Marketing Automation Software Best Practices, Strategy and Results

Maximizing the Business Benefits of Marketing Automation Software

Marketing Automation Software benefits are immense and range from?sales efficiency to lower promotion costs. These business benefits can be maximized by following best practices and integrating all software features into your marketing strategies. This article outlines these best practices to help you reach your lead generation and sales goals.

Best Practice 1: Establish your Lead Management Process before Automating

Before moving over to Marketing?Automation Software,?there are two main points to remember:

1. You can?t automate a process that doesn?t exist.
2. Marketing automation does not do marketing and sales for you, it allows you to scale and optimize your efforts.

It’s important to work with your marketing and sales teams to solidly map out your lead management workflow from start to finish. Lay out each customer touchpoint on your website and on third party platforms to make sure there is a call-to-action and follow-up process for each.?Doing your homework will allow you to optimize your marketing automation.

Best Practice 2: Understand your Buyer – From Buyer Persona to Buying Cycle

To deliver the most effective, timely content you need to understand the different types of customers and where they are at in their cycle.? Visualize an actual prospect?and try to paint a complete picture of their needs, goals, and how your product can assist them.

In fact, work with your sales and product teams to understand their interactions with leads and current customers in the market place ? from industry conferences to every day users.? As you better understand how your products are bought, you can optimize the content and marketing that you deliver.

Best Practice 3: Choose the Right Marketing Automation Software

To help you choose the right Marketing Automation Software, work through the following questions.

• How big is your organization?
• What?s your budget and resources?
• What aspect of the funnel are you trying to improve?
• How diverse are your marketing and sales tools?

Focusing on the correct answers to these questions will allow you to choose the right software tailored for your organization.? Not only do you need to map out your current processes before automation, you need?to?match the Marketing Automation Software with your organization.

To further help you with this step, Download The Free EBook “A Guide to Choosing Marketing Automation Software.”

Best Practice 4:?Focus on Lead Nurturing

Face it ? many leads that you may gather?are not ready for your sales team.? Whether leads are too early in the buying process, they’re merely exploring different vendors, or they’re learning about a new product themselves, it?s important to nurture these leads over time to increase the probability of converting them to customers.

Make sure your communications are personal (avoid cold, generic emails), follow-up after the lead takes any type of action, and be sure to revisit old and cold leads to maximize your likelihood of success.

Best Practice 5: Pay Attention to Lead Scoring

Assess your prospects by scoring their individual activities, aggregating or increasing scoring of multiple prospects from the same company, assess your scoring over the spectrum of your products, and integrate data on cold prospects into your overall scoring mix.

Focusing on a comprehensive scoring methodology will allow you to achieve sales goals, close more qualified marketing leads, improve lead generation, and optimize your sales team?s operations.

Choosing the right Marketing Automation Software for your company will take your Inbound Marketing Strategies to the highest levels of efficiency.

Download “The?Guide to Choosing Marketing Automation Software” today:

Marketing Matters Inbound?is an inbound marketing firm specializing in online conversions, content?strategy, call-to-action mapping and traditional media placement. Our experience in?B2B digital?marketing?and traditional media allows us to deliver results through a strategic media mix. We believe in?aligning and merging marketing and sales/operations for optimal return on your marketing investment.