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Mar­ket­ing automa­tion is a pow­er­ful weapon in the mod­ern marketer’s armoury. It offers the abil­ity to tai­lor your approach far more accu­rately than ever before. It can deliver mod­els for suc­cess that can be repli­cated and applied to new and exist­ing cus­tomers. And it can make you more respon­sive to cus­tomer needs.

But how can you get more from your mar­ket­ing automa­tion efforts?

Here are five areas to take a look at:

1. Lead nur­tur­ing – go beyond the form

Unsur­pris­ingly per­haps, many involved with demand gen­er­a­tion and lead nur­tur­ing have their eyes firmly fixed on form sub­mis­sions. But it doesn’t end there. Also look for ways of nur­tur­ing the com­pany and brand as a whole. How about qual­i­fy­ing their inter­est and build­ing a pro­file of their com­pany and the key decision-makers? You know who needs to be involved in buy­ing your prod­uct, so try to reach them.

Don’t for­get that there is almost always more than one deci­sion maker in any tech­nol­ogy sale. Mul­ti­ple nur­tur­ing is far more effec­tive than sim­ply focus­ing on an indi­vid­ual, espe­cially if the per­son sub­mit­ting the form isn’t one of the deci­sion mak­ing team.

2. Turn con­tent into conversations

Use your nur­tur­ing efforts to cre­ate con­ver­sa­tions rather than just push­ing con­tent out. Generic, sequen­tial mes­sages are a thing of the past – do some qual­i­fi­ca­tion first.

The aim of lead nur­tur­ing is to encour­age some form of engage­ment with prospec­tive buy­ers, so make it inter­ac­tive – don’t just send out another white paper down­load three days after a click-through. Analyse your data, under­stand your buy­ers’ cri­te­ria and help them eval­u­ate the ben­e­fits by pro­vid­ing con­tent that is rel­e­vant to where they are in the buy­ing cycle.

The Elo­qua Con­tent Grid v2 from JESS3

Remem­ber – con­text is just as impor­tant, if not more so, than your con­tent. How and where you deploy it will have a sig­nif­i­cant effect on your suc­cess. Take a look at the con­tent grid above for some inspiration.

3. Refine your lead scoring

Taken a close look at your lead scor­ing recently? Many of your poten­tial leads are prob­a­bly still wait­ing to hit the magic-lead-score-number when they finally get passed to sales. If so, here are a few pointers:

• Look at the speed of scor­ing and fre­quency of inter­ac­tion, iden­tify ideal data com­plete­ness lev­els and define key con­tent areas on your web­site – then use these as accel­er­a­tors in your lead scor­ing programmes
• Audit your con­tent and map the val­ues to your buy­ing cycle, align this with your lead scor­ing pro­grammes and then decide on the best nur­ture track
• Set up a method of iden­ti­fy­ing stuck engage­ments and a pro­gramme to reawaken them
• Use trig­gers and alerts to get sales involved ear­lier (you’ll find the con­ver­sa­tions move faster). Bet­ter yet, ask sales to help struc­ture your nur­tur­ing con­tent based on the con­ver­sa­tions they are already having

4. Social media, mobile and email

Not con­cerned by mobile? You should be. All the cur­rent research is show­ing that an ever-increasing num­ber of B2B buy­ers are now view­ing con­tent pri­mar­ily on mobile devices.

You don’t have to con­quer the mobile world all at once. Start small, begin by focus­ing on basics such as email and mea­sure the results – you might just be sur­prised. The smart­phone has changed engage­ment, even in B2B. Don’t believe me?

Read our insights arti­cle on B2B mobile social media or watch our recent webi­nar.

B2B Mobile Social Media Insight Paper

5. Make data work harder

Data is key to any mar­ket­ing automa­tion activ­ity. But all too often it is either under-used or poorly exploited. Too many com­pa­nies focus too much on acquir­ing new data when they already have prof­itable oppor­tu­ni­ties star­ing them in the face.

Look at your exist­ing cus­tomer base. Are they cur­rently active or grad­u­ally becom­ing inac­tive? If they’re inac­tive, you could look at the following:

• Seg­ment it. Find the areas where you have sat­u­rated your mar­ket and are los­ing engage­ment as a result
• Iden­tify where your offer is strong but you have few cus­tomers and design approaches just for them
• Look at trickle-down – if you have one or two top com­pa­nies in a sec­tor already on board, use them in your mar­ket­ing to cap­ture the com­pa­nies in the same sec­tor who look up to them and are likely to be impressed by your work
• Design land­ing pages and struc­ture your email cam­paigns to develop your new tar­get mar­kets – and stop spend­ing so much mar­ket­ing bud­get on the sat­u­rated ones

Mar­ket­ing automa­tion is fast becom­ing a must-have tool for today’s mar­keters. But it’s impor­tant that it doesn’t sim­ply become a more expen­sive way to carry on with exist­ing batch-and-blast tech­niques. Not when it can do so much more.

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