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Marketing Automation Course

Introduction

What is Marketing Automation?

Successful email marketing, demand generation, and lead management processes hinge on a modern strategy closely aligned to buyer needs and expectations across all phases of the buying process. Using a wide spectrum of digital channels, today’s buyers employ an extensive network of tools and resources to make the most informed purchase decisions.

The Modern Marketing era is driven by the self-educated buyer who marketers must engage to achieve a relevant, targeted, and value-based customer experience. Marketers are increasingly enhancing their understanding of how data can fuel the delivery of meaningful interactions. This access to vast sources of information that marketers are applying to execute and achieve more refined marketing simply can’t be gleaned manually.

Buyers demand and deserve value-based interactions across all points of engagement. More importantly, timing and relevance are critical factors for content delivery and sales engagement. It has become a mandate to tailor content aligned to the buying process in a manner that demonstrates how your solution or services can help prospective buyers address their challenges and objectives. People have no interest in being inundated with product specs. They do, however, seek informative interactions to support their search.

Marketers are leveraging the power of marketing automation to refine, target, and optimize program initiatives, including customizing content and automating communications. Marketing automation technology empowers marketers to improve their knowledge of buyer behavior and understand how it plays out in campaigns.

With the ability to manage, report, and automate the moving parts of a campaign with marketing automation technology and expertise, leading organizations are aligning marketing to sales, powering revenue performance, and fueling overall business growth.

Benchmark data from research firm SiriusDecisions indicates that the number of B2B organizations using marketing automation is accelerating, and adoption rates will grow to 50% market penetration by 2015.

The Five Tenets of Modern Marketing

While managing the operational efficiencies of marketing and sales can seem daunting as an ongoing endeavor, companies of all sizes and business models are revamping their strategies by focusing on specific areas of optimization.

Organizations are proactively developing formal processes to enhance their efficiency and engage in a meaningful way by addressing core competencies of effective marketing.

This guide will help you understand the core competencies of marketing, as well as the benefits of implementing automation technology as part of your business structure. The information provided highlights a variety of different topics, building on The 5 Tenets of Modern Marketing:

  1. Targeting. The first step in building any sustainable structure is to ensure a proper foundation. Think of your database as this foundation. Without the proper data management and hygiene in place, your marketing operations will suffer because it’s nearly impossible to meaningfully segment and refine your prospects.
  2. Engagement. Meaningful marketing is centered on the customer. No longer can marketers or sales reps relegate communications to company centric conversations. To engage with prospects and customers in a meaningful way, you must develop tactics to address and align messaging across all digital channels. To do this effectively, you must have a content marketing strategy in place to provide educational engagements.
  3. Conversion. Marketers are using technology that responds to the buyer’s actions in real time and delivers profile information that reflects their timeline and research journey. Automated campaigns
    have higher conversation rates and are much more resilient for maintenance. By automating your campaigns, you can improve the buyer’s experience, develop loyal relationships, and track conversion data more effectively. If you understand the nature of conversions, you can leverage that data to refine business initiatives across your organizational structure.
  4. Analytics. As accountability for marketing investments increases, data analytics provide a helpful tracking resource to define and measure. By implementing systems for reporting and intelligence, organizations can better understand the impact that sales, marketing, and other efforts are having on overall business performance. This insight helps you refine strategies and develop repeatable processes for success.
  5. Marketing Technology. Organizations across all sizes and industries are leveraging tools to simplify business processes. Successful marketers understand the importance of aligning marketing automation, sales force automation (SFA), and customer relationship management (CRM) platforms in the cloud. They can then extend capabilities with cloud applications by integrating other key technologies to connect the dots of internal efficiency and maximize prospect and customer interactions.

The Role of Reactive Marketing

Using Behavioral Insights

The seismic shift from face-to-face to online sales has hindered the ability to see and learn from body language when interacting with prospects. Today’s salespeople are engaging primarily — in many cases exclusively — online and are closely aligning their efforts with the key attributes found in online behavior. We call this Digital Body Language ™. By analyzing and understanding prospect online behavior — email responses, web page views, social engagement, and other core attributes — marketers have a wealth of insights to personally guide prospects through the buying process.

The notion of understanding buyers is no longer based on information that the sales team types into a sales force automation (SFA) system. It’s now based on information that’s gathered from all buyer interactions. As we learn more about buyers across all touch points such as events, webinars, social, and video, we gain a deeper understanding of their Digital Body Language and have many more predictive insights than from their SFA record.

