Marketing autoMation

the next generation in revenue

Executive Introduction ...............................................................2

Why Marketing Automation Matters ...................................2

What is Marketing Automation? .............................................3

What Marketing Automation Isn’t .........................................5

Elements of a Marketing Automation System....................6

Marketing Automation In Motion...........................................8

The Revenue Revolution..........................................................10

Conclusion ................................................................................... 12

About the Author:William RobertsVP, Marketing Automation Services845.201.5328william.roberts@reachmarketing.com

William Roberts is VP of Marketing Automation Services for Reach Marketing. He’s an experienced executive with a proven track record of delivering profitable marketing automation, lead acquisition, demand generation and analytical solutions to a wide range of SMB and enterprise level organizations.

William is qualified as a Marketo Certified Expert.

Reach Marketing2 Blue Hill Plaza ConcoursePearl River, NY 10965www.reachmarketing.com

© Reach Marketing LLC 2015 All Rights Reserved.

Marketing AutomationList Brokerage List Management Email Acquisition and Retention Database Management Data Hygiene Lead Generation Social Media SEO Data Append Customer Profiling

Executive Introduction

Marketing automation has become mission-critical technology for producing highly qualified sales leads, accelerating growth, protecting brand identity and developing an industry-dominating competitive advantage. With automation, you can customize your message for maximum impact at every step of the buyer’s journey. Your marketing automation system scores prospects based on their behavior, not just their demographic and firmographic data, resulting in better qualified leads and improved coordination between sales and marketing. Because it is scalable, predictable and reproducible, automation offers companies an enormous competitive advantage for increased revenue. In the hands of marketing specialists trained to use it, marketing automation is both incredibly powerful and simple to implement.

Why Marketing Automation Matters

■ Automation keeps even complex multi-channel marketing campaigns organized

■ Lead generation and ranking are a challenge for incompletely automated software

■ Measuring ROI is critical to increasing revenue ■ Marketing efforts can focus on creative lead nurturing and content creation

with automated campaign management ■ Marketing automation has an impact on more than just marketing, affecting

everything from brand perception and customer service to shortened sales cycles and larger overall revenue.

Turning prospect leads into customers is the ultimate goal of marketers, but assembling the tools to make that transformation happen is a challenge. Automation puts every aspect of the marketing process under one roof instead of siloing it. Every step of the prospect-to-customer journey can now be streamlined and made more responsive to your prospects. Your brand and message become signposts your prospects use to make the trip from interested lead to committed customer.

Keeping Pace with a Complex Market

With every advance in technology, businesses have more competition for their prospects’ attention. The average B2B company uses a dozen channels to increase brand awareness and connect with its audience, including email, newsletters, on-site blogs, print media, banners, SEO, SEM, content marketing and multiple social media sites. That figure is only an average, and many businesses – often those that are the most effective at reaching their marketing goals – work with far more channels. It’s no longer time- or cost-efficient to manage these multiple channels by hand; some amount of automation is needed to keep messages integrated and cohesive across a wide range of platforms.

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Transforming Conventional Marketing into Revenue MarketingToo often, marketing gets lost in the details. It becomes a task-focused enterprise that pays more attention to individual activities than to the ultimate purpose of those activities – building revenue. Revenue marketing links creative strategies with automation designed to accelerate sales opportunities through the pipeline, moving leads through your sales funnel quickly and efficiently. At every step of this buyer journey, marketing automation keeps prospects connected while protecting and reinforcing your brand, giving you a crucial edge when it’s time to make key buying decisions.

Lead generation is essential to growth, yet most business owners feel they could improve on their current lead generation strategies. With automation, it’s possible to work smarter and not just harder when generating and nurturing leads. By prioritizing your most valuable leads and nurturing those that aren’t yet sales-ready using automation, a lead-scoring system lets companies invest their marketing effort where it matters most. An efficient ranking system acts as a force multiplier for marketing spend because it puts that effort in the right places.

Putting Content FirstOne of the greatest growth areas for B2B and B2C companies is content marketing, which is why 75 percent of B2B CEOs and owners polled plan to invest more in content over the next two years. With easy access to Google and review sites, many of your leads essentially market to themselves. Leads now do half the work for your marketing team by doing their own research. Without sufficient content to inform their decisions, though, these leads go elsewhere to find what they need. Your content strategy must provide them with a steady stream of useful, actionable information – not just ads.

