By Adam Blitzer, Vice President of B2B Marketing Automation, ExactTarget
I’ve seen marketing automation come a long way in the last few years. A rapid shift in marketers’ desire to show both brand impact and business results have fueled a transformation. With more marketers shifting to a revenue-oriented marketing model, this will be the year that even more companies get started with marketing automation.
By Adam Blitzer, Vice President of B2B Marketing Automation, ExactTarget
I’ve seen marketing automation come a long way in the last few years. A rapid shift in marketers’ desire to show both brand impact and business results have fueled a transformation. With more marketers shifting to a revenue-oriented marketing model, this will be the year that even more companies get started with marketing automation.
Despite consistent leaps forward in feature sets and ease of use, automation platforms are complex solutions. I often see companies expecting automation to be a silver bullet for their marketing woes, but an important – and often overlooked – requirement of a successful marketing automation implementation is planning.
Here are five simple tips to consider as you implement marketing automation.
1. Align Your Sales And Marketing
At its core, marketing automation is designed to make marketing and sales departments a seamless, cohesive engine for creating leads and closing deals. However, automation cannot do its job if your company is designed to keep sales and marketing at odds. Increase transparency across departments by defining key terms and creating shared success metrics. This will keep both departments working toward the same goals. Everyone should know what defines a successful campaign.
2. Pick A Trailblazer
Sales adoption is key to the success of a marketing automation roll out. Pick a high-performing sales rep who is also open to new ideas, and make sure he or she understands marketing automation from a sales perspective. Then let this sales rep be an evangelist for the platform and explain its value to the rest of their team, spreading the message about how it can save sales reps time, identify qualified leads, and allow for more targeted follow-up.
3. Define A Process
The true power of marketing automation comes from putting a science and process behind the sales funnel. Before implementing automation, it is important to define roles and responsibilities for stages of the sales cycle. How are you assigning leads to your sales team? Who will create and manage drip campaigns? These are important questions to answer before implementation so you can hit the ground running.
4. Go Beyond The Defaults
Most marketing automation platforms will have an out-of-the-box setup for major functions like lead scoring, grading, and sales alerts. While these features will be dramatic improvements over a traditional sales process, customizing these defaults will push your effectiveness even further.
Purchase intent is indicated differently in every industry and your system should be tailored to fit your needs. Creating custom rules for your prospects will also allow you to better target your marketing and create dynamic content tailored to your audiences.
5. Focus On The Content
If marketing automation is the engine powering modern sales and marketing departments, then content is the fuel. One of the biggest challenges many marketers face in making automation work is finding or creating relevant content for landing pages, drip campaigns, and more across a long sales cycle.
The good news is that content can often be easily repurposed from your existing assets. Think about how to make content multipurpose – one white paper can become a whole series of blog posts, or information from a webinar can be reused in a white paper.
You may not be able to wave a magic wand and change your marketing process overnight, but by following the tips above, marketing automation can help transform your marketing programs and reframe the role of the marketer from a resource-draining cost center to a revenue-driving superstar.
Adam Blitzer is Vice President of B2B Marketing Automation for ExactTarget, a global provider of cross-channel digital marketing solutions.
