Marketing Automation For Dummies

Mathew Sweezey

• Publisher: For Dummies
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781118772225
• eBook ISBN: 9781118772270
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Sales
• Index: Business

Multiply the effectiveness of your campaigns with marketing automation

Marketing automation technology has been shown to dramatically increase lead conversions and average deal sizes as well as improving forecasting and customer segmentation. A subset of CRM, it focuses on defining, scheduling, segmenting, and tracking marketing campaigns. This friendly book demystifies marketing automation in straightforward terms, helping you leverage the tools and handle the processes that will enable a seamless integration with your CRM program. Learn to establish a buyer profile, assess your needs, select tools, create a lead scoring model, and much more.

• Marketing automation is a next-generation, CRM-related tool for increasing lead conversions and improving forecasting and customer segmentation
• This book provides an easy-to-understand introduction to the tools and technology, helping you evaluate your current processes, choose the appropriate tools, and follow best practices in making the most of them
• Written by Mathew Sweezey, Marketing Automation Evangelist at Pardot (ExactTarget), a leading provider of marketing automation solutions
• Covers working with the marketing lifecycle, evaluating your assets, integrating marketing automation with CRM and with other processes, nurturing your leads, and using marketing automation to reach buyers via e-mail, social media, and more

Marketing Automation For Dummies is the ideal guide to get you up and running with marketing automation, putting your business on the cutting edge and enhancing your competitiveness.

Part I

For Dummies can help you get started with lots of subjects. Visit www.dummies.com for more great content online.

In this part …

• Get introduced to the modern buyer and learn why marketing automation is so effective.
• Create a business case for a marketing automation solution.
• Find out the basics of setting up a marketing automation tool.

Chapter 1

Introducing the Concepts of Marketing Automation

In This Chapter

Defining marketing automation

Defining the modern buyer

Knowing why companies implement marketing automation

Starting the conversation about marketing automation

Marketing automation is a buzzword in the marketing world. This chapter explains what it means and why marketing automation has made such a big difference in so many companies.

I show you what defines marketing automation and why it’s such a big deal. I list the major reasons that companies are implementing marketing automation solutions and show you how to start conversations about it at your company. I also dig into the changes in the modern buyer that have made marketing automation so popular.

Defining Marketing Automation

The term marketing automation got its start in the mid to late 1990s when a few people were combing their databases with automated code to make it easier to segment their databases into more granular segments based on more data. Since then, it has turned into a massive industry and has been called the fastest-growing software segment in the CRM space.

In short, marketing automation refers to the process of using a single platform for tracking leads, automating personal marketing activities, and being able to produce full closed-loop reports on the effectiveness of all marketing activities.

There are also many other ways to refer to the processes that marketing automation encompasses. Each company that sells marketing automation software calls it something slightly different, and even the analysts call it something different. Here’s a list of terms you may hear in place of marketing automation:

• Demand generation
• Lead performance management
• Revenue performance management
• Automated lead management
• CRM lead management

Marketing automation (or whatever name you call it) really consists of three parts:

• The first is lead tracking, which consists of tracking a lead across all marketing channels.
• The second is automated execution, which enables you to have automated processes take place either as marketing campaigns or as internal changes based on these tracked actions.
• Finally, the third part allows for closed-loop reporting for proving the value of your marketing efforts down to every dollar those efforts bring in.

When thinking of marketing automation, many people may be confused, wondering whether it’s a technology or a way of marketing. It’s actually both. Marketing automation is just as much a new way of marketing as it is a new tool that most companies have never used before. There are also many levels of marketing automation. Throughout this book, I cover all levels of marketing automation and show you how to implement the new technology while thinking about marketing in a new way.

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Full marketing automation vs. piecemeal marketing automation

Marketing automation has many levels, an idea that you need to grasp before you dig deeply into this book. Currently, many options are available to help you automate marketing activities. Depending on your goals, you may just need a single tool to add to your existing toolbox, or you may need to replace your entire toolbox with a full marketing automation platform.