These inbound leads rely heavily on content marketing, but conventional analytics are not well equipped to measure ROI on content-based revenue marketing. Older tools can give feedback about search terms or bounce rates, but they can’t track more sophisticated metrics such as the revenue contributions of each channel, the most effective landing page design or lead-scoring priorities that point the way to your future top customers.

What Is Marketing Automation?

■ Quantifying results to enhance scalability, predictability and reproducibility links the art of traditional marketing with the science of revenue marketing.

■ Velocity is the fourth aspect of marketing automation and the one that has the greatest impact on revenue as it’s derived from the system’s other three elements.

■ Marketing automation answers questions about your leads’ demographic, firmographic and behavioral characteristics that other marketing software tools cannot.

Marketing software is a burgeoning growth industry as companies jockey for position in an

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increasingly crowded marketplace, but not all software systems are created equal. Investing in the right marketing tools now could mean the difference between leading an industry and becoming just another follower. Finding the right marketing strategy is a critical decision, and knowing more about your best options is essential to making it. Marketing automation presents a way to establish and fortify your brand identity, unify your message across all content channels and coordinate campaigns.

To many sales departments, marketing is just a prelude, a way to establish sales-readiness and qualify leads. Marketing traditionally lacks the measurable sales goals and targets that any seller considers essential for monitoring success. Automation turns the art of marketing into a science and gives it the steady, quantifiable metrics that make sales easier to manage. It offers three advantages that siloed marketing software lacks: scalability, predictability and reproducibility.

ScalableWhether working with an audience size of a few thousand leads or a few million, marketing automation software offers full scalability. The same flow moves through your marketing funnel regardless of its volume, ensuring that the system grows with the company using it. For revenue marketing, scalability is a must. A smaller firm that outgrows its marketing strategy often loses what makes it successful, but with an integrated and scalable automated system, you continue that initial success into the future.

PredictableFrom weather to stock market trends, some aspects of life are a challenge to predict with precision. Marketing automation allows exponentially greater predictability of everything from lead acquisition and lead nurturing to customer retention. Lead ranking and management tools let marketing automation software accurately predict how many leads will flow into each part of your sales pipeline and when these leads reach a new level of sales-readiness. By knowing how many leads your marketing team must generate and nurture to reach a given revenue target, you have the knowledge you need to prepare for future growth.

ReproducibleA single success might as well be luck. With the reproducibility of marketing automation, you have sustainable growth. The software works not just with a single campaign but with every successive campaign to form a comprehensive marketing strategy designed to boost revenue while serving your leads and customers what they need to make key buying decisions. Without the reproducibility of automation, you get inconsistent results. Until you can pinpoint

why a campaign was a success or why it fell short, you can neither excel in future campaigns nor protect yourself from costly failures.

Scalability, predictability and reproducibility contribute to a crucial fourth aspect of marketing automation: velocity. The speed at which your prospects move through your marketing funnel dictates how many sales you make, how much time your sales team invests in leads and how you manage increases in lead volume. All three elements of the SPR formula affect velocity, and all three are equally important aspects of a complete system.

What Marketing Automation Isn’t

■ What makes content relevant is its responsiveness to your prospects’ behaviors – what they click, view and download tells you what they need to make a buying decision.

■ An integrated automation system is greater than the sum of its parts. ■ Automation is not just for large companies and has real value for small to

mid-sized firms. ■ Marketing automation takes care of routine processes and time-consuming

details, freeing your creative team to do what they do best: create.

To get a better handle on what marketing automation software is, it’s useful to look at what it isn’t. Revenue marketing can only happen when every aspect of your marketing software provides the scalability, predictability and reproducibility of automation, so to transform your marketing from expense to asset and maximize revenue, your marketing tools must give you more.

More Than Email MarketingMany aspects of email are automated, but that doesn’t make marketing automation another term for email marketing. For automated mailings and retargeting email campaigns, a fully integrated and automated system can pay significant dividends over a system that only manages email. Conventional email marketing has leaned toward impersonal “spray-and-pray” techniques in the past, leading readers and Internet service providers to fight back with tighter regulations and anti-spam software. Marketing automation is a push in the other direction – away from email spam and toward more focused, finely segmented audiences who are receptive to the messages they receive.

While email is far from the only task marketing automation can handle, it remains one of the most important. Email marketing offers outstanding efficiency, reach and ROI in a highly measurable format. It’s a natural fit for automation and provides a wealth of data that informs other key marketing decisions from direct mail to telemarketing. Automation ensures disparate audiences get the right mail at the right time, maximizing open rates and responses.

