Marketing automation is more than a “popular” sales and marketing tool; it’s moved to essential. Eight out of ten companies use marketing automation to gain, score, and nurture leads, and for good reason. Marketing automation can improve workflow, boost conversion rate, increase productivity, and bring critical personalization to customer outreach. Yet, not all businesses see these benefits. Why?
The disconnect lies in a lack of marketing automation support. You need the right processes, people, and technology to gain marketing automation’s benefits. Some of those vital pieces include:
Integrating Market Research and CRM Data
We’ve said it repeatedly: you need quality data for quality results. You need to pull in data from market research and your CRM for your marketing automation to see valuable output. The more you can discover about your current and potential customers upfront, the more success you’ll see in your marketing automation campaigns.
Establishing Lead Scoring
The data you gain from market research and your CRM should give you enough to set up lead scoring in your marketing automation system. Though there are frameworks to create your scoring system, each business is unique. Once you determine ways to identify “hot” (or “sales ready”) leads versus “cold” leads, you can establish automated pathways to nurture each appropriately.
Identifying Audience Segments
Segmentation is a sales and marketing cornerstone. Your customers and leads are unique, but you can use some common factors to group specific identities. Once you know your different marketing segments, you can establish the right content, cadence, and contact mode to fit each. The more you can customize the experience for each segment, the better.
Bringing Sales and Marketing Together
“Thou shall not separate sales and marketing teams” should be a development commandment. Your sales and marketing teams need to stay connected on what your marketing automation is doing and how it affects your sales reps’ outreach. A warm or hot marketing automation lead must move to a sales rep’s call sheet ASAP. Though marketing automation is a critical tool for gaining and nurturing leads, it’s up to your sales team to close the deal.
Following Up and Improving
Test, evaluate, and update. This is another common refrain in our sales and marketing advice. The market moves quickly, and your team needs to stay on top of how areas like outreach preference, pain points, and “must-haves” for your product or service are changing. When used correctly, your marketing automation can make quick adjustments to keep up, but whether or not it does is up to you.
Syncing with the Right Tech Stack
Marketing automation, though extremely valuable, is only one piece of your sales and marketing tech stack. You need the right technology and expertise to support its function. Content creation, email marketing, social media management, geo-targeting, and analytics are just a few of the supplemental tools that can bring out the best in your marketing automation. Beyond the tools themselves, you need a team that knows which you need, how to use them, and how to integrate them with your marketing automation system.
That’s where the NuGrowth Solutions team comes in. We bring end-to-end marketing management with content creators, a fully-built and specialized tech stack, and experienced experts to manage your marketing automation and connected tools.
Find out how we can bring the marketing automation and other support you need to grow leads and boost your bottom line. Check out our marketing packages, business development outreach offerings, and more at nugrowth.com.
