Blog Post

Marketing automation is more than just sending out emails [INCLUDES EXAMPLES]

  • by Daniel Dornak
  • •
  • 02 Jun, 2018
  • •
Note: I wrote this article back in 2015 but the information is still very relevant so I decided to republish it
Marketing automation is already a common buzzword and is becoming more and more popular amongst marketers and companies who want to improve the results from their marketing campaigns and activities. Based on the B2B Marketing Outlook 2015 research report prepared by Green Hat and ADMA, 47% of respondents stated they use a Marketing Automation tool. This is still less than half of the marketers but the number is definitely growing. And those 47% use a proper marketing automation not just a tool for sending out email blasts.

So what can you actually do with a marketing automation tool? In the same research report, they stated that a marketing automation tool was defined as the use of software and web-based services to generate, track, nurture, manage and score leads as well as execute repetitive campaigns. And I think there is another big part of such tools which play an important role – marketing analytics. As yes, it is great to use all those fancy automation features but if you don’t evaluate results from those activities then you can’t improve what you are doing.

So let’s look at those marketing automation activities and tools functionalities in more details:

1.    Generate leads – Use forms and landing pages to generate leads

If we are talking about B2B then generating leads is a key objective for marketers now. In the B2B 2015 Outlook report more than 80% of respondents stated that Generating leads is their key marketing objective for 2015. So how can you use marketing automation to generate leads?

One of the main functionalities of such tools is creating landing pages and web forms. Now you can say, we don’t need it, we can create forms and landing pages in our CMS or we can ask our web developer to create this for us. Ok, that is definitely possible, but with such marketing solutions, it is in most cases so easy to do, that you don’t need any developer or even a graphic designer to create either form or even a full responsive landing page which would match your other web pages in terms of design and branding.

[EXAMPLE] University open day

This example is from B2C so you can see that it is not only applicable to B2B sector.

You are a marketing manager of a university and you are running an open day event to attract new potential students. You promote this event using digital advertising, social media, or even print advertising. The goal of that campaign is to get as many potential students as possible to register for such event and to attend that event.

So in marketing terms you want to first attract potential students through the campaign, then you want to get them interested to find more info about the event = visit your website and then you want to convert those visitors into new leads = new potential students. In other term, you want them to register for that event via the form on your landing page. And as we discussed before, you can use the marketing automation tool to simply create the landing page as well as the form. You can define which fields you want to show in the form, you can define which fields will be required, you can make various types of fields like text field, number field, drop down field and in most cases you will have a specific field for email as it is crucial to always get at least the name and email as everything what happens after, is related to those basic information.
With most marketing automation solutions you will be able to simply create the Landing page inside the marketing platform and add the form to that page in a very simple way by first creating the form and then just simply adding the form to that page.

Now this is still very basic, but there are other advantages of using the marketing solution in this case. You can actually create a campaign and assign the form, landing page and even the email (which you can use to invite even existing prospect students) to that campaign, so that you will be able to track back all leads = potential students generated by this campaign.

And if some of those leads become your students, then you can assign the revenue generated by that lead and then easily calculate the ROI of such campaign by calculating the revenue generated by students which we attracted by this campaign and comparing the revenue with the costs of the campaign (speaking in a very basic way). This is great, but again, you need a solution which would keep this information (lead source) during the whole sales funnel process. In most cases, once the lead is qualified and moved to sales, this info would move from the marketing tool into CRM (in some cases it is all integrated together and you have the lead info inside your CRM straight from the beginning of the process).

As you can see, to be able to evaluate the ROI of a campaign or even to evaluate the ROI of a marketing automation tool, you need to have the insights through the whole sale funnel. This means, in most cases you should have your marketing automation tool integrated with your CRM or any other system where you keep records about your sales. That’s why 60% of marketers responded in the B2B Marketing Outlook study that they have their marketing automation integrated with their CRM.

