under-using your automation platform.
Standardize and Normalize
While the human mind is great at assimilating varied input, software doesn’t always keep pace. Plugging in standardized, normalized data makes it accessible to your marketing automation system. Redesign forms to accept data in standard formats so your system has to do less work to make data actionable and incorporate it into analytics. For example, if you currently use a write-in line on a form for company size, replacing it with a radio button and a standardized set of size ranges will allow your system to give each range customized marketing messages.
Get More from Your Data
Demographic data, contact data, firmographic data, behavioral data – these are the necessary fuel to launch a stratospherically successful marketing automation program. Fresh, accurate data is essential to the sophisticated analytics that make this technology such a leap forward for marketers. The better your data is, the more accurate your predictions and insights will be, so use the data hygiene features of your system and revisit cleansing processes regularly to be sure your data stays high-quality.
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