Marketing automation has revolutionized the way B2B organizations manage their leads. Not only has it provided marketers with effective and innovative ways to conduct campaigns and manage leads, it has given firms access to invaluable insight into daily marketing operations.
As a result, marketers have less and less opportunities to excuse poor performance. Here are seven lies they can no longer tell because of marketing automation:
1. The database we have to work with is flawed.
Marketing automation arms you with the necessary tool to keep your database clean and up to date. Most software will give you the ability to automatically merge duplicate leads, append incomplete records, handle soft and hard bounces, and manage unsubscriptions.
2. We are missing ways to reach our target audience with the content we have on hand.
Marketing automation gives you several ways to utilize your content and distribute it to your audience. You can gate it with a form and to capture leads or use it in your email campaigns to nurture prospects and even distribute it via social media.
3. Our database is too large for us to create customized campaigns.
Marketing automation makes it very simple to segment a database so you can create campaigns that are highly relevant to your leads. For instance, you may want to segment your database by industry, geographic location or even readiness to buy (using lead scoring).
4. We can’t manage to convert opportunities because leads aren’t qualified.
Most marketing automation software includes CRM integration, which translates into Marketing and Sales working transparently with one another. Among other information, they have access to a lead’s score. This allows both Sales and Marketing to determine whether leads need further nurturing by Marketing or if they are ready to be contacted by Sales.
5. Marketing can’t be held responsible for poor results.
The same transparency that allows marketing and sales to work hand-in-hand also provides a scale to measure the effectiveness of marketing initiatives. With marketing automation, the performance of your marketing team is trackable and measurable via metric such as email open rates, click-throughs, pages visited and the reach via social media.
6. I think the last campaign did pretty well.
The advanced reporting and analytics features of marketing automation also allow you to dive deeply into the performance of your marketing programs. Rather than being vague on the effectiveness of a marketing campaign, you can actually measure how marketing activities performed against a set goal. In addition, marketing automation permits to conduct A/B testing on your landing pages and subject lines; and, it also provides insight regarding the effectiveness of your email campaigns (open rate, click-through rate, link performance, bounces, etc.).
7. We don’t have time to reinvent the wheel for each marketing campaign.
Marketing automation allows you to automate your processes so you don’t have to start from scratch each time you initiate a new campaign. You can also easily repurpose previous emails, landing pages and templates to deliver up-to-date customized content in no time.
Photo by Trsitan Schmurr