For example, say that you’re using a form on a website and you can now easily have form submissions dropped right into your CRM without your having to lift a finger. This is an example of a single automation. A single tool can do this for you if this is all you require. I call a single tool working to do one action “piecemeal marketing automation.” But if you need those form submissions to score your prospects so that you can determine who is the most sales ready, you need a full marketing automation platform. Removing tasks is considered a level of automation, but it is a single-point solution and doesn’t meet all three of the criteria I mention in this chapter to qualify as full marketing automation.

As you go through this book, determine whether you need just piecemeal marketing automation or full marketing automation. Making this determination will help you to ensure that you get the tools you require and don’t buy a technology just because it is a hot buzzword.

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Recognizing the Relationship Between Marketing Automation and Online Marketing

Marketers are running the majority of their campaigns online. This fact makes many marketing activities easier to execute and track but also adds a lot of technical challenges. Marketing automation and online marketing have a symbiotic relationship. Think of marketing automation as an extension of online marketing. It needs online marketing to work, just as online marketing is made more effective by marketing automation.

Online marketing usually consists of many different channels and types of campaigns. Here are the marketing campaigns that can be made more effective with marketing automation:

• Search Engine Optimization (SEO): Marketing automation allows for the tracking of each keyword, and full closed-loop return on investment (ROI) reporting on every keyword.
• Search Engine Marketing (SEM): Marketing automation provides full lead tracking so that you can see each person and every paid advertisement that person has engaged with.
• E-mail marketing: E-mail marketing changes with marketing automation because you don’t have to send blast e-mails, which are individually executed marketing pieces not tied to other prospect interactions. With marketing automation, you gain the ability to execute automated, personalized lead-nurturing campaigns that may last for months and dynamically change based on people’s interactions with the emails they are receiving. So you move from a manual execution and scrubbing of lists to an automated campaign that can optimize itself for best results.
• Content marketing: Marketing automation gives you the ability to track every piece of content and see each person in your database who engages with your content.
• Trade shows: If you attend trade shows, marketing automation gives you the ability to track each lead from your booth and prove full ROI on each trade show.
• Social media: Tweets, blog posts, LinkedIn, Facebook, and all other social media channels can be tracked and reported on. So you can prove the ROI on social media down to the tweet and demonstrate how it influenced your last closed deal.
• Website: You can drive more value out of your website by knowing every page a prospect looks at, helping you to identify hot leads based on the prospect’s level of engagement with key pages.

Marketing to the Modern Buyer

A European study in 2013 noted that the average consumer is in front of a screen 12 hours a day. More than 294 billion e-mails are sent each day, and more than 2 million new blog posts go online every day. The Wall Street Journal reports that more than 42 percent of holiday shoppers in 2013 did their holiday shopping online. Clearly, with the amount of time people spend online, if you’re not online, you’re going to be left behind.

Most of this is not news to you. You probably have a website, an e-mail tool, and a Twitter account. You have started to blog and create content for your website. You’ve learned about the benefits of SEO and optimized your content for search results. The next sections explain how to engage with the modern buyer in more granular detail so that you can easily see how marketing automation helps you better engage online with your consumers.

Feeding the need for content

Content marketing has become another buzzword in the marketing world. It has sparked the New York Times bestselling book Youtility, by Jay Baer, and spawned new institutes such as the Content Marketing Institute. Content marketing even changed the way Google’s algorithm ranks websites in natural searches. The Internet is now made up of content, and marketers are clued in. We’re creating more content than ever before, and it’s because we have to.

Today’s buyers want to get help and are looking to your company for that help — and they should be getting help from your content, too. This is one of the key messages Jay Baer puts forth in Youtility. It’s also the message of Joe Pulizzi, founder of the Content Marketing Institute. Your content needs to be helpful to get people to engage with it, and you need to provide a lot of it, as well.

The need for all this content has put a strain on a marketer’s day and made distribution of content a massive problem. Marketing automation helps to solve a lot of this content problem by giving marketers an automated way to distribute their content and by opening up more time in their day to create more content instead of managing a database. The need for content isn’t going away. Content is only getting more important, which means that the problem of distributing content, and following up with ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• Part I: Getting Started with Marketing Automation
• Part II: Working with Data and Leads
• Part III: Running Automation Campaigns
• Part IV: Mixing, Scoring, and Reporting
• Part V: Putting It All Together
• Part VI: The Part of Tens
• About the Author
• Cheat Sheet
• More Dummies Products