Automated – But Not Auto-PilotAlthough marketing automation streamlines marketing flow and provides deeper, more

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relevant analytics, it is anything but mechanical. With automated systems, companies are better able to understand what their audiences want and deliver it to them. By automating triggered email blasts, creating personal URLs (PURLs) for landing pages and coordinating content with SEO/SEM, your marketing team is able to focus on creating outstanding content and enhancing your brand.

Although its analytics and mailing triggers can be set-and-forget events, marketing automation doesn’t replace the need for creativity in your content; on the contrary, it’s content-rich. With automation, your marketing team has time to develop that customized content. PURLs and JavaScript give every returning visitor a tailor-made landing page uniquely designed to meet that customer’s needs. Email, newsletters and other content offers are also customized to address every marketing segment with highly relevant, targeted information.

Not Just for Big FirmsThe first true marketing automation tools belonged solely to the big names. Their extensive IT departments worked on building custom systems for their organizations, but smaller businesses had trouble justifying the expense of such software even when they had the IT personnel to research and develop it. The next generation of marketing automation software is no longer the province of those few companies. Small and mid-sized businesses can now gain access to software-as-a-service (SaaS) marketing automation that puts these powerful tools within the reach of a far broader range of B2B and B2C businesses.

Elements of a Marketing Automation System

■ Automated marketing software must provide scalable, predictable and reproducible results to maintain your prospects’ velocity as they go through the buyer’s journey.

■ Each part of the system enhances the effectiveness of its other elements. ■ Marketing automation uses a knowledge base, a control center and

a sophisticated analytics dashboard to enhance current and future campaigns.

One of the significant benefits of marketing automation, particularly for small to mid-sized firms, is flexibility. Companies can choose which aspects of the software they want to implement, redesign the sales and marketing pipeline to optimize flow and quantify the real value of leads throughout the marketing process.

CRM and Marketing DatabaseEvery business needs a customer relationship management system, and a complete marketing automation strategy incorporates these records as well. The marketing database serves as the system’s memory, recording everything about your customers and prospects, including their demographic and firmographic data. With this information, your marketing automation software can develop the well-segmented audiences that enhance the relevance of your marketing message and let you customize your content.

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Data hygiene and enhancement takes place here to ensure all your customer records are clean and current. Because customers can’t respond to messages they never receive, high deliverability is an important component of any targeted marketing campaign, and a well-organized automated marketing database makes it happen.

Relationship Marketing and Customer Engagement EngineIf the marketing database is your system’s memory, then this engine is its nervous system, sending and receiving commands from every part of your integrated marketing campaign while coordinating this information across multiple channels. It’s where the potential energy of your leads’ information becomes kinetic energy in the form of email marketing, SEO, SEM, social media, banner advertising, content marketing, telemarketing, retargeting efforts and more. With state-of-the-art automation, your marketing team can get real-time feedback on lead management and progress through the sales funnel.

Behavioral elements are many times more predictive than demographics, but in the initial stages of lead generation and lead nurturing, demographic and firmographic data set your baseline. Job function, industry, company size and other relatively static data form the foundation of your prospects’ profiles, but as your marketing automation tools collect behavioral data that reveals how people interact with your brand, you develop a far more sensitive and predictive way to differentiate leads.

Typically, a marketing team lines up the usual suspects when finding target audiences for a campaign. Looking to the usual prospect base by demographics and firmographics alone causes two problems. First, this data provides a snapshot, not a record of actions over time as prospects move through the marketing pipeline. For another, the people you consider your most promising demographic and firmographic leads are just as interesting to your competitors. Firms that look only at this data will find themselves reaching for an increasingly narrow share of a crowded market.

If firmographic and demographic data are a snapshot, then behavioral data is a movie starring your leads. Still images contain plenty of valuable information, but they don’t create a narrative the way film can. Behaviors tell you how close a lead is to making a buying decision. Demographics still matter, but because they’re less powerfully predictive than activity, automated marketing systems lend lead behaviors greater weight.

AnalyticsBy calibrating, measuring and optimizing every aspect of each campaign, your marketing team builds a unified revenue marketing strategy that transcends activity-focused marketing. Think of the system’s analytics database as its reasoning faculties, delivering feedback about what works and what needs to change. Because analytics derived from full marketing automation draw from a much deeper pool of knowledge, they provide a more nuanced view of your leads, your sales pipeline and your overall marketing strategy.

