How to Avoid Being the Industry Loser with Marketing Automation [incl. checklists and presentation]

Common sense would dictate that there are precisely two alternatives to having an automated marketing strategy:

1. Not automated at all: Meaning marketing is doing everything manually. If this sounds like your company, I'd be willing to bet that you have a big problem generating enough good leads on a consistent basis. You might have 1 or 2 marketeers on the payroll, but you just fail to see any noticeable growth in your business.
2. Partially automated: Meaning marketing is doing a lot manually. Most companies in this group are using something like an email marketing platform, but still find it hard to generate a measurable ROI of their marketing initiatives and show some actual significant progress.

Having sold marketing automation software for the last year or so, it’s safe to say that there are still many, many misconceptions about this type of technology. For some reason, people often choose to believe one of these two:

1. Marketing automation will magically deliver bucketloads of highly qualified leads, without having to do much more than purchasing a system and switching it on. Whereas that would certainly be ideal, it is far from realistic.
2. "Marketing automation is a hype we shouldn't invest in, we're not ready for it, and it's better for us to continue in the same way we've always done." I got bad news, because with today's rapid technological advancements, doing the same doesn't just result in the same, it results in worse. Competitors learn and iterate much faster, do much better marketing, steal your leads and customers, and leave you out in their dust.

In general, and please do correct me if I'm wrong, I can't come up with a single business context where more manual work is better than more automated work. Automation compared to manual labour - by definition - increases efficiency, increases productivity, decreases costs-per-unit, and there's a whole range of additional benefits.

Whether you like it or not, I can guarantee that some of your more forward thinking and tech-savvy competitors are already creating more and better engagements with your (potential) buyers than you are. Want more good leads? Marketing automation! Want to close more deals? Marketing automation! Want better data to improve marketing and sales performance? Marketing automation!

This article is written for anyone who’s already tried and failed with marketing automation, or anyone who’s about to try and would strongly prefer not to fail. Throughout this blog you'll find multiple checklists and tips, and at the bottom there's a link to what is basically this article in PDF presentation format to use for your own benefit.

Introduction

What is marketing automation?

According to HubSpot, ‘Marketing automation refers to the software that exists with the goal of automating marketing actions. Many marketing departments have to automate repetitive tasks such as emails, social media, and other website actions. The technology of marketing automation makes these tasks easier.’

Pardot says: ‘Marketing automation is a software platform that helps you automate your marketing and sales engagement to generate more leads, close more deals, and accurately measure marketing success.’

For simplicity’s sake, let’s say that marketing automation typically:

• Is a marketing software platform, that ideally integrates seamlessly with other relevant systems for maximum data capture
• Helps organizations transition from traditional and manual marketing, to modern and automated marketing
• Helps both marketing and sales work more efficiently, smarter and therefore more productive than they did in the old situation
• Helps organizations increase revenue, while decreasing unnecessary time inefficiencies and customer acquisition costs

Which challenges do we address with marketing automation?

Typically, when organizations invest in marketing automation, they are looking to solve for one or more of these business problems:

1. "Our marketing engine doesn’t generate enough high quality leads for our sales team."
2. "Our marketing department is extremely busy due to an overload of manual labour, so we need to become much more efficient."
3. "We can’t make our marketing communications personalized and relevant to our buyer personas, and a blanket approach doesn’t really work anymore."
4. "We don’t have enough data or insight in the success of our marketing initiatives, or it takes too much time to tie all the numbers together in Excel."

For whom and when is marketing automation worth the investment?

While there is no one single best answer, I’d recommend using the following basic prerequisites as a checklist:

• The organization already has a regular flow of website traffic
• The organization already has a database of decent size
• The organization already has, or is ready for, a measurable marketing strategy
• The organization already has, or is ready for, a content-driven marketing strategy
• The organization has concrete growth goals that can justify the financial investment

Practical applications of marketing automation

First and foremost, the main objective of marketing automation is generating more high quality leads; either by wasting less time on manual labour, having more data-driven insights into what actually works, or better segmentation and more relevant/personal communication towards buyer personas (make your own buyer persona here!). However, what does "more high quality leads" actually mean?

The terms "more leads" and "better leads" are obviously not the same. More leads simply means higher quantity, and that is typically done by increasing traffic and conversion rates. Better leads, on the other hand, typically means something like "more ready to buy", "more in line with our buyer persona", "more educated about the nature of our offering" or "has more pressing challenges that might warrant our solution". In other words, they are of high priority to the sales team and usually much more likely to buy your products/services in the foreseeable future compared to "just" any lead. In short, lead quality is where marketing automation really makes a difference:

1. Segmenting the database and filtering out the bad-fit leads as early as possible
2. Prioritizing the best leads and measuring their engagement with your marketing engine
3. Nurturing those good-fit leads until they are (nearly) ready to engage with sales