2. Track, nurture and score leads

In the first section we illustrated how to use marketing automation tool to generate new leads. Now, that’s great, but the story doesn’t end here of course. Or at least it shouldn’t. Now we need to work with those leads, move them through their buyer’s journey, and track their activities. Why do we need to track leads and how?

To be able to always improve your marketing campaigns and activities you need to be able to evaluate them to see what was working, what was not and you should always try to evaluate and understand the results. As at the end, marketing is now responsible for generating new leads, which means generating new sales opportunities. So, if we want to know which campaigns or activities worked = generated sales opportunities and sales / revenue, we need to be able to track to see how we generated that particular customer which generated a revenue in the amount of $x.

So how do we track this? The answer is of course by using a marketing automation tool which in the best case scenario is integrated with a CRM or other sales performance system. With such systems in place, you should be able to track which leads generated by which campaign led to the final customer. Of course there can be many situations which affect the final sale but again the tool can eventually help us to see and evaluate all those situations which affected the move from a lead to a happy customer.

[EXAMPLE] B2B Company which sells a financial planning, budgeting and reporting solution

Nurture leads

A person downloads a white paper from your website (after submitting a form described in part 1) about How to fast track the financial close and his or her contact details are entered into your marketing automation software or even into your CRM. Now that doesn’t mean that the person wants to buy the solution from us. Most likely that person is just educating him/herself as he or she has some difficulties with closing the financial books on time and when doing research found our white paper thanks to our SEO or even SEM activities. So from our point of view, this is just a new name in our database, potentially with some problems, or pains which we could help to solve.

Because we now know that most buyers are not ready to talk to a sales person unless they do their own research (based on various researches a buyers are not willing to talk to sales persona until they are at around 66% of their buying journey) so we simply want to help that particular potential buyer by providing valuable, helpful and educational information even before our sales person picks up a phone and call. Or even best, the person will contact us asking for help with the problem / pain. By the way that’s how inbound marketing works in the best possible way.

So our goal now, is to keep engaged with that lead and build up a relationship, usually by providing helpful and useful information. For this we will use a targeted nurture marketing program set up in a marketing automation tool.  First thing to do is to specify, what buyer persona that particular lead belongs to. To simplify the process for this example, let’s say the buyer persona is a CFO from medium sized organisation and is in the Awareness stage due to the type of content he or she downloaded at the beginning of this example.

For that particular buyer persona we will have a dynamic list created in the marketing tool and we can simply set up that as soon as someone downloads this WP, the lead will be added to that list. That’s a first step to nurture.

Now we set up a process / workflow on the top of the list which would consists of steps like this:

  1. After few days, we send that lead an email with another educational content; lets’ say with a link to a blog article with educational content still related to the awareness stage.

  2. Wait 5 days

  3. Send email with a live webinar invitation - We are trying to move the buyer to the next stage of the journey.

  4. Wait 5 days

  5. Send another email with a free trial download offer - Again, moving the buyer into the stage by the type of content we use.

This is a very simple scenario just for this example. The workflow can be much more complicated and actually dynamic where we can set up that some steps will happen only if something happens in the previous step. For example if that person clicks on the link in the email then … or if that person didn’t click or didn’t open that email then... This can get as complicated as you like and as the tool you are using allows you.

Or we can move the lead to a different nurture program based on the activities in previous emails etc. In this simple example the lead is moving from the awareness stage to the consideration stage (webinar invitation email) and finally to the decision stage (trial download). But what is important is that you can set up the list and the workflow just once in the marketing automation tool and everything happens automatically afterwards. Plus, you can set up “Lead scoring” which means that every single activity done by the lead during this process will be scored by a particular amount of points.

An example can be:

  • Downloaded the first WP = 5 points

  • Visited the blog article page = 3 points

  • Attended live webinar = 15 points

  • Signed up for free trial = 20 points.

Why this? It actually helps you to qualify your leads better and again automatically without the need of calling that person. Let’s say that you set up that once a lead or prospect reaches 100 points then the lead becomes a marketing qualified lead and can be moved to a different nurture program related for this group of leads / prospects. Or you can say that when the lead hits a score of 200 then it will be passed to your sales team for further qualification or for moving the lead into the next stage of buyer’s journey.  Again, everything can be automated and once a lead hits the score, an email is sent to the particular sales rep, the lead is assigned to that sales rep and an activity / task is created for the sales rep to follow up. Easy.

Track and score lead activities

Lead scoring is just one part of tracking. You can actually use a marketing automation tool to track everything what happens since someone provided you with their contact details and became a lead or new name in your database. As you move the lead and prospect through the buyer’s journey and sales funnel, all information are marked in the marketing automation tool or your CRM. All clicks on links in email, all web page visits, all webinars attendance, all white paper or case study downloads, etc. This helps you to be able to evaluate your marketing campaigns and activities properly. And all those activities can be scored as described before. You can even use a negative score for cases like when someone visits your career page for more than 1 minute etc as most likely that person is not one of your leads so you want the score to be decreased by this activity.

Evaluate ROI from marketing campaigns and activities

Being able to track your leads, prospects and all activities that happen throughout the buyer’s journey is one of the key elements of a marketing automation tool. Being able to see which campaigns or marketing activities were successful = generated not only new leads but also generated new customers and by that new revenue is one of the critical measurements for any marketing professional. With tracking you can evaluate how many leads or name names were generated by which campaign, which leads turned into qualified leads and opportunities and which opportunities turned into customers. So you should be able to report on ROI of your marketing activities and prove your management that the money you spent actually generated higher revenue for the company.

Again, the situations can be a bit more difficult if you don’t do just one campaign or if there are more leads from the same company which at the end become a customer but still, with marketing automation tools you get very important insights which you can then use to evaluate your marketing activities and present this to your company’s stakeholders.

3. Don’t forget to nurture customers

One simple example of how you can use marketing automation tool to nurture your customers is that you set up a workflow or a nurture program which will be triggered as soon a prospect / opportunity is converted into a customer. There are many ways of how this can be set up, usually based on which CRM system is used. In Microsoft Dynamics CRM you will mark an opportunity as closed won and then you can create a workflow which will change a prospect into a customer as soon as this happens. You don’t even have to do it manually all the time. In Salesforce.com pretty much same approach applies.

[EXAMPLE] B2B Software company - onboarding new users to increase customer retention

Now if you have your marketing automation integrated with your CRM then you can set up a workflow or nurture program which would be triggered by this change in your CRM. You can create a dynamic list of all of your customers. Dynamic list means that people are automatically added and removed based on criteria set for that list. For example if you mark one of your accounts / companies in your CRM as “Customer” then all contacts under that company could be automatically added to that list. Again, you don’t have to do anything. And on the top of that, you will have a workflow or nurture program set up above the Customers dynamic list which would say something like this:

  1. Trigger workflow as soon as someone joins the list
  2. Send email with welcome and introduction about our customer program
  3. Send an email in 1 week with top tips of how to start using our solution
  4. Send another email with recorded webinar about how to use….
  5. Create a follow up phone call task for an account manager in 2 weeks
  6.  … etc
Again, everything happens automatically. The only thing what was done manually was that a salesperson marked an opportunity as won. Nothing else and thanks to a marketing automation tool integrated with CRM we manage to engage with our new customers straight from the beginning by helping them to start using our solution in the best possible way. So we help our customers to become more productive, more successful and to generate better results. Simply said, we are still building our relationship as the process shouldn’t stop by simply selling the solution and walking away. As by nurturing customers we are actually creating possible up-sell or cross-sell opportunities. Or we are making sure that our customers are happy with our product/service so that they may recommend us to someone else.

And there is no better way of generating new potential customers than by referrals, right?