Programmers have a saying: “Garbage in, garbage out.” In other words, even a sophisticated program can only interpret results based on the original input it receives. Each element of an

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automated marketing system works in concert and is fully integrated with its counterparts, ensuring more accurate data from the outset. The records in the system’s marketing database allow more refined audience segmentation for delivery through the marketing engine, which in turn provides more complete data for future analysis.

Marketing Automation in Motion

■ Automation governs the motion of leads through your sales pipeline and reduces friction in the qualification process.

■ Flows let you define every step of the buyer’s journey and optimize it for results.

■ The transition from marketing to sales maximizes ROI for each lead and prevents wasted energy from both departments.

Motion is integral to the concept of the sales funnel. Leads enter at one end and progress to an increasing state of sales-readiness until they become buyers. Marketing automation streamlines that process, facilitating your prospects’ transformation from new leads to established customers.

The Buying JourneyBefore making that buying decision, each customer first had to become familiar with you, measure your offer against their budget and needs, and move through your sales department’s qualifications. At any stage during this journey, many otherwise promising leads drop out of the process. Marketing automation ranks these leads to let your marketing team and sales personnel conserve and convert them.

Your sales department is probably the costliest part of your organization, yet too often, marketing fails to qualify leads properly for sales. Divisions between sales and marketing mean the marketing department is essentially tossing leads blindly over a wall and hoping sales personnel are there to catch them. Automation takes down that wall, integrating sales and marketing to ensure that leads are nurtured carefully.

To maximize the value of your sales team’s time and minimize wasted effort, automation defines and segments leads according to where they are in the marketing and sales pipeline. These terms outline separate stages as leads traverse your sales funnel; they do not overlap, which is critical to sending customized messages appropriate to each stage.

Lead Stages ` CRM – New lead from the CRM system. This prospect has just begun the trip. ` MCL – Marketing-captured lead: a lead who entered the pipeline other than

through the CRM.

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` MEL – Marketing-engaged lead: this lead has shared an email address and has either downloaded a PDF or visited the website recently. A lead at this point is ready to move to a new phase of marketing but is not yet sales-ready. ` MQL – Marketing-qualified lead: At this point, the lead has shared an email

address and has a lead score of greater than 50 in the lead-ranking system. By the end of this stage, the lead is ready to hand to the sales department. ` SAL – Sales-accepted lead: This lead has made contact with the sales team but is

not yet converted. At this critical point, sales personnel have not yet converted the lead and must establish the lead’s budget, authority to buy, need and timeline, or BANT. ` SQL – Sales-qualified lead:

The seller has validated the lead’s BANT qualifications and is close to making the sale. ` CST – Customer. This is

the end-point of your sales funnel but critically, it is not the end of your marketing process. Customers move to new stages in the marketing automation system where they can provide referrals, set up service agreements, upgrade, participate in loyalty programs and more.

Rhythm and FlowEvery activity your marketing team takes incurs a cost and produces revenue. Quantifying those costs and revenues using traditional marketing methods is impossible, but marketing automation is able to assign values and assess successes. To do this, the system establishes and optimizes flows that orchestrate leads’ progress through the system.

Flows are essentially sophisticated flow-charts. While conventional marketing tactics focus on the actions you take, automation tracks the action your leads take. When a lead takes an action or meets defined sorting criteria, that qualified lead receives specific content tailored to his or her needs. Using state-of-the-art tracking cookies, marketing automation software can build a picture of your leads even before you have their specific data.

Marketing automation lets you control the flow of leads from one end of your marketing pipeline to the other. Triggered actions and reactions keep the drumbeat of your campaigns strong and measured, ensuring that the right lead gets the right message at the right time. Even the most carefully crafted message won’t have the desired effect if it’s ill-timed. Automated systems handle timing for you, delivering introductory messages to new leads

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CSTSQLSALMQLMELMCLCRM

New lead from CRM

Marketing Captured Lead

Marketing Engaged Lead

Marketing Qualified Lead

Sales Accepted Lead

Sales Qualified Lead

Customer

Sales FunnelLead Stages

and supplying ample information to those in the middle of your sales funnel. As leads reach sales-readiness, they see content that confirms their decision to buy. The SPR strategy of marketing automation keeps leads moving at peak velocity and eliminates wasted effort.

AttributionWith better attribution, you can track your leads’ movements even before you know who they are. Anonymous browser cookies store no personal information about visitors but provide a wealth of data about them. If that anonymous visitor later provides an email address, marketing automation software can retroactively link the data from an anonymous browser cookie with that email to provide a more detailed picture of even a newly engaged lead.