When marketers can automate the marketing process taking into account a potential buyer’s Digital Body Language, they will be able to triumph over their biggest challenges:

Increase revenue performance with qualified marketing leads.
Align marketing to sales with process and system integration.
Boost demand generation efficiency and effectiveness.
Demonstrate marketing value and accountability.
Establish a Modern Marketing system of record.

Social media sites are a hub for information gathering, primarily because the distribution of that information is through trusted networks and communities. As social media users, we review a constant flow of information from friends, family, and colleagues. This information passes the test because it’s trustworthy or particularly interesting. Social media has added another component to the buying process as a result.

Understanding buyer behavior on social media sites is critical. The information that buyers interact with comes with an additional layer of trust that other information does not, and thus is more likely to form a base of that buyer’s opinions about your company or services. Marketing automation provides marketers with the ability to segment based on behavioral data and attributes.

What Social Media Says About Buyers

Understanding who is participating in social media conversations that concern your brand is an indicator of interest, and potentially, intent. If someone is polling your followers for information on your brand, it’s usually an indicator that they are involved in a buying decision. If sales can see when a hot prospect is sharing your content, they can get better insight into the topics and content that is important to that buyer. Social media offers visibility into key behavioral attributes, allowing marketers to leverage extended channels for lead generation and brand building. Social media enables marketing organizations to capture:

Social profile and behavioral data on leads.
Common attributes, connections, or sharing behaviors to support segmentation strategy.
Relevant conversation monitoring to improve sharing tactics.

The Role of Database Marketing

Maximize the Value of Your Data

Campaign success hinges on a variety of critical factors managed by both sales and marketing teams. A sound data management strategy is an integral component to ensure that organizations are aligning relevant and appropriate messaging with prospect expectations at every possible touch point.

The foundational element of successful marketing automation is your database. Good data quality enables relevant, real-time messaging. If you want to target based on demographic data, you need to ensure the data that you’re collecting is both accurate and up to date. Campaign effectiveness will suffer if you’re unable to target accurately as a result of bad data. Key prospect and customer data at the contact, demographic, social and company levels enables marketing organizations to provide relevant information at appropriate phases in the buy cycle. But often there is missing contact data, such as a job title, which can prevent quality leads from getting in front of sales. Even if quality leads get through, if sales reps can’t contact the prospects, then overall conversion rates will suffer.

It’s crucial to implement data management as the foundational component of any program. Marketers cannot establish systems to optimize the visibility and insight that data provides if the information is decentralized and unaligned with other business processes. By implementing the right strategies to maintain accurate data, you can enhance campaign initiatives and provide relevant prospect and customer offers.

Beyond missing attributes, marketers also are challenged by the reality of data decay rates. SiriusDecisions estimates that B2B contacts become obsolete because of people changing jobs and companies at a rate of 2-3% per month, creating a constant stream of inaccurate contact data.

The data element is the single most important area for companies to understand. Yet at the executive level, it is often the least understood. Without clean data, marketers waste precious money and time. When data is accurate, open rates increase, conversion rates improve, and revenue increases.

To optimize the value of marketing automation and improve the performance of campaigns, marketers are realizing it is imperative to integrate their marketing automation platforms with their databases. With an integrated data process in place, marketers can improve key performance indicators (KPIs) in their campaigns, such as open and click through rates, as well as conversion rates from leads to opportunities.

Marketing Automation Simplified

Marketing automation helps sales and marketing teams work collaboratively by integrating technologies central to data management, such as CRM. This connection bridges the gap and improves visibility into data detriments — or missing information — so marketers can standardize lists of values, normalize data, and ensure accuracy in future data collection sources. Focusing on data management and cleanliness is a powerful way to make a significant impact on the sales and marketing funnel by improving demand generation, as well as the quality of marketing and sales accepted leads (SALs).

Marketing automation helps support effective data management so marketers can:

  • Improve campaign targeting and segmentation.
  • Align the efforts across the organization by demand generation, marketing, sales, etc.
  • Reduce inaccurate or duplicate data within CRM systems.
  • Improve campaign performance with better email marketing engagement results.

The Role of Targeting & Segmentation

Keep It Focused

Automated marketing campaigns can segment potential customers across a number of dimensions including demographics, activities, length of engagement and interests, among others — and they also can segment the message types. You can build a target audience based on information including title, geography, job function, visit frequency, or topic of interest. Targeting and segmentation are crucial for marketers looking to avoid batch and blast outreach methods. Targeting and segmentation also are crucial components of marketing automation technology.

