8 Marketing Automation Tips
Businesses that use marketing automation to nurture prospects experience a 451% increase in qualified leads. (Propeller)
B2B marketers say the number one benefit of marketing automation is the ability to generate more qualified leads (Pepper Global). They experience these great results because, marketing automation allows you to educate buyers, build trust, and stay in touch with prospects as they search for solutions to their problems. However, while more than 60% of marketers use email to stay in touch with their prospects, only 13% use marketing automation tools so they put in some of the effort but only get a fraction of the results. They also miss out on early stage leads, since marketers using marketing automation generate twice as many leads than those who just use one off blast emails. It’s statistics like these that spurred us to share some of Gabriel Sales’ automation best practices that have benefitted our firm and our clients.
Marketing automation is not necessarily difficult, but it does require a bit of a learning curve and some planning. Here are eight best practices we use that will ensure you’re marketing automation will be used wisely.
Start with a Strategy
Without a strategy, your marketing automation tool will inevitably become an ordinary email tool, blasting one-off messages and newsletters. The process of creating a strategy requires defining your value proposition, targeting your audiences, outlining the buyer personas of your ideal customers and mapping your buyer’s journey to your sales process. This allows you to tell your story, establish thought leadership and build trust with your potential buyers without the expense of sales reps doing this one customer at a time. A DemandGen study found that 95% of buyers consider content as trustworthy (and in some cases at early stages more trustworth then sales reps) when evaluating a company and its offerings.
Framework to Tell a Powerful Sales Story with Simple Messages
A critical part of the strategy will be a series of simple messages that tells your sales story in a way that resonates with your buyer’s needs. This message framework will anchor your marketing efforts. This framework will deliver the right message at the right time based on where your buyer is at specific stages their buyers journey. As the table shows, there are different pieces of content topics and different types of media that work best for certain stages. While educating your potential buyers about your perspective on challenges they face in the marketplace, who you are, and how you may be able to solve their problems, your content will be organized in a systematic way to help them understand if you are the right fit to help them solve their challenges . This builds trust with buyers looking to buy and keeps your brand and your solutions top of mind, for those not yet ready to purchase with helpful educational content.
Use Lead Nurturing to Create Opportunities
On average it takes, on average between 7 and 13 touches by both sales and/or marekting before a sale is made. This does not count the 47% of buyers who want to view 3-5 pieces of content before they even want to engage with a sales rep. (DemandGen). All this takes time. And if you rely on sales reps to carry the load it can also take a significant amount of money. For those leads that already know about your solution, but aren’t yet ready to buy, lead nurturing allows you to stay top of mind through offering educational and thought-leadership content about industry trends and developments without the expense of a sales rep. Establishing thought-leadership is critical to an overall effective cost of sales percentage, since 96% of B2B buyers want content with more input from industry thought leaders which includes the company’s selling solutions that solve their problems (Demand Gen Report, 2016). Companies that excel at lead nurturing generate with educational thought leadership generate 50% more sales ready leads at 33% lower cost (Source: Forrester Research).
Integrate Social into Your Distribution Network
While marketing automation is associated with email marketing, modern automation tools are now easily connected to help you publish your content to additional networks in social media. That said, those channels are merely that, distribution outlets where it exposes your content to additional buyers so you can educate and build trust with your audience in additional areas across the web. If you make the investment in content it also makes sense to share that content in social media. Blog articles are leveraged by your automation platform to generate and score leads by educating and building trust. But since you already have the content you can post it to social media to solidify a relationship with your leads and to make additional buyers aware of your solution.
Use Lead Scoring to Identify Who’s Engaging
Lead scoring is the least used feature by most businesses but it is the most critical for small and mid sized companies to increase productivity and lower their cost of sales. Lead scoring is the ability to figure out where someone is in their buying process and when they are getting actively interested in purchasing. Lead scoring allows sales and marketing to quickly flag who should be getting more attention from higher-end sales reps. Lead scoring will generate more revenue because better leads (buyers with high scores that are ready for sales interaction) will bubble to the top and be pritorized for you sales team, allowing your sales team to contact your most potential buyers at the right time. Lead scoring saves you money because leads with low scores that are not yet ready to buy, can be managed and developed by less expensive reps or in some case just by nurturing with marketing automation during their early education stages of your sales cycle. Lead scoring works. 68% of top marketers report lead scoring as the most responsible feature for improving thedirect revenue contribution of their content marketing efforts (Lenskold Group).
Integrate your CRM to Capture Lead Data
Capturing data and valuable information about your buyers is one of the key drivers to help you drive sales. Marketing automation allows you to capture both key sales and marketing metrics. When you have collected this information in your CRM system you sales reps will have direct access to it. This allows your sales reps to easily organize and sort prospects by any number of criteria including, points accumulated, predict location in the sales funnel/buyer’s journey and to see what educational content the buyer has consumed. This data allows you to sort buyers and then to sell to them more effectively because they will have a jump start on their level of education and business needs.
Use Data to Improve How Your Target Markets
You can learn a lot about your target audience by measuring the people who are engaging with your content through your website and emails. To better understand the interactions you can split them into two data categories, explicit and implicit. Explicit data tells you who’s volunteered information to you via web forms, events or other interactions such as phone calls. Implicit data measures online behavior such as emails opened, click-throughs, form submissions, and downloads of your marketing collateral. If an activity is predictive of buying the lead can be scored appropriately and can be highlighted in your CRM. In many cases you can send real-time alerts to sales reps once a prospect reaches a certain point threshold or if a certain activity takes place. And timing is everything. In some types of sales 35-50% of all sales are won by the vendor that responds first (InsideSales.com).
Keep it Simple
Many SMBs we talk with say they haven’t made the leap to real marketing automation yet because they believe it’s too difficult. And while successful marketing automation involves many moving parts – contact us forms, downloadable assets, social and CRM integration, lead scoring, etc. – it’s important to start small and slow, while always keeping the end goal of the purpose of marketing automation top of mind. And the ultimate point of marketing automation is to put more sales qualified opprotunities into the hands of your closers. Decