While you may not be familiar with the term Marketing Automation, you certainly are familiar with what it does. If you are online, you interact with Marketing Automation systems every day.
Wikipedia has a straightforward (if somewhat traditional and limited) definition here. Basically, Marketing Automation software is used by Marketing departments (and sometimes Sales and Customer Service) to automate tasks and provide business intelligence. In its most basic form, it involves creating rules to automate communications (generally email) and handle online form submissions.
As an easy example, when you go to TitanFile’s resource library and request to download an ebook, you are presented with a form. Once you complete and submit the form, you receive an email with the ebook you requested. The embedded form is created and hosted within the Marketing Automation service Hubspot, as is the email that is generated when you submit it.
That is just scratching the service though. Marketing Automation platforms only begin to show their true value when they are integrated with a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system. All the major platforms (Hubspot, Pardot, Eloqua and Marketo) do this natively. In fact, Marketing Automation is quickly becoming a a key piece of the overall CRM infrastructure. Salesforce.com recently purchased ExactTarget/Pardot, Oracle has acquired Eloqua and Hubspot has been building up its internal CRM features even while it improves its integration with Salesforce.
Marketing’s Job is to Enable Sales
Once your Marketing Automation system is integrated with your CRM, you have the power to provide intelligence to Sales by updating customer and lead data that they can see on a contact record by contact record basis including:
- What the last visit and pages viewed on your website by a lead were
- What emails have been opened and if opened, what links were clicked
- What forms were completed and resources downloaded
- Keyword analysis and content creation/optimization based on the activities of leads that converted
- Lead scoring and alerts
The last two items are a little more complex, but it is this type of activity that starts to generate the extra ROI of a Marketing Automation platform.
Using Content and Keyword Analysis to Shape Content Creation
Your CRM tracks what leads convert and how much they are worth. Your Marketing Automation platform tracks what content generates form submissions and leads. By linking the two, you can see, at a macro level, what content and keywords generate not just the most leads, but more importantly the leads that become the most valuable customers. You can then provide that data to your content creators and use it to shape blog post topics, keyword usage and even email subject lines.
Lead Scoring and Alerts
It takes a lot of leads to fill a Sales funnel. For the sake of easy math, let’s say that to keep the funnel full, your Sales team needs 100 leads per Sales person, per week and you have 10 Sales people. Over just a single quarter, that means 12,000 leads were added to your CRM. How does your Sales team know which are the most promising and when the best time to reach out to them is? Or, when to reactivate contact with an old lead?
Lead scoring and alerts help with this. Your Marketing Automation platform will allow you to display a Lead Score for each lead in your CRM. This can be based on website activity, what they have downloaded, if they’ve been opening emails, the size of the company, annual revenue, what country they are based in – almost anything. Moreover, you can have your Sales team alerted via email if a lead returns to the site after a period of quiet time or even if they view certain pages. Imagine if every Sales person on your team knew when a lead looked at a pricing page and what pricing tiers they reviewed. Pretty powerful stuff.
Wrap Up
Marketing Automation is how you convert your website visitors into leads, your leads into customers and your customers into loyal brand advocates who spend more. It is more than just an email platform – if used correctly it accelerates your Sales team’s efforts. More leads that convert faster for your best sellers.
If you are looking for more information on using Marketing Automation and how to leverage its capabilities by integrating it with a CRM and other SaaS products – check out this post. Already have your CRM and Marketing Automation platform linked? Let me know how it is going below.
