When you need more than Marketing Automation
By now, if you’re not already using it, you’ve heard the hype about how great marketing automation is. Marketing automation is a great tool, there’s no doubt about it – in short it helps organize lead scoring and helps define quality leads – but it’s also not always enough.
It’s true that it has been proven to help generate a huge increase in quality leads when companies use it to nurture their prospects, and studies have shown those nurtured leads are more apt to make bigger buys, but the truth is it will not do everything for you and thus there are times when having marketing automation is just not enough.
Here are a few key ways to supplement your marketing automation program and get the most out of it:
- Gather up All your Data: Marketing automation will help you analyze certain behaviors and lead scores, but it won’t integrate all the data you’ve collected. When used alongside other marketing platforms, such as CRM, to pull together the whole picture, it can provide you with invaluable data about your prospects.
- Provide a Personal Touch: You can build automated trigger campaigns to nurture leads with marketing automation, but this is difficult to do without seeming like it’s a repetitive, form letter style of contact. You need to assess the different touch points during the campaign yourself, put your customers into different categories and then personalize a marketing strategy relevant to your prospects.
- Get some Content: Marketing automation will definitely not help you get content up on your web site or write your newsletters for you. This you’ll have to do on your own. And this is important, too, because today’s buyer is savvy – they have already gathered a lot of their information about you from the internet before you even meet them. Today’s buyers want to quietly do their research before they invest in a product or service.
- Align Marketing and Sales Teams: We can’t say it enough – getting both teams together to discuss the marketing campaign will help you understand the buyer all the way through the marketing funnel. A good marketing campaign consists of lead scoring, lead nurturing and converting those leads into sales. It helps marketing to know what makes a buyer buy just as much as it helps sales understand who their buyers are.
If you’re already using marketing automation successfully, what tools or methods do you supplement with to create a fantastic marketing campaign?