Without automation technology, it is difficult to segment leads within a database, and even more challenging to send the most appropriate messages. When equipped with buyer profiles, marketers can leverage customer data within to build market segmentation strategies, understand where to focus marketing resources, and rank opportunities against their true potential. Detailed buyer profiles also are useful for developing content marketing, as they provide marketers with a better understanding of the types of content to send to potential buyers: information that is reflective of their phase in the buying processes.

Targeted and segmented prospect data is critical to assure that any company’s marketing messaging is relevant, appropriate, and aligned with prospect expectations at every possible touch point.

The Role of Trigger-Based Marketing

Offer Timely & Relevant Communication

Every marketer knows the importance of providing the right message at the appropriate time. Trigger-based marketing enables critical response to behavioral attributes and actions, such as an email click through or continually demonstrable interest in a particular asset or offering.

The key to executing trigger-based marketing is timing and relevance. By aligning the content and timing of email messages with behavior, marketers can optimize their points of engagement and encourage feedback via calls to action. Trigger-based email programs enable marketers to transform existing customer data into measurable rules that help execute on business objectives.

Marketing automation supports content delivery based on interest, inquiry, and engagement. By providing tailored information specific to prospect or customer actions, you can more definitively provide value to assist and empower potential buyers. This dramatically helps reduce cycle times.

For instance, when an email recipient clicks on a link or call to action to learn more, predefined rules can be set to ensure that this particular prospect, who expressed topical interest, should receive a specific asset or information based on their behavior.

Marketing Automation Simplified

Effective engagement and communication is delivered at the right time, relevant to its recipient. With marketing automation, you can drive the initiatives and offers that resonate with prospects based on their behavior and indicated interests. By delivering information at critical moments in the decision-making process, you can cultivate a greater role in the discovery and engagement process.

The Role of Email Marketing

Centralize Multi-Touch Engagement

While many marketing communication channels have emerged along with the evolution of automation tools, email is still perhaps the most critical point of engagement that supports marketing communication. Marketers are equipped with an arsenal of prospect information, garnered through web forms, third-party lists, social media, conference registrations, and a variety of other channels. Email helps support overall multi-touch communications strategies, enabling marketers to deliver these targeted messages based on customer preference across different points in the buyer’s purchase process.

Email provides a platform for right time, relevant communication when used with behavioral triggers. It also provides the opportunity to serve up relevant content at the time when a buyer is engaged and likely to respond.

List management is critical to having visibility into inactivity so marketers can accurately measure and understand the effectiveness of email communication. Keep in mind, however, that your email sender reputation is a core component of your potential reach, and maintaining your deliverability score is key to ensuring continual reach and communication with contacts. Too many blocks, spam trap hits, and/or complaints from targets are just a few ways to get blacklisted, but it’s also important to maintain strategies for list management, frequency of sends, engagement metrics, and policy/security compliance.

To provide positive brand impressions, avoid complaints, bounce backs, and unsubscribes, marketers must develop and maintain a comprehensive privacy policy that shows how you’re collecting, using, and protecting data.

As privacy protection and compliance becomes an increasingly critical consideration for marketers, email suppression has become a primary technique for high-volume email delivery. Additionally, it’s vital that marketers ensure the prevention of unwanted solicitations and senders to avoid landing on blacklists and irreparably damaging their brand’s online reputation.

 Marketing Automation Simplified

The standard opens and clicks are one way to measure the impact of email marketing effectiveness, but marketing automation provides visual click through reporting so you can see which links within an email get the best response. This helps optimize the overall effectiveness of email communications. By knowing which email messages and offers are the most engaging, you can fine tune your trigger-based marketing campaigns and serve the right message.

The Role of Social Media and Content

Influence Inbound Marketing

Social media is a driving communication force where buyers, sellers, and thought leaders are connecting to exchange ideas and information. The influx of content, information, and education available across these digital channels has tasked marketing teams with a variety of new roles to manage, across web, brand, and content.

Prospective buyers initiate their own research and discovery processes to identify solutions to their business challenges and ask peers how they are addressing industry trends. Once they’ve figured out there’s a solution to their problem, they narrow the list of companies that likely can solve their problem.

Buyers do this by leveraging a number of channels and content offerings, including: searching Google, attending a webinar, downloading an eBook, attending an event, asking their network for recommendations, visiting your corporate website, reading your blog, listening to a podcast, attending a virtual trade show, watching a product demo, seeing a video customer testimonial, reading shared content on social media, and the list goes on.