Marketing needs Sales as much as Sales needs Marketing

by Daniel Dornak • 27 Apr, 2018

There has been a lot of discussion around this topic, but I think it is actually very simple and I honestly don’t understand all those articles, videos, arguments discussing the sales marketing alignment or mainly misalignment. How can those two departments not work together? There are so many benefits of close cooperation between Sales and Marketing so let's take a closer look at them.

Also, I think the discussion should go even further than marketing vs sales. Why is it only between marketing and sales? Yes, those two need to work closely together, but if a company wants to be successful, the whole company needs to be aligned. Not just marketing and sales. We should be talking about aligning the whole funnel from marketing to sales to customer success or service which goes back to marketing. Why back to marketing? Simple, one of the best leads and new customers generation channels is a referral from an existing happy customer.

But let’s discuss the simple version for now – Marketing and Sales alignment.  Alignment, that sounds like a big deal. But it’s not. It just means those two departments need to work together. And I wouldn’t even say departments, as it’s always just about people. How they communicate and how they work together.

But why do those two need to work together?

Well, it’s simple. They need each other and they can hugely benefit from working together. Sales needs marketing and marketing needs sales. Full stop.

1)   Why Sales needs Marketing?

The answer is again very simple. To make more sales, to hit their targets easier, to get their bonuses and to help company grow.

People buy differently these days and both sales and marketing should know that

I think marketing these days plays even more crucial role in the business than ever before. First, as we all know, people changed the way how they buy things. And it doesn’t matter if we talk about B2B or B2C. At the end of the day, it’s always about people. Even in the B2B environment, some person needs to make the decision. Yes, there are a bit different factors which affect the final decision but the main thing is that people are now smarter and have access to much more information thanks to the internet and social media. So what people do before they make the decision to buy something and doesn’t matter if it’s a car, holiday or new marketing automation software?

They do their own research!

They search the web, they check social media, they ask friends, they check the reviews, attend event, watch a video etc. They do anything possible to make sure they make the right choice when they finally make the purchasing decision. And the key thing for our discussion is, that this all happens before people are actually happy to talk to a sales person or hit the Buy now button. Usually when people are happy to talk to a sales person, they are pretty much ready to make the purchase, they pretty much know what they want and what options they have.

So how do we make sure that whenever a customer is ready to talk to the sales person or is ready to press the Buy now button they not only know about our products or services but they will choose and purchase our products or services?

Well, the answer is simple. It’s marketing’s job to do exactly this.

Marketing is responsible for making sure customers find us during their research and then for building relationship with the potential customers so that when they are ready to talk to sales or to make the purchase, they are already emotionally attached to our brand. Marketing needs to make sure that when people search for answers to their questions on Google they find an answer from us, or when they check their social media we will be there in front of their eyes, telling them hey we can help you with …, or if someone attends an event about digital marketing trends, we will be there presenting and proving we can help that person to do their job better etc. See, we are not selling at this stage. We are trying to help people to solve their needs, pains, requirements or desires.

And the best marketing goes even one step ahead when we create the need for something. That way, we are the first brand customers engage with during their buying journey and we start building the relationship already from this point. We helped someone to find out they can do something better in their life, both personal as well as professional. So who do you think that person will tend to choose when they are ready to buy or talk to sales? How do you think the discussion between a sales person and the potential customer will go? I think the answer is pretty simple.

Just compare a cold sales call to a person who has no idea about our brand, our products or our services with a call being actually initiated by the potential customer who already knows how our products or services can help them and already have some kind of emotional attachment to our brand thanks to all the work done by marketing.

Use data provided by marketing and save time to improve your sales performance

Second reason why sales can highly benefit from working tightly with marketing is data and a massive reduction of time spent on admin and manual processes. Modern digital world helps marketing as well as sales to use and analyse huge amount of interesting and important data.

