Lead generation is an integral part of all B2B marketing teams and they are facing increasing pressure to address the complexity and fragmentation of marketing efforts.
Conventional marketing techniques are rapidly becoming ineffective. Marketing teams are constantly under pressure to deliver more qualified leads. Increasing marketing complexity, mandate to do more with less and converging pressures is pushing marketers to increasingly look for the technologies and tools to address these challenges and automate marketing operations. But most often organizations lack standardized marketing processes resulting in mis-alignments and inconsistencies. Coupled with frequent change of people in marketing departments companies routinely lose key lessons learnt and corporate memory. All this makes adoption of Marketing Automatons an imperative for marketing departments.
B2B marketing teams are primarily involved in lead generation & lead generation can be broken down into two different ways.
- Inbound Marketing
- Outbound Marketing
Outbound marketing includes lead generation from Exhibitions and Trade Shows, Seminars, Direct Mailers, E- mailers, Paid Search, Television advertising, Print Advertising, Outdoor Advertising & Online Advertising etc. Inbound marketing is about helping your customer to find you out. This process involves setting up your online presence in a manner that your prospects and customers can easily search you using natural search methods like Google or directory search. The tools used are Search Engine Optimization, Blogs, Micro sites, Social Networks, Online Directory, Print Directories listings etc.
What is Marketing Automation?
Marketing Automation is a program which allows organization to automate the delivery of content based on lead behavior such as visiting the website, opening an email, and other attributes like segmentation, demographics, budget, Title, stage of prospect etc.
Its a campaign management program to manage multiple marketing campaigns with precision targeting and relevance. Its about treating every prospect in a customized manner and delivering information to your prospects as and when he demands it. Its a program to analyze your prospects, campaigns outcomes and learn from it to reshape strategy and increase marketing efficiencies.
Marketing Automation Program enables marketers to automate the process of handing off lead to Sales team once they have met a mutually predefined criteria or lead score.
Marketing automation is a tool to bridge the widening gap between sales and marketing and bring them closer and align them to drive results on both sides. Marketing Automation Solution help to build transparency between both the teams which leads to informed choices by sales people on the ground.
Why Marketing Automation is required?
For sales person struggling to hit sales targets time is money. Modern buying behavior is making their job difficult. Taking appointment is becoming harder and it takes more touches to convert suspects to prospects. Therefore nothing is more frustrating to a sales person than having marketing deliver immature leads that such up their valuable time which could have been spent pursuing stronger leads. This alone makes a compelling case of adopting lead nurturing practices which is the core function of a Marketing Automation Program.
Another advantage that comes with Marketing Automation Solution is when sales people call their prospect acting on these weak sales leads with no demographics or firmographics in it. They can either go blindly of the other side asking uncomfortable questions to the prospects like size of the company, No of employees or either completely skip this firmographics clarity etc. The hesitation of early stage buyers to give complete and accurate information is natural. They are more interested in solving their problem rather than answering revealing questions and get engaged there. Marketing Automation helps greatly in such a situation and sales person can have an informed conversation with the prospect which makes prospects more willing to work with them.
Think of the same situation when sales people know that
- What communication was sent to this prospect?
- How frequently were they sent?
- What was the prospects response?
- Which search term brought this prospect to our website?
- Which pages on our site this prospect was viewing on the site?
Most sales people do not have access to this kind of information. Hence they are completely ignorant on how marketing has acquired this lead which makes the sales person groping in the dark while conversing with the prospect. The problem has been further deepened because of shortening web forms. In order to acquire more no of leads by marketing the lead capturing forms on the online and in offline world is getting shorter and shorter. Not only this more than 50% of the leads generated by marketing departments are coming through web and even rest are touching websites to learn about your company. In future these phenomena will increase towards more and more web leads.
Improving Marketing Efficiency is another big reason why marketing automation is required. To do more with same resources requires consolidated, streamlined efforts. Marketing Automation Solution help to produce more campaigns and thus producing more leads.
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