Marketing automation focuses on automating marketing processes like campaign design, lead generation, and nurturing prospects. It allows marketers to manage large databases of leads and set rules for how each lead is handled. Popular tools include Marketo, Silverpop, Eloqua, HubSpot, and Pardot. When implementing marketing automation, companies should consider the initial investment cost, switching costs, data integrity, and reporting requirements. Lead scoring and lifecycles help understand a lead's progression, while sales agreements ensure qualified leads are passed to sales teams. Marketers are now measured on their impact on revenue through metrics like inquiries, opportunities, and bookings.
2. WHAT IS MARKETING
AUTOMATION?
“Marketing automation focuses on the lead acquisition and
demand generation activities within a marketing group, as
opposed to the sales activities, where CRM systems as a whole
tend to focus. Simply put, these tools automate marketing
processes — everything from strategic planning and campaign
design to customer segmentation, lead generation, nurture
campaigns, prospect scoring, and closed loop analytics”
3. WHY USE MARKETING
AUTOMATION?
Many B2B and recently some B2C companies, have large
databases of prospective customers they need to manage
• Marketers often wear many hats, it’s impossible to look at each individual
lead
• Automation allows marketers to set rules for what happens to each lead
that enters the database
Marketers want insight into the overall big picture, the demand
funnel
• What campaigns are performing well, where am I seeing a positive ROI?
• Am I meeting my demand generation goals?
• Lead volumes
• Sales conversions
• Budget
4. EXAMPLES OF AUTOMATION TOOLS
A few popular platforms..
•Marketo
•Silverpop
•Eloqua
•HubSpot
•Pardot
5. A FEW THINGS TO CONSIDER
Cost of initial investment
• Often increases as the size of your database expands
Switching costs
• Integrating a marketing automation system with your existing CRM and marketing
is no easy task
• Can takes months of work with many stakeholders including sales, operations, engineering, IT and the
marketing teams
Data integrity
• Do you trust the data your company has already collected? What about now?
• When you automate tasks, there is always a chance for disaster. You need to be sure of what you are
doing, the outcomes and how it is going to affect your prospect and customer databases
Reporting
• Everyone will want to know what you are doing, the net effect of your results and
how much it costs!
6. LEAD MANAGEMENT
Lead Scoring – behavioral and demographic fit for your
organization
• Can assign point values based on desired attributes
• Can be different for different product or sales groups
• Assign a threshold value that makes logical sense, and then adjust based
on feedback
Lead Lifecycle – understanding the typical progression of a lead,
conversion times, recycled leads, bad fit, nurture
You need to be able to quickly investigate a history of any given
lead at a moments notice, being able to understand the
progression of a lead, and how your company has interacted
with them in the past, can help create trust and a strong
7. SALES LEAD IDENTIFICATION
What defines a good “sales lead”?
What types of things are important for the sales and marketing teams
to collaborate on?
What does a sales driven organizational model look like? Marketing
driven?
What are the common goals of your sales and marketing
organization?
8. SERVICE LEVEL AGREEMENTS
(SLA)
One of the most important, if not most important aspects of
being a successful demand gen marketer
• Explicit level of service you and your team agree to supply qualified lead to
sales team
• Demographic factors
• Company Size
• Industry Verticals
• Job Level
• Job Role
• Behavioral factors
• Content Downloads
• Contact Request
• Lead Routing based on sales organization hierarchy
10. HOW ARE WE MEASURED?
Modern marketers are ultimately
responsible for their contribution
to the their organization’s top
line revenue (bookings)
• We look at what happens at the top of
the demand funnel through pass over
to sales, qualification, opportunities
and ultimately bookings
• Inquiries, AQL, TAL, TQL(MQL), SAL,
SQL
• Number of opportunities, new logos
11. LEAD NURTURE
Leads are expensive! Cost per lead (CPL) can range anywhere
from a few dollars to over $100 just for one lead!
• Hopefully, when you pay for a lead, they will be the right fit and ready to
purchase
• This isn’t always the case, automation allows for strategic email nurturing
to move leads through your marketing funnel
• Can be based on different behaviors, or desire actions and outcomes
• Often content-centric, awareness and consideration assets
12. FUTURE OF MARKETING, TODAY?
Modern marketers are for the first time being measure on what effect
they have on top-line revenue at organizations. The days of
marketing being an art and less of a science are fading away
Being able to know what your demand pipeline looks like, and how
you can improve conversions, opportunities and closed/won business
at any point in time is paramount
Most companies have no clue! Yes, they have the software, they’ve
signed the contracts, but their data is a mess, and they have no idea
how to fix it
All of these skills are learned on the job, no one comes out with a
degree in marketing or an MBA and is expected to be an expert in
these tools