Thorough attribution also creates a clearer view of leads’ actual value over time. First-touch attribution, the initial contact, may not always generate revenue directly. Multi-touch attribution follows each lead through a process that isn’t always linear. For example, a visitor at a trade show who leaves an email address might not respond to an initial phone call but may visit the website and start the qualification process there. Only an automated system that fully integrates all marketing data can spot that lead and correctly attribute his or her buying decisions to specific marketing channels and messages.

The Revenue Revolution

■ Revenue marketing requires precise, accurate data every step of the way. ■ Returns on marketing investments increase dramatically when marketing

teams serve customized, relevant content. ■ Multi-channel, multi-touch marketing strategies are challenging or

impossible to coordinate without the power of automation.

To see how automation empowers revenue marketing, consider a business that has a limited budget for marketing its latest webinar. With $10,000 to spend, every dollar counts; delivering the maximum ROI is critical to this firm’s future. Data collected from CRM and marketing-captured leads via anonymous tracking cookies gives the marketing team cues to their audience’s main interests. Those cookies on the company’s website, SEO content and social media channels can later be tied to specific email addresses once leads share their information, so each of the 50,000 marketing-engaged leads in the system get customized, relevant email. The system’s automated data hygiene and enhancement features ensure deliverability, so each tailored message finds the right recipient.

Customizing email produces a significant increase in open rates, so instead of the 3 percent open rate the marketing department experienced before automation, a full 6 percent of recipients open their email. These 3,000 email recipients find customized content once they open their mail, and 1,000 of them find those customized calls to action interesting enough to click through to a landing page – or more accurately, to one of a series of customized landing

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pages the marketing automation system has served to meet that qualified lead’s needs via Real-Time Personalization.

Of the thousand leads who clicked through, many evolve into marketing-qualified leads by exploring the firm’s website, following the company on social media or using a search engine to find more information about the business, all of which marketing automation software can track. Meanwhile, many of their actions trigger additional email communication and build that lead ranking score higher. Over the next few weeks, 20 percent of the original marketing-engaged leads sign up for the webinar and become marketing-qualified leads. Out of those 200 webinar sign-ups, 100 become attendees and move on to become sales-accepted and sales-qualified leads.

If the initial outlay for the webinar campaign was $10,000 and resulted in 100 leads, then the company’s real cost per sales-qualified lead is $100. If the average customer’s transaction is $5,000, and if a group of sales-qualified leads has a 30 percent conversion rate, this marketing campaign was a huge success. Quantifying that success every step of the way with marketing automation ensures a better ROI on future campaigns as well by building a more complete data picture and pointing out the most effective flow paths through the sales pipeline.

In this example, scalability, predictability and reproducibility all contribute to an effective campaign in the short term and a successful revenue marketing strategy in the long term:

•Scalable: The initial mailing was to 50,000 leads, but as the company grows, the software can scale to an unlimited number of leads and return the same 6 percent open rate. Automated marketing allows businesses to extrapolate and interpolate expected revenue anywhere along a sliding scale. For sales departments defining their quotas or finance departments developing next year’s budget, scalability is key.

•Predictable: By being able to predict how many leads would open, click through, sign up, attend and eventually convert, the automated system informed the marketing team’s decisions about the number of initial emails sent and any subsequent contact with leads.

•Reproducible: Controlling and optimizing the pace at which leads are nurtured and moved through the sales funnel for one campaign is important; being able to perform the same magic again and again is the foundation for lasting success.

This example is far smaller and simpler than an actual campaign that might include SEO, direct mail, telemarketing, banner ads, radio and print. In an actual campaign, options are more varied and nuanced, addressing a far wider range of possibilities and contingencies. Automation can also develop multivariate testing to refine your marketing message, coordinate across multiple channels and analyze the results efficiently.

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Conclusion: Marketing Automation is Essential to Modern Integrated Marketing Campaigns

With the increasing complexity of marketing channels, the power of customization to maximize ROI, and the need to track volumes of data, automation is essential to long-term viability. A complete marketing automation system uses behavioral data as well as demographics and firmographics to create an intelligent framework of leads, campaigns and marketing strategies. With automation, you further the scalable, predictable and reproducible science of revenue marketing. The fourth element, velocity, ensures that you deliver the right message to the right person at the right time to speed your prospects’ transition from new lead to knowledgeable customer. Marketing automation transforms static images of your customers’ data into dynamic analyses of their behavior. Although it is highly sophisticated, marketing automation still needs expertise to drive it. Contact Reach Marketing for a full suite of state-of-the-art marketing automation tools along with the knowledge and experience to use them.

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