This new world of buying is transforming the role of marketing and sales. To help support the buyer’s discovery process and ultimately progress to becoming a loyal, satisfied customer, it’s imperative to rethink the selling model. To the earlier point, buyers don’t want cold calls, generic emails, or case studies of companies they can’t relate to. They want value-driven insights, information, and engagement.

Marketers have realized the value in providing compelling content and are increasingly thinking like publishers to engage with their community of influencers by storytelling and education.

Effective content marketing supports the buyer’s independent researching and brand engagement, and is specifically tailored to address evolving needs. Realizing this shift, marketers are increasingly focused on measuring the impact of different types of content on various stages of the sales and marketing processes.

 Marketing Automation Simplified

In the information exchange- driven marketplace, content is a critical component to connecting with prospects and customers. Marketing automation enables you to circulate and track content based on buyer profiles and segment your prospects and customers according to their roles, interests, and other attributes that make sense for your business. Automation also helps you trigger relevant content based on consumption and channel delivery preferences.

The Role of Lead Management

Maximize Prospect Interest & Engagement

Lead management is the lynchpin of demand and revenue generation strategy. Marketing automation technology enables marketers to implement a framework that outlines the process between marketing and sales for handling leads. Without a proper system in place to manage all your potential buyers across a high volume of channels (email, social, direct, etc.), it’s impossible to capitalize on their interest.

Industry benchmarks indicate that organizations leveraging a lead management system to maximize their marketing automation see a 416% increase in closed deals, according to SiriusDecisions. Moreover, IDC estimates that companies that implement lead management systems are enjoying a 10% increase in overall revenue.

While close collaboration between sales and marketing is necessary across all areas of the organization, it’s especially critical during the lead management phase, so that both teams are in sync regarding the criteria, attributes, and characteristics of different types of leads.

Although the general practice of lead management focuses primarily on the organization of data distributed across the various sales cycle stages, marketing automation technology enables marketers to streamline an otherwise manual and time-consuming task.

3 Steps to Establish a Qualification Process

  1. DEFINE each stage of the buying cycle (inquiry, marketing qualified lead, sales qualified lead, etc.).
  2. DETERMINE what criteria will be used to arrive at those definitions.
  3. CREATE a lead scoring model (for instance, start with the buyer’s role, function, or vertical).

Marketing Automation Simplified

Marketing automation provides an efficient way to manage lead qualification, or the process of reviewing the criteria of each prospect /customer with the goal of moving that buyer to the next phase of the buying cycle. Most buyers initially will need to be nurtured, which means that they are not quite ready to buy. Marketing automation provides tools to assess buyer fit and behavior, which then allows you to easily determine the attributes of a likely lead.

The Role of Lead Routing

Manage & Optimize Demand Generation

The immediate challenge of data collection is that there are so many sources of information, feeding into multiple data stores, that it gets really difficult to maintain a consistent process of data collection. With a thoughtful lead management system in place, you can optimize the effectiveness of their activities that ultimately decide the most appropriate course of action for each lead, or group of leads.

Lead routing is a critical step in this process because it helps categorize and prioritize leads based on a company’s criteria, and get leads where they need to go to keep marketing and sales initiatives going.

Marketing automation helps automatically route marketing-qualified leads based on a score or rank, so sales can focus time and energy on leads that are ready to buy. This is critical in eliminating the lead- distribution bottleneck that occurs with manual processing.

Having a lead routing strategy in place is vital to the success of other core marketing automation components, which will be addressed in the following sections. Without a fundamental understanding of the avenue to sales success, it’s virtually impossible to provide value to leads and progress them through the buying cycle.

Marketing Automation Simplified

Marketing automation helps marketing and sales teams avoid letting leads slip through the cracks and into the black hole of lost opportunities. By feeding leads into marketing automation, lead information is automatically captured and routed to your sales team based on geography, industry, product interest, or other assigned business rules to alleviate the lead management process. Whether you have a direct sales force, named account model, or a distributed channel and sales organization that require sophisticated routing capabilities, marketing automation helps ensure that leads are efficiently and correctly delivered to sales.

The Role of Lead Nurturing

Stay in Touch and Top of Mind

Nurture programs offer a unique opportunity to engage with prospects over time, on their terms and in a way that is manageable, understandable, and meaningful. Nurture programs are often great opportunities to develop relationships based on value and ongoing communication. Lead nurturing also enables marketers to cultivate leads that are not yet ready to buy.

