Top Tips for Getting the Most Out of Your Marketing Automation Platform
Use of a marketing automation platform plays a vital role in growing a business – yet, Act-On’s recent research found that only 16% of respondents feel they are fully utilising their marketing automation tools to their potential.
Successful campaigns rely on highly targeted marketing, delivering the right message, to the right person or business, at the right time. Prior to marketing automation, marketers had to essentially adopt a trial-and-error approach to their campaigns, with no way of knowing what was and wasn’t effective.
A major benefit of marketing automation is to help marketers conserve resources while also launching more campaigns, more effectively. But with marketers struggling to maximise the potential of their marketing automation platforms, it’s important to investigate how they can extract full value from their investments and reap the benefits of having such a platform in place.
This innovative technology empowers you to do more work with less manual effort to reach a larger audience in a more personalised and relevant way. Learn how to align your entire strategy and implement your plan in one coordinated platform with The Marketing Automation Quickstart Guide.
Below are 5 top tips marketers should consider, to ensure they are getting the most ROI from their marketing automation platform:
1. Develop KPIs for Each Goal
If you don’t have a solid plan to measure and analyse your campaign results, all of the invaluable data and marketing efforts may go to waste. How else can you figure out how efficient your campaigns are and if your company budget is invested in the right marketing strategies?
KPIs are essential data that measure your campaign effectiveness and efficiency and provide guidance on whether you’re hitting the goals you set out to achieve.
2. Get Marketing and Sales Aligned on Funnel Stages and Definitions
According to a 2020 LinkedIn report, failure to align sales and marketing teams is leading to wasted budget and resources with up to 60-70% of B2B content not being used. By integrating a marketing automation platform with a CRM platform, sales and marketing teams can take a more holistic approach to their sales funnel.
That being said, marketers and sales teams must ensure they are aligned on funnel stages–these include: awareness, consideration, conversion, loyalty, and advocacy–to shed light on where a particular individual is at on their journey with your company
If sales and marketing are not aligned and are also not tapping into the wealth of data insights, both teams may be communicating inconsistent messages with a customer or prospect which could hinder the effectiveness of any campaign.
Read How to Automate Your Marketing With a CRM System and discover how to enable sales and marketing to work together, pass leads more effectively, gain more visibility into the sales cycle, and achieve greater ROI.
3. Get Marketing and Sales to Agree on Lead Scoring Criteria
Defining how to score leads improves alignment and collaboration between marketing and sales teams. By agreeing on an objective definition of a quality lead, sales and marketing can exchange better feedback on the quality of the leads the sales team receives.
Furthermore, lead scoring helps ensure the most suitable leads (based on potential revenue and buyer readiness) are followed up on immediately, ensuring they’re not lost to competitors.
4. Map your Content to your Personas and your Funnel Stages
By categorising your funnel stages into 5 ‘buckets’, it enables you to establish what content a specific prospect or customer should be receiving from your company based on where they’re at in their customer journey.
Furthermore, by leveraging the behavioural insights that prospects have consented to sharing, it allows you to further personalise the content you put in front of them based on their interests and preferences.
Personalisation needs to be at the forefront of every strategy, every campaign, and every piece of content you put out into the world. That’s why Act-On created this all-in-one guide to mapping everything out, executing your vision, and extending the lifecycle through personalised customer journeys.
5. Build a Content Calendar to Keep New and Targeted Content Flowing into your Campaigns
Finally, having a content calendar in place helps ensure your content marketing team is continuously producing the most current and relevant content for all of the contacts in your database.
By becoming more digitally innovative and customer-focused, these 5 strategies ensure you stay ahead of the competition and withstand even the most tech-savvy competitors.
Implementing these actions into your marketing automation platform is a highly effective way to build customer loyalty – as it guarantees an improved brand experience and drives overall engagement. With these strategies in your pocket, your business is guaranteed to thrive.