A few examples of universally applicable use cases

Many practical benefits of marketing automation are universally applicable, regardless of the industry you work in. Let's presume I am looking to buy a new car. If the car dealer were using a marketing automation platform, they would be able to:

• Segment their entire database to invest time and money in the warmest leads only (e.g. high school student who can't even drive a car, versus middle-aged man who wants a sports car)
• Profile me as a potential lead by capturing my behavioural data and every single engagement (e.g. email, social, website, request, download, visit, etc.)
• Differentiate between me merely being interested versus me having actual buying intent (e.g. I'm very interested in having a Porsche, but at the moment I'd have literally 0 buying intent).
• Influence my research and decision making process by sending me relevant content at the right time (e.g. reviews, promotions, short lists, etc.)
• Combine my online (e.g. car configurator) and offline (e.g. showroom visits) engagements under one single, centralized record
• Nurture me until the moment I am ready to buy a car, by sending me the right content at the right time with the right calls to action
• Measure the actual effectiveness and ROI of your marketing initiatives, hence moving away from "I really feel that this blog works well" and instead say "I know for sure this blog or campaign was horrible, because the data says we literally generated 0 new customers)
• Transform me from customer into ambassador by sending me automated, helpful messages and engaging with them in a human manner once I have bought a car

How smart leaders get started with marketing automation

As the introduction to this article already implied, many organizations are all but too happy to just go out, buy any marketing automation platform, and hope for the best. Unfortunately that is not going to work. Do your research, involve all stakeholders, and think long term.

Strategy and pre-work

Before you let your organization purchase anything, at least go through this very basic checklist:

1. Define the strategic objective for marketing automation. Do we need more leads? Do we need to start working more efficiently? Do we need more marketing analytics? Or perhaps a combination?
2. Identify success metrics and/or KPIs with management. Avoid vanity metrics like clicks and leads, because ultimately we are trying to generate more business. Unfortunately anonymous website visitors don't pay the bills, and a lead is not a good lead per sé, so be sure to start measuring business critical metrics such as "marketing sourced revenue", "number of generated Sales Qualified Leads" or "customer acquisition costs".
3. Discuss with sales and define your actual buyer personas. Do this to avoid generating leads that sales isn't happy with, which in most companies is a life-long battle.
4. Don't forget to think long term. Usually, you want to buy a marketing automation platform that will suit your needs not only this year, but also works in your favour in the coming 3-5 years. Think about (future) integrations, changing markets, strategic objectives for the coming years, etc. Not every single tool is capable of scaling up along with your projected growth, while other platforms are simply much too complex to benefit from continuously.

Implementation and analysis

Once you have purchased a marketing automation platform, you obviously want to start building and running successful marketing workflows. After the initial setup, this is how you get started:

1. Segment the database. Gartner research says the average B2B company will find themselves, at any given time, in possession of of three lead categories: 1) ca. 3-4% is ready to actually consider purchasing your product/solution, 2) ca. 46% is in the twilight zone, meaning they might become a serious prospect but they aren't right now, and 3) ca. 50% is a complete waste of marketing and sales resources. I'm kind of stating the obvious here, but that means you'll need to surface the first group, nurture the second group, and filter out the third group!
2. Determine the desired result for your marketing workflow. What action do you want your targeted segment to complete? Do you want them to request a software demo or a trial? Do you want them to download an ebook? Do you want them to buy your product right away? Not to be underestimated; has this goal been discussed with sales and do they agree?
3. Produce relevant and helpful content. Coming back to one of my first points, you can't just turn on marketing automation and magically receive a bunch of leads. The whole idea of marketing automation is that you send the right content, to the right leads, at the right time, in an automated manner. That does mean you have to produce content first. Content can be in the shape of a blog, review, calculator, events, checklists, guides, etc. Whatever is it, the content pieces should be aligned with the goal of the workflow you determined in the previous step.
4. Build, test and activate your workflow. It's not rocket science, but it will take some trial and error before you've built a functioning workflow. This article explains how to get started with workflows in HubSpot. Alternatively, if you prefer video over text, this video training in the HubSpot Academy will help you understand how workflows actually work.
5. Analyze, learn and iterate! A major benefit of marketing automation is that marketing and sales teams can now work much smarter, not harder. Working smarter means you first have to learn and understand what parts of the marketing engine do or don't work as expected, for which you need data and analysis. Does our workflow actually generate the results (email opens, SQLs, demo requests, test drives, etc.) we aimed for? Or does the data tell us that we need to iterate and improve the logic or content behind this workflow?

Complementary presentation to use for yourself

If you liked this narrative, and you would like to make a case for investing in a marketing automation platform in your organization, feel free to download and leverage these slides (basically this article in PDF presentation format) to bring across the message in a coherent fashion!

Hopefully I've been able to shed some light on the competitive and revenue-generating benefits of marketing automation. Feel free to post any question in the comments section!

Vincent Onderdelinden