The more information you have, the more success you’ll achieve creating buyer personas and defining need-based objectives. You’ll also gain a better understanding of the behavioral and consumption patterns of your target buyers. All of this knowledge can then be utilized to refine and optimize your ongoing nurturing processes.

Effective nurtures should take into account both buyer role and lead stage. By looking at these two elements, marketers can ensure they are having a relevant dialogue. You want to tailor your communications based on the audience you are talking to (role/persona) and where they are in the sales cycle (lead stage).

Nurtures also should consider buyer engagement. Successful lead nurturing keeps prospects engaged by providing relevant content, such as infographics or white papers, conducive to prospect needs, industry, role or other characteristics, as well as their phase in their discovery and purchase processes. Meaningful nurture offers are based on relevance and value, so it’s critical to think about the attributes most important to your prospective buyers and their surrounding business trends. You’re not nurturing if you keep blasting emails regardless of actual response (or lack thereof).

Nurturing can help establish loyalty and brand affinity long before a prospect is in the purchase phase, but by cultivating latent demand, companies can increase the conversion of unqualified leads to opportunities and drive more revenue.

 Marketing Automation Simplified

Nurturing helps accelerate active opportunities by empowering prospective buyers with content that  supports their research and discovery process. Therefore, it can be effective as part of a trigger alert program to help marketers track and correspond to prospect actions. Nurturing offers an innovative approach to managing different types of leads, based on interest or other profile attributes.

The Role of Lead Scoring

Identify Target Attributes

Lead scoring starts with sales and marketing aligned to define and establish agreed upon systems to identify where prospects are in the buying cycle. It’s crucial that this system is established in concert, as the two teams can exchange feedback on the quality of leads being passed to sales.

Scoring mechanisms enable marketers to identify ready-to-buy prospects, so that teams can allocate appropriate follow up initiatives. Quality data provides the foundation for a successful lead scoring process and for refining that process over time. Perhaps most importantly, lead scoring helps ensure the best leads are followed up on immediately by prioritizing leads according to revenue potential and buyer readiness.

Lead scoring uses common lead quality definitions, such as BANT (Budget, Authority, Need, and Timeline), as well as key qualification data including lead response, activity, and behavior.

By implementing a scoring system, marketers can effectively assess and qualify leads and better prioritize those with higher scores, as they are considered more likely to convert to closed revenue. They can be passed off to sales while other lead scores can be determined according to the timing of activity or inactivity. Unqualified or cold leads can be routed to lead nurturing programs until they become active again.

Marketing Automation Simplified

Marketing automation platforms have automated lead scoring in place so that, for example, if a prospect is actively opening all communications sent by marketing, his or her lead score has the ability to rise. This person scores higher based on behavioral attributes and Digital Body Language. A higher lead score will be passed to the sales team much quicker to enhance the odds of closing the deal.

What is Progressive Profiling?

To understand prospects in a more holistic view, marketers typically leverage firmographic analysis and the market segmentation insights it yields to identify likely buyers. This traditional approach based on attributes like industry type, revenue, employee counts, and geography is still useful, yet it is no longer enough to give B2B marketers a thorough understanding of their target buyers.

Whether a company sources its prospects internally or purchases a marketing list based on this data, it still ends up with too many targets, making it virtually impossible to sort the suspects from the true prospects. Marketing automation enables marketers to summarize this wealth of behavioral data — your prospect’s Digital Body Language — in different ways. For example, marketers can glean an understanding of a contact’s campaign history, program membership, and activity information. Marketing automation provides an at-a-glance, visual summary of prospect activity for salespeople embedded within their CRM system.

By asking for less information up front, marketers can increase conversion rates and accelerate the funnel. However, you will then need a way to evaluate buyer fit if you are not collecting all the data they need up front and progressive profiling allows you to do that.

The Role of Marketing in Sales Enablement

Address the Independent Buying Cycle

While many marketing initiatives are driven by buyer-centric strategies, it’s important to remember that smart Modern Marketing strategies are focused on sales enablement in addition to providing value to prospects and customers. Sales enablement — or sales readiness — is about helping your sales reps deliver the right content to the right person at the right time to cultivate a more active role in the mostly independent buying process.

Today’s buyers are engaging with sales later in the cycle than ever. They are self-educating by employing a variety of independent channels to garner peer feedback, relevant research, and case study examples of how to optimize their business. Prospective buyers are in many ways reinventing the sales cycle. SiriusDecisions estimates that the buyer’s journey is 70% complete by the time they contact a sales person.

