09 Oct Is Pardot (or any Marketing Automation solution) right for your company?
Here is a great video from A. Lee Judge, Digital Marketing Strategist.
According to Lee, B2B marketing automation will continue to grow accross all sectors.
But is marketing automatin right for your business?
In this video, lee gives 6 key-factors to consider in deciding if you need marketing automation:
- Marketing to sales handover process regarding the qualification of leads. In other words, Marketing automation creates MQLs (Marketing Qualified Leads), but this means sales will not know about all leads. While this is the whole objective of marketing automation, some sales departments won’t be happy about it; Extra effort/processes must be put in place to adjust.
- Do your prospects research online prior to buying? For big B2B companies this is probably the case. Lee says that up to 70% of the sales process for B2B companies happens online and before talking to a sales person . Start by asking your customers how they found you and look at Goolge Analytcis stats. Other questions to ask oneself: Who ranks first on search-engines? Us or the competitions? Keyword analysis of the top-ranked websites in your industry can be bery useful. Also, it’s a preliminary step to create the right content that will interest your potential buyers.
- Do you have a long sales cycle? If so, know that manual nurturing and tracking is unlikely to be consistent. A marketing automation platform will cover long sales cycles and nurture them through this cycle. Just because a lead isn’t ready to talk to sales, doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be sending them relevant information (blog content, social media, email, etc.)
- Is your website a major component of your selling process? The website should contain quality information and clear CTAs (Call-To-Actions)- which leads to quality resources to provide visitors with value (downloads, whitepapers, webinar registrations, product content, etc.). These, in turn will provide you insight regarding their position in the decision making process and can be completed with Ad-retargeting, emails, webinars, events, etc.
- Do you have multiple products and services? A marketing automation systems conveys the appropriate information to the appropriate prospect at the appropriate time. If you have multiple products or services, once they are in the process, you can put them on the list to cross-sell them other products or services.
- Do you want to obtain more leads from marketing? A marketing automation solution can manage, segment, qualify and nurture the prospects, while cold calling and mass irrelevant emails might just do the opposite or be neuteral.
Watch the full video here: