Drip, Nurture and Automated Marketing Campaigns

$\"Marketing$ Although it may sound technical and maybe even Orwellian, marketing automation is becoming an essential marketing practice for all business to business (B2B) companies and even some business to consumer (B2C) companies.

Marketing automation is here to stay: it’s a proven, powerful technology that helps business owners and marketing staff do their jobs more effectively. If you’re not using a marketing automation system, it is not too late to start.

Lead management becomes a collaborative process ensuring real-time communication between your marketing and sales departments with marketing automation. It can be an efficient tool for enterprises looking for a cost-effective, one-stop solution that enables a prospect to self-educate and move quickly through the steps of the sales conversation from prospect to customer. Your marketing automation software should integrate with your CRM software like Salesforce, NetSuite, or SugarCRM to increase its usability and provide deeper insight into the minds of your prospects.

The utility of marketing automation is that it covers the entire prospect to customer lifecycle. This includes lead nurturing, lead acquisition efforts and the transfer to sales that comes after. It also should include the parts of customer management – additional sales, service, and retention – that follow the initial order.

Marketing processes that should be handled by software:

Anonymous Visitor Recognition
Drip Campaigns & Email Marketing
SEO & PPC Reporting
Websites and Landing Pages
Social Media Marketing and reporting
Webinar Tracking
Event Management

5 Concepts for Strategic Marketing Automation

Create a strategy and conditions of satisfaction. It’s vital that you demonstrate ROI from it. You need to outline your revenue creation process and see how your marketing can be made more efficient with marketing automation.
Use marketing automation for drip campaigns instead of email newsletters. This is a 4-6 week campaign of ebooks, email, webinar invites, and phone call invites. A drip campaign will allow you to find the method of communication the prospect prefers.
Integrate your sales and marketing teams. Ideally, sales and marketing want the same thing – many high quality leads to meet the growth demands of the company.
Marketing automation is key to getting that. Integrate marketing automation with CRM to give sales complete lead history and lead intelligence. With this lead intelligence, sales can deliver customized pitches that are directed specifically the lead’s business problem.
Increase content development. Marketing automation requires content. You will need to allocate staff time or hire a marketing company to develop well crafted content. Content for your automated campaign will include blogs, webinars, product videos, and case studies. Consistent and updated content is essential to inbound marketing.
Manage campaigns daily. If you want to create a campaign and forget about it, hire an agency. Otherwise, you will need to allocate staff to monitor and innovate weekly, at the very least.

Just like email marketing replaced direct mail for most businesses, marketing automation will likely replace email-only marketing. If you’re ready to learn or have a campaign developed, email me at emanuel@strategicemarketing.com.