This shift — which places buyers in control of the sales cycle — makes sales enablement that much more important for companies. Empowering sales requires a number of different tactical measurements and strategic insight.

Sales teams must be prepared to have strategic, problem solving, value-creating, and differentiated conversations, rather than traditional product, feature, or company-focused pitches. Taking cues from Digital Body Language, it’s become critical for sales professionals to understanding the nature of online selling. This puts a premium on content and creates new requirements for both sales and marketing organizations that must align in a seamless, joint selling effort.

Winning sales reps aren’t simply focused on closing deals. They know the value in providing the benefits of a true consultant, and helping simplify the decision-making process based on a clear understanding of buyer interest, needs, and behavior. When a prospect finally reaches out, sales reps are equipped with every available attribute about the buyer and can then be prepared to deliver value.

 Marketing Automation Simplified

Sales needs to ensure they are providing the necessary tools and content to help buyers make a purchase decision. Marketing automation provides the sales team with a library of tested content for every scenario. Sales reps can choose from marketing crafted emails for various scenarios and buyer stages — which lets them focus on selling rather than customizing email communications — and ensures the messages they are sending are optimized. It also allows them to track how buyers are responding to those messages because they are tracked by the system.

The Role of Business Intelligence

Drive Smart Marketing

Marketing and sales efforts are often only as effective as the data and intelligence feeding them. Because there is such an extensive network of information and details available about prospective buyers, marketers and sales teams must have systems in place to collect and analyze this data, and to act on it efficiently.

Equipped with rich reporting and intelligence about prospective buyers, marketers can refine their engagement strategy and provide content aligned to specific stages of the buying process that helps build trust and rapport with the buyer. Business intelligence helps marketing organizations to:

Business intelligence helps marketing organizations to:

Inform Strategy: Optimized customer profiles enable marketing analysts to make better and faster strategic decisions. A sound segmentation analysis helps marketing analysts understand new market opportunities, identify common attributes, and create marketing strategies that maximize your reach and positioning as a thought leader.

Streamline Sales: Richer profiles feed sales intelligence, such as prospect scoring, to help salespeople identify likely buyers. This provides a better understanding of what products customers are most likely to buy, and their time frame for making purchases. These become easy sales qualifiers, and they also can help sales teams develop product bundles or identify cross-sell and upsell opportunities.

Accountability across the organization has pressured marketers to implement systems for measurement to help demonstrate the impact initiatives have on generating qualified sales leads and revenue. It’s essential to have dashboards in place to understand data elements of each phase of the marketing and sales funnel from multiple systems.

Using insights from your shared marketing dashboards, you can drill down into the details to analyze behavior, actions, and effective tactics. You also can develop custom reports and charts based on your information needs and objectives. Marketing automation provides visibility into key data including:

  • Closed-loop campaign reporting to understand how marketing activities and campaigns are driving pipeline, revenue, and ROI.
  • Campaign engagement reporting to analyze which channels and offers generate the most interest, engagement, and conversion.
  • Website analytics reporting for insight into website demand generation performance, including who is on the site and how they convert.
  • Database health reporting to help diagnose the health of the marketing database, including growth or shrinkage rates, activity rate of various segments, and record completion.

Marketing Automation Simplified

Marketing automation integrates data from social media, email, websites, and sales pipeline from your CRM to close the loop and help you make more informed decisions that drive lead generation and engagement tactics. This also helps prevent the need to constantly re- create frequently used personalized emails throughout the sales process. This ensures that sales reps are using marketing-approved messaging, branding, and content. It’s critical to use metrics across all channels, so you can stay plugged into real-time insights, even on the go.

The Role of Marketing Automation

Eliminate Silos and Engage Your Community

Bringing together the efforts of sales and marketing is an ongoing challenge, and marketing automation offers a platform to garner measurable and visible results to track the success of their campaigns, while improving the quality and flow of leads. Meanwhile sales executives can monitor prospect interest levels and — with higher quality leads from marketing— can close more deals.

Marketing automation technology helps teams refine their strategies by connecting the efforts across both the art and science of marketing. Marketers are streamlining campaign execution with the ability to better target, engage, convert, and analyze business in more meaningful ways, both qualitatively and quantitatively.

Marketing automation functionalities help marketers improve campaign execution, testing, measurement, prospect profiling, and lead nurturing. Marketing automation also provides visibility into critical analytics, so marketers are effectively acquiring new customers, driving revenue performance, and enhancing their most significant strengths to develop strong brands, build creative campaigns, and deliver compelling content.

 

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