If you’re a marketer, you probably spend your days on some of the following; sending email campaigns, creating landing pages, writing content, posting on social media, updating your website, generating leads, sending leads to salespeople, responding to your boss about which campaigns are working best…and on and on and on. For many marketers, the day is spent trying to juggle each of these in turn. If this sounds familiar, it might be time to consider a system that can do a lot of the work for you.
Many overwhelmed marketers have started turning to marketing automation to take the manual work out of time consuming tasks and to accomplish things that simply could not be done with traditional marketing tools. Think you could benefit from marketing automation, too? See if you agree with three or more of the pain points listed below.
1. You are generating more leads than your sales team can effective handle.
Wait, this sounds like a great problem to have. And in some ways it is. Trouble is, most ‘leads’ are not good sales opportunities. When salespeople spend precious time on lousy leads, they have less time to spend on good opportunities. That student from Indonesia who read your white paper may not be as important as that Fortune 1000 IT Director your company covets. Through the use of lead scoring, marketing automation software does a fantastic job separating the wheat from the chaff.
2. Your sales leads come from a single event like a download or a signup.
OK, it’s wonderful that you have a website that attracts visitors and converts leads but with the sheer volume of content floating around the ether, one download does not a qualified lead make. Marketing automation software helps you understand, track, and quantify that critical threshold of engagement when a lead is truly “sales ready”.
3. You have oodles of website visitors but little insight into who they are.
Google Analytics is a fabulous SEO tool and for a while marketers were judged by the number of eyeballs they generated. Now, the emphasis has changed to knowing your audience—not just their demographics but their actual identify. Marketing automation features like the use tracking code to ‘cookie’ visitors, turns the anonymous into known or identifiable leads.
4. You have lots of marketing activity going on but no way to attribute it to actual revenues.
Remember that old saying that you know fifty percent of your marketing works but just don’t know which fifty percent it is? Marketing automation solves that dilemma by enabling you connect marketing activities with revenue. Attribution models vary but with the proper tracking in place, you can tie closed business opportunities directly back to the marketing touch points and interactions you had with each opportunity.
5. You are getting diminishing returns from your email campaigns.
All of us subscribe to favorite newsletters but more and more you may find yourself unsubscribing as a result of sheer information overload. As inboxes fill and unopened emails proliferate, it’s more important than ever to deliver highly relevant content in a time frame consistent with the needs of your prospects rather than what’s convenient for your editorial calendar. Marketing automation allows you to automatically send emails that are triggered by prospect interactions and enables you to reach prospects with top of mind content in a time frame that maximizes engagement.
6. Sales and marketing operate as silos.
Today, the buyers journey is most of the way completed by the time a salesperson gets involved. In other words, the buyer already knows much about your company and product. When marketing and sales operate independently, sales is cut out of much of the process, and when it takes over, there’s an information gap. With marketing automation, the salesperson is privy to all of the marketing interactions and can use that knowledge to tailor the sales discussion and accelerate the sales process.
7. Your sales team fails to convert enough marketing leads to sales opportunities.
What do you do with leads that don’t make a purchase? Many companies discard them. It’s been shown that over three quarters of sales prospects that express an interest in your products are not yet ready to buy, but a large portion of them may be ready over the next 12 months. Marketing automation enables you to keep them warm through regular nurture campaigns, so that when they become sales ready, you are top of mind. You can even gauge their readiness with lead scoring and send sales alerts at the appropriate time.
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