Just about every business that doesn’t yet use marketing automation to fuel engagement, score leads effectively, manage torrents of customer data, and deliver customized content wants to step up to it, but not every organization has the foundation needed to make it a success from the start. Hit the ground running with a marketing automation preparation checklist that lets you get more from your automation technology from day one.
Single-Touch or Multi-Touch?
How complex is the buying journey your leads take to become customers? For most B2B businesses, the answer is almost always a multi-touch, hands-on process. Leads may take months or even years to progress from initial contact to a purchase, moving through many layers of approval during the journey. If your organization finds a multi-touch approach more effective, marketing automation is your next logical step. If you aren’t there yet but want to be, automation can also help you become more efficient.
How Do You Educate Buyers?
B2B buyers are highly sophisticated today, doing a great deal of research before they ever engage directly with marketing or sales. In some industries, more than half of that buying journey is taken alone – but it doesn’t have to be that way. With a strong content marketing program, you accompany buyers on the journey, providing much of the research they need to reach decisions. Marketing automation is an outstanding content customization and delivery system, allowing you to be a better guide to your leads at every step of the buying process.
How Well Do You Quantify Marketing Value?
The quality of your marketing can be stellar, but if you can’t quantify your activities in terms of actual revenue delivered, it’s tougher to move forward with new programs. With marketing automation technology, you’re able to assign meaningful value to all your marketing activities, which also lets you create more accurate projections of what you need to do to meet revenue benchmarks in the future.
How Well Do You Customize?
Personalization isn’t just a luxury for marketers; it’s a must. Customers expect a total user experience that fits their needs rather than adapting to what’s given to them. Remember Henry Ford’s joke that his customers could have their new cars “painted any color you want, as long as it’s black?” It worked for him because his company was the only source of cars for many years. Your customers can choose their cars – and everything else – from a host of sources. Personalization and customization let you give your prospects something no one else can, and marketing automation makes it possible.
How Data-Driven Are You?
Each of your prospects produces mountains of data. How well equipped is your organization to take it in, organize it, and analyze it to derive new insights? While it’s possible to manually perform some tasks marketing automation does, data collection, storage, and retrieval aren’t among them. Leave manual records in the ’50s where they belong and opt for a more sophisticated solution.
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