Did my prospect visited our website recently? Did they visit the pricing or contact page? Did they open the email I sent with a special offer? Did my prospects register for our event or webinar? Are my prospects following us on social media? Or how do I know someone is ready to talk to me about our products or services?

Those can be few examples of questions a sales person from the typical B2B environment can be asking, or should be asking. Why? Because if a sales person gets answers to questions like this, they will know much more about the prospects’ interest which can help them to make the sales process much easier and much more effective. They can prepare for a targeted personalised sales call, they can easily plan their sales pipeline, set up different priorities about which leads and prospects they should follow up or which deals they can close faster.

Super handy, don’t you think?

But where can a sales person get all this data? They don’t have time for this.

Well, again, from marketing.

Thanks to modern marketing tools marketers can provide answers to all those questions and can place them straight in front of the sales person’s eyes easily. Or if a sales person is not a fan of using modern tools, you can simply ask marketers and have a discussion. They have all the data and they should be happy to provide you with all the info needed as remember, you both have a common goal – company growth.

Another example of how marketing data can help sales to make their life easier and mainly improve their performance is that marketing can provide a complete full funnel performance analyses. Conversion rates, ROI, or engagement data all help to provide sales with the best possible leads with the highest probability of closing those leads into customers in the shortest time.

Yes, marketing automation can help improve sales as well

Marketing automation also plays an important role of how marketing can help sales to improve their performance. Imagine a sales person is working with a prospect but the prospect became a bit cold. They have different priorities, they don’t have a budget now or they just simply became unresponsive for no obvious reason to us.

And now what?

One thing a sales person can do is to simply create a task in their calendar to follow up later and focus on other warmer or hotter prospects. Sure, that’s understandable, but what will happen with this cold prospect in the meantime? It can be few months and unless the sales person calls them we don’t know what is going on there. Plus, they can simply forget about us as remember they are busy with other things. So, when the sales person finally calls back after few months, it can be pretty much one of those cold calls again. Not exactly what you want as a sales guy right?

Enters marketing automation and nurture marketing to keep that lead or prospect warm till they are ready to talk to us again.

But how does marketing know they need to nurture some sales prospects? Well, they again need to cooperate and work closely together. They need to define the process and rules of transferring leads from marketing to sales and then from sales back to marketing. Thanks to modern marketing tools this is extremely easy and the whole process can be automated. So not only marketing is helping sales to nurture their prospects but by using the modern tools, marketing is also saving a lot of valuable time by using automations for both sales as well as marketing. High five!

 

2)     Marketing needs Sales as much as Sales needs Marketing

Now let’s go to the other side. Marketing needs to work with Sales and they need to work extremely closely together for few reasons:

Understand the target audience

Ok, thanks to the modern digital world, marketing can do a lot of research and analyse huge amount of data about their customers and about their behaviour. This is absolutely fantastic and marketers can leverage on all those data and information to build and promote products or services people need or desire. Marketers get direct feedback by analysing websites, social media channels, apps usability, campaigns and they actually get direct feedback from customers on various digital channels like Google, Facebook, G2 Crowd, Tripadvisor, Uber, Airbnb etc.

That’s a lot of data and valuable info which marketers can use but it’s those sales guys and then also customer service or consultants who are directly talking to our prospects and customers every day. They know exactly who our target audience is, what they do during the day, what problems they are trying to solve, or what dreams and desires they have (or at least they should know if they want to achieve their sales targets and help the company grow).

So, communicating and working closely with the sales guys is extremely important for marketers to even better understand the audience and then define marketing strategies and tactics based on this deep knowledge about customers. Marketers need to know as many details about the target audience as possible to be able to:

  • develop and design products and solution which can help solve people’s problems, pains or needs,
  • engage with potential customers = know where and how to engage
  • understand their motivational and emotional drivers = how people buy and why

And marketers can surely get a lot of these insights directly from the sales. Just simply talk to them, have open discussion and simply leverage on their knowledge and info they provide you with to improve the marketing performance.

