Marketing Automation
February 21 2018
Marketing Automation is more than lead generation
At Leadfront, we have had the privilege of working with a wide range of organizations, operating in a variety of industries, and our experience is that the overall trend in Marketing Automation has been to focus solely on lead generation. As it stands today, it is not uncommon for companies to underestimate the benefits of implementing Marketing Automation in other processes. Instead, they only use the system to identify more website visitors to send information to via email, and maximize the delivery of leads to their sales departments. The risk of focusing on quantity in lead generation is that it can lead to lower quality and increased administration time. Marketing Automation, in contrast to the above, should lead to the delivery of high-quality, relevant, and sales-ready leads.
Is lead generation the answer?
Are you experiencing an increased number of leads, but not always higher sales conversions? The fault often lies in trying to process as many leads as possible, which can result in spending far too much time and resources on accounts that ultimately do not convert. This is also one of the symptoms of a disconnected the marketing and sales department, where instead of collaborating and working with the customer together, they work in silos with their own goals and metrics.
Succeed with the integration of your outbound and inbound activities
We are advocates of creating a good foundation for the implementation of a Marketing Automation system in the form of a solid strategy focusing on the ultimate goal > converting prospects to customers. To facilitate and increase sales conversion, you should be able to prioritize the leads that are most relevant and ready to buy. Of course, it is still important to have a healthy inflow of leads, but the real strength of the Marketing Automation system lies in its ability to integrate inbound (marketing) and outbound (sales) activities in a single platform.In other words, Marketing Automation gives us the technical capabilities needed to tailor outbound messages and content such as sales meetings or phone calls, based on insights from inbound activities such as what the user is doing on the website. This way, you can help your most important potential customers move forward in their buying process, by staying relevant throughout the journey with the right information at the right time.
Fewer leads - Higher conversion
How do you prioritize your most important leads and personalize and streamline your communication with them? A well-established strategy based on concentrating resources on your most important and potentially profitable customers is ABM > AccountBased Marketing. Before the era of automation, it was a time- and resource-consuming strategy. Because the data needed to define your most important accounts tends to be managed by different departments and scattered across different systems and data collection is all too often done manually. Collected data then needs to be compiled, which is also done manually in many cases, in order to be able to tailor their dialogue with specific accounts and contacts based on these insights. The difference is that today, with the help of a Marketing Automation platform, we can exercise an ABM strategy on a much larger scale as it enables and facilitates the collection and harmonization of data from all channels:
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Identify your target accounts - use the collected data to distinguish which accounts will best benefit your business
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Find out how your buyer persona actually looks and behaves based on user data from different channels.
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Create the right content - tailor your message based on data-based customer insights
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Ensure consistent messaging - succeed with a multichannel strategy by maintaining consistent communication across all channels.
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Measure and optimize - a shared platform for both sales and marketing paves the way for common measurement criteria through cross-departmental goals and KPIs.
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