An Infusionsoft Small Business Marketing Trends Report recently showed that 43% of businesses with in-house marketing say their efforts are ineffective. What’s holding them back from transforming their outreach efforts into sales? In many cases, it’s a lack of planning around the marketing and sales connection, especially for those leveraging an outsourced sales campaign. One tool can bring both together: marketing automation.
Marketing Automation: What It Is and What It Can Do
Marketing automation is, despite its name, a marketing and sales development tool. With marketing automation, businesses can streamline their marketing outreach and measure their success in moving prospects through the sales funnel. Development teams leverage marketing automation to create customer segments and buyer personas, and to qualify leads. The data captured in the marketing automation stream is critical when it comes to establishing and refining outsourced sales campaign tactics.
Marketing Automation and Sales: What You Need to Be Successful
As with anything worthwhile, what you get out of marketing automation is only as good as what you put in. There are a few essential factors required to make your marketing automation experience successful:
- Social media and email: First things first – you need to have a way to share your messaging with prospects. Social media (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn) and email are the vital starting place. You need a presence on each and a strategy. Once you have your outreach efforts feeding through your marketing automation tool, you can begin capturing valuable info on what resonates with different audience segments and customize to increase conversion.
- Content: One of the wonders of marketing automation is how quickly you can share content and track its impact. However, this presupposes that you have quality content relevant for each stage in the buyer’s journey. You need to have a variety of impactful content (i.e., email templates, infographics, eGuides) scheduled to send when prospects take relevant actions like requesting a quote or demo. Matching pertinent content to these actions can propel prospects from one stage in the sales funnel to the next.
- Data analysis: No matter how much data you capture, it’s worthless if you don’t put it into action. To tap into the power of marketing automation, you need a team to analyze the data you gather and put it to use. Marketing automation data can be leveraged to create buyer personas and audience segments, qualify leads, improve outreach cadence, and identify a variety of issues in your development processes.
Get the Tools and the Know-How with NuGrowth Solutions
Bridging the sales and marketing gap with marketing automation is no easy task, but the experts at NuGrowth Solutions make it simple. With our over 70 years’ experience in the business and results like a 170% increase in customer base, we’re confident we have the right tools and expertise to bring your development to the next level.
Find out how NuGrowth can help you fill in your development process holes – get in touch at 614.304.3917 today.
Sarah Deak is a veteran copywriter and content strategist with NuGrowth Solutions. She likes to look for the unexpected angle and uses her background in education, business development, and marketing to create interesting and informative pieces to equip readers with actionable data