Marketing automation can provide B2B marketers with the opportunity to market more efficiently, quickly and successfully. But making the commitment to purchase a marketing automation platform can be a big decision, and B2B marketers can find it daunting to understand where they should begin, with such a wide range of resources available to them.
It’s important to have a marketing automation strategy in mind when getting started. If you don’t, its easy to get lost in the wonderment and capabilities of a marketing automation platform, without achieving any real results.
Here at Napier, we are keen supporters of marketing automation and have experienced first-hand how it has improved sales for our clients. This is why we’ve pulled together our top six tips to help marketers use marketing automation systems successfully from the beginning.
Marketing Automation must be strategy-led
As with all marketing initiatives, the implementation of marketing automation needs to be strategy-led in order to be effective.
You need to understand where marketing automation fits with your overall marketing strategy plan, and it simply boils down to one question ‘What are you trying to achieve?’.
Whether its lead nurturing, or an increase in sales, its vital to know what you are trying to achieve, in order to understand whether you are being successful.
Focus on your pain points first
B2B marketers can often fall into the trap of trying to fix every problem at once. With marketing automation it’s important to focus on your true pain points, and get the basics working first.
Marketers should look at getting basic templates in place and start with launching campaigns that achieve simple ROI-focused goals. This could include a simple goal such as save time, reduce labour costs or increase leads.
Whatever the campaign or automation, they should be easy to measure and report, so you can understand what works, and what you should change moving forward to achieve even better results.
Optimise at every stage of campaign creation
Once your marketing automation campaigns are up and running, it can be easy to push them to the sidelines as you look forward to the next big step.
You should be consistently checking the performance at each stage of your campaign creation, and optimising each element based on performance.
Remember poor processes don’t move a prospect through the funnel, and weak messages don’t engage your audience.
Marketing automation systems offer great reporting features, and you should keep a close eye on performance, to understand how you can refine and optimise each stage of automation process moving forward.
Align sales and marketing
To gain the best results from marketing automation, your sales and marketing teams need to work together towards one common goal.
Marketing teams should work closely with sales to determine and implement best practices for content, lead nurturing and lead scoring. This will mean only the most qualified leads are sent to sales and will help both the sales and marketing team identify where the customer is in the buyer’s journey.
Aligning the sales and marketing teams will also help bridge the information gap between the two teams. Marketing automation provides a great opportunity for all information to be in one place, where sales can learn what marketing activities have driven leads to the company, what they want, and the best way to convert them into customers.
Understand your customers
Marketing automation can provide a great advantage to your marketing efforts, as it allows you to deliver the right message to the right person, at the right time. However, the system can only do this successfully is if you have identified personas in place.
Having identified buyer personas is vital to allowing the system to do its job, as they provide you with a great advantage to deliver messaging and content based on that specific persona’s attributes and behaviour.
For example, setting up workflows based on personas can be a great way to follow up with customised emails with content that you know will be of interest to them.
Don’t’ get overwhelmed – ask for help!
This may seem like an obvious tip, but with marketing automation platforms having such a wide range of capabilities, and without the right training or resources, it can be easy for B2B marketers to get overwhelmed when onboarding with a new system.
Luckily, you are not alone. Onboarding and getting used to a new system can be tricky, and there are plenty of resources available to help with any queries you may have.
Here at Napier, we work closely with our clients to help them with the tricky process of onboarding and getting the system set up. From getting the system running, to creating your basic templates, Napier can help you iron out any issues you may have.
If you’re looking to implement marketing automation into your strategy or have any questions you’d like to ask us. Why not drop us an email, we’d love to help you.