Achieve the business objectives and targets

Marketing these days should always have their key goals aligned with the key company’s goals and objectives. Marketing strategies, campaigns or even just a basic blog article should always have some clear and measurable goal behind them (sure everyone heard about SMART goals). Otherwise how do you know what campaigns should you do, how much should you invest in what and where?

Simple example. Our company wants to grow the revenue by 20% this year. To achieve this, we need x number of customers. Some will be new customers; some sales will be driven by existing customers through up-sell or cross-sell. This pretty much sets the sales targets which can be then divided into half-yearly, quarterly or monthly targets.

For sales to be able to achieve their sales targets, they need leads. They need people willing to purchase our product or service. And as we all know, not all leads convert into customers. So let’s say we know that we need 100 leads to close 10 sales deals. We then also go into details like what kind of leads we need to be able to close those 10 deals generating the targeted revenue.

And with all these info, marketing then need to work closely with Sales to define which channels will be used to get those 100 leads. Once we know how many leads need to be generated by marketing, marketers then need to define their marketing strategies and tactics to make sure they deliver that agreed number of leads.

Simple. Marketing needs to be driven by the company and sales targets so they need to work closely together to be able to achieve that. Marketing needs to know what the Sales KPIs and targets are to be able to deliver relevant leads.

It’s not just about Marketing vs Sales

Now this is a simplified version just for this article when we discuss Marketing vs Sales as normally the whole process goes well beyond just Marketing and Sales. Marketing needs to work closely with Customer Service or Customer Success (however you call it), with Product, with HR, with Finance …pretty much with all departments in a company. And all departments should work closely with Marketing as again they can highly benefit from working together.

Change the Way You Do Marketing…and Sales…and Customer Service to Be Successful

by Daniel Dornak • 01 Mar, 2015
Yesterday I attended a marketing workshop which was run by a Sydney based consulting agency Carpe Diem Consulting. As the title “ Are you using New Marketing to soar to higher results? “ initiated, the workshop’s intention was to bring around marketers and explain to them how and why they should change the way they do marketing .

I guess the first question of those who received the invitation was - What is, or what do you mean by “New Marketing”? So, probably same as the other marketers, I checked the event info and agenda and found out that the purpose of this event is to help marketers and companies to change the way they do marketing by moving from the “old style” or some people call it “traditional” marketing to the new era marketing which is based on …. ?

Yes. Your guess is right. It is inbound, content marketing, SEO, social media and all those tactics and channels which help companies to generate more leads and more qualified leads and at the end more satisfied customers and higher revenue. And I can’t agree more with this approach and it is great to see another agency or people who are passionate about inbound and about modern marketing tactics and strategies. So I decided to attend this workshop and I think it was very informative and I hope people who attended will be getting on board with inbound soon.

Inbound Marketing Is a Complex Strategy

by Daniel Dornak • 10 May, 2014
There are many many articles about inbound marketing, about content and how important it is for companies to implement inbound strategies to become more successful, but I still think there are many marketers or sales professionals or even executives who don't know what's behind inbound and why everyone talks about this. Even from my own experience, I have to talk about inbound and try to explain inbound and why companies I work or used to work for should shift their focus on inbound to sales people and company's stakeholders all the time. And it is hard to change people's mind as yes, inbound doesn't bring immediate results as for example when you buy a list of contacts or run online advertising campaigns. And I am not saying inbound is the only right way to do marketing, I myself ran many successful outbound campaigns but implementing inbound strategies will help you to reduce your marketing cost dramatically, it will help you to convert more leads into customers as sales is getting more qualified and sales ready leads. Plus sales will get much more time to actually focus on closing deals as inbound marketing will do part of their current job for them and will bring people who are actually willing to talk to them (that's why it is called inbound).  

So if someone asks me to explain in few words and in a very simple way what the inbound marketing means, then I would probably say.
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