Making sense of sales and marketing data is not easy. Especially when there are no tools available to store and organize this data. Before marketing automation, companies tracked data in various places. These posed nightmares including inaccurate data, conflicting information and slow processing times. These challenges make it impossible to analyze their data to gauge marketing performance. One way to navigate these obstacles is by using marketing automation tools. What is marketing automation? How can it be useful for your lead generation efforts? Let’s dive in.
Getting Down to the Basics: What is Marketing Automation?
Marketing automation is a way to organize your marketing and automate tasks. Some tools, like Marketo, can do everything in one place, from emails to landing pages and more. Other tools focus on one thing. For example, Mailchimp focuses on email marketing while Unbounce manages landing pages and forms. Here, we will dive into each benefit of marketing automation, giving a full view of what marketing automation is and how it can be used to generate more leads and sales.
Boost Efficiency in Marketing Operations
Marketing automation tools allow you to manage your marketing on the same platform. This enables the centralized collection of marketing data, which marketers use to optimize campaigns. Instead of going back and forth between platforms to manage components, marketing operations become simplified. As time and resources become valuable, task automation becomes more critical. Over 30% of companies report using marketing automation to automate tasks. This frees up time to focus on other high-impact marketing activities.
Understand Prospect Behavior
Marketing automation also provides insights into a prospect’s behavior. You can see all behavior, such as what content they engage with and how their lead score accumulates. With engagement occurring via outbound efforts and many digital channels, it is important to attribute behaviors with each. From email to social to website engagement and more, marketing automation platforms help teams see their prospect’s engagement levels. These insights allow for customer experience improvements. As buyer expectations change, it is important to adapt and marketing automation tools can help uncover those trends.
Improve Lead Quality and Quantity
Marketing automation is a great tool to support overall marketing efforts. That includes your company’s lead generation strategies. These are just a few marketing efforts that help improve lead quantity and quality.
Content Marketing
Creating a mix of gated and ungated content brings traffic to your website and supports lead generation. Gated content generates leads while ungated generates traffic. It is imperative to have a mix to see success.
Marketing Automation in Content Marketing
42% of marketers use content automation in the content lifecycle, automating workflows that include content. For example, in the lead nurture process, there might be a behavior-based trigger that sends a new blog to a lead. This gives marketers time to focus on creating quality content. Marketing automation also keeps your content organized in one hub. You can create, edit and publish all in one place.
Website Optimization
Your website is the cornerstone of your business. From incorporating messaging points to highlighting customer testimonials, optimizing your website is critical. Ensure landing pages have the most important information above the fold. Check that forms have minimal, yet essential fields included. This minimizes barriers to conversion. Consistently use brand identity elements across the entire website. Most importantly, your website needs to be mobile-optimized. Google is mobile-first, and your website should have the same focus.
Marketing Automation in Website Optimization
Depending on what marketing automation tools you use, most can also manage your website including forms and landing pages. Keeping these in one location saves time. Marketing automation tools also offer insights into website performance. Use this data to understand engagement and make decisions moving forward.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Having content is great. Ensuring it is optimized for search engines elevates it and helps bring more traffic to your website. There are a lot of things to focus on when optimizing content and your website for SEO, to get you started, here is a list.
Marketing Automation in SEO
Marketing automation tools can also support SEO efforts. They provide details on keyword optimization, linking best practices and formatting. All are important to SEO.
Advertising
If budget allows, paid advertising is a great way to quickly generate leads. For the highest quality leads, LinkedIn is the best place to be. Focus on your target audience. Ensure it fits your ideal customer profile. Here are seven proven strategies for B2B LinkedIn lead generation.
Marketing Automation in Advertising
Marketing automation tools help you understand the best audience for advertising efforts. Groups of prospects can be sorted to form different audience segmentations. These segments are then used to mirror audience targeting for ads. Plus, most marketing automation tools integrate with ad platforms, giving your team direct insight into conversions and performance.
Maintain Sales and Marketing Alignment
To ensure sales and marketing alignment, it is important to define what a quality lead is. This happens through lead scoring. Lead scoring accounts for a lead’s demographic characteristics. Attribute a lead score based on elements such as their job title, geographic location and email address. While on the behavior side, you can score them on their website and email engagement. For example, if their job title is either President, Vice President, or Senior Manager, they get 25 points. If they download a gated eBook on the website, they get 35 points. Once the score adds up to a certain threshold, they are considered a Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL) or a Sales Qualified Lead (SQL). Organizations navigate MQLs and SQLs differently, but at this point, it all means the same thing. A lead indicates interest in your company and product offerings.
Lead scoring can be useful in the B2B setting where buyer lifecycles are longer. A solid inbound marketing plan can bring in a host of leads. Some may not be viable prospects at all, others may be at the beginning of the buying process, or close to the end. The behavioral and demographic scores assigned to these prospects can give a measure of where they are in the lead lifecycle. Marketing automation handles the scoring and moves the lead from stage to stage based on their score. This is important for sales and marketing alignment because it ensures that the right leads get to the right people at the right time.
Whether you are gearing up to take on marketing automation for the first time or looking to refine your marketing automation efforts, Launch is here to help. Request a free marketing consultation or contact us today to meet our marketing automation consultants.
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