Trends in Marketing Automation - April 2018.pdf
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- 4. This is the big question that usually precedes every change, every business model re-organization, every innovation, every success and sometimes every failures. So! What happened, what brought Marketing Automation into the core grid of commercial operations? Hold on! I’ll jump into this in a few moments. 4
- 5. T.M - Characterized by the normal 4Ps; Marketing is a pure cost center; Focused on branding, product marketing, marketing communications, and public relations; Metrics: marketing budget to actual amount spent and impressions rate; L.G - Focused on providing leads to sales; Investment typically in organic and paid search, advertising, list purchase and email marketing; Metrics: emails sent, open rates. CTR, form submissions, and cost per lead; D.M- Characterized by Alignment of Sales and Marketing to generate highly qualified leads; This is where Marketing automation systems integration with CRMs becomes necessary; Metrics: number of Marketing Qualified Leads, percentage conversion of leads to opportunity, percentage conversion to deal closing, percentage contribution to pipeline, and number of days to close; R.M - Increases sales-ready leads at the top of the funnel, then accelerates opportunities through the sales pipeline; Revenue generated and attributed to marketing is repeatable, predictable, and scalable; Marketing can report and forecast revenue, while aligning with sales to ensure that revenue goals are achieved; 5
- 6. • Buyer journeys and decision making processes has expanded exponentially, thereby leading to chaos, we’ve got too much data, very little actionable insights and an ever increasing channels for touch base with potential clients and even existing clients. • This is why Marketing Automation is needed. Marketers need to automate repetitive activities while they free up time for analytics to actually know what is going on with their brand. • In other words, Marketing Automation becomes a necessary tool for Marketers to avoid drowning in Big Data. 6
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- 8. • Marketing Automation is basically the harmony between Robotics or lets say Artificial Intelligence, Data and Creativity. 8
- 9. • Marketing Automation requires 3 main grids, the Central Marketing Database (CRM) where details about prospect behaviour and interactions are stored for easy segmentation and targeting; an Engagement Marketing Engine - which is an environment for the creation, management of all marketing activities; an analytics engine to test and optimize marketing ROI and impact on revenue. • Apart from this, Marketing Automation also means, Data Driven Marketing Operation, which is a synergy between Sales objectives and Marketing Operations with continuous analytics which allows optimization at all times. This literally means a technical method of engagements with the relevant audience at the right time – automatically based on data, with an intent to enhance the buyer journey while moving the audience down the marketing funnel and converting them into paying clients. 9
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- 11. • An ideal implemented Marketing Automation strategy would mean that all your marketing tools are in one place, marketers are able to track interactions with their campaigns or content across multiple platforms, every aspect of the buyer journey from the top of the marketing funnel to the buying stage is trackable and measurable. • This would mean that all is going on well. • However, that is not the case! 11
- 12. • Ideal state would be to use automation fully – you only have to put content into the system. • Reality is that all the technology involved is fragmented, they need to be connected and they don’t necessarily work together easily. • Data is also a reality check - Companies databases were not built up with this in mind so data inconsistency creates a big gap. 12
- 13. • This is what we are seeing these days – I call it the rise of APIs and universal connectors • By the way, this is not a promotion of the brands highlighted in the slide. • Due to increasing brand-to-customer engagement touchpoints, Marketers realized that there is a need for a universal connector which allows you to = collect data from all touchpoints; sync the collected data into your Sales CRM and your Marketing Automation; it also allows you to conduct analytics to know what’s really happening and how the engagement is affecting your ROI and collective revenue. • The example shown is the case of a web-app called Tray.IO, it allows you to sync data from diverse channels like social media, AdWords, Web Traffic, site traffic, chat bots, into sales force, Marketo and Hubspot for SALEs tracking and LEAD Nurturing; it also allows you sync data into DOMO, GOODDATA and Tableau for reporting and analytics. • As I said, this is not a recommendation of Tray.IO, it is an example of how to sync Marketing Automation tool Stacks with Sales and Analytics tech stack for a broader picture of Marketing automation. • As a matter of fact, there are several universal connectors in the market that you can use to sync all your demand generation tools from content creation to campaign launch and analytics. 13
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- 15. • Ideal state would be to use automation fully – you only have to put content into the system. • Reality is that all the technology involved is fragmented, they need to be connected and they don’t necessarily work together easily. • Data is also a reality check - Companies databases were not built up with this in mind so data inconsistency creates a big gap. 15
- 16. • We moved from campaign blasts to a lead nurturing strategy where we engage our audience and provide them content and offers through out their buyer journeys, big data allowed us to identify priority leads which we engaged with customized content, • We also noticed that automated lead nurturing was scalable. We could expand it while also using predictive analysis to forecast our revenue and due to observed buyer behaviours. • A major advantage of aligning our existing data to Marketing automation was higher deal closing velocity and reduced level of cold calls our sales teams had to make. 16
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- 18. • This is all about organization maturity and available resources. Is there a resource for content, campaign builds, strategy planning, inbound channels – PPC • Can the organization pick up the threads with leads – is there someone to follow up with them once they are on the stage to be interested? Marketing Automation needs diverse talents like copy writers, web developers, will the organization be able to afford this type of resource? • Does management understand how automation works to invest 1 year into setting up a marketing organization? Or is it heavily sales driven with short gains? Marketing nurturing program takes time and it is about allowing the lead to give imprints of their journey. Question to consider is, will the management be patient to wait for up to 1 year before they get measurable returns in revenue? • Costs also come into place. Automation techs are quite expensive, apart from this, for Leads to come through - the content has to be promoted, and this will require its own budget. • Database management will be required too, it is important to have an existing and well defined database. Without these there is no point to get into marketing automation. 18
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