So, you’ve heard all about the good things that Marketing Automation can bring including:
- combining various marketing tools in one platform
- scoring leads to identify your hot prospects
- nurturing leads automatically to add to their world until they are ready to buy
- aligning your sales and marketing teams to work more efficiently
- increasing the number and quality of leads.
Here are a few tips to help you get marketing automation right for your business
Do you really need Marketing Automation?
Marketing Automation isn’t just about sending a newsletter here and there to your prospects and clients.
It’s all about helping your buyers through their journey by understanding their behaviour, serving them appropriate content and creating processes to engage with them at the right stage of their buying journey.
The question of whether you need Marketing Automation is a no brainer, but when and how to implement this is what you really need to think about.
Creating buyer personas
Spend some time understanding your buyer personas. Knowing the people who buy from you and how they buy is key to marketing automation. Having your buyer personas mapped out and making sure your whole business knows what they are is so important. Look around your business now, do you digest information the same as the people around you – the answer is probably no.
Not knowing who your buyer personas are means you will create content for anyone meaning your content won’t be target your audience’s pain points and challenges specifically.
Creating content that each of your buyer personas will relate to and interact with will change your marketing automation journey.
What state is your data in?
Every business has data, usually stored in multiple different programs with everyone in the business accessing it for different reasons.
When Marketing Automation is implemented well, its’ usually because the business’ data is up-to-date and clean.
Before you consider having a brand-new platform and using the data from all these sources, it’s worth cleaning your data and making sure the data you are importing is fresh and not out of date.
Sales and marketing alignment
For Marketing Automation to work well it is key to have your sales and marketing teams aligned to the same objectives.
Salespeople tend to have their own processes for the buyers journey which aren’t always communicated to the marketing team and vice versa.
The way that customers interact with businesses is now different so getting your sales team to understand how it has changed is crucial.
They need to understand that there is much more to do before a qualified lead is likely to drop into their laps. Customers and prospects expect to be able to self-educate before they have contact with a salesperson.
Salespeople can now do more to make leads come to them. They can set themselves up as trusted advisors to their potential customers by writing blogs or answering questions in LinkedIn Groups. It may take a little change in perspective and they'll need to learn some new skills but it’s all needed to fit in with what our buyers want today.
Choose a partner to work with
Starting your Marketing Automation journey can seem daunting and having a partner to guide you through the process from the initial setup, to onboarding your team and creating campaigns is essential.
When choosing your Marketing Automation partner consider a recognised company who works with marketing automation systems. They’ll need to be honest enough with you to tell you where you are going wrong but also guide you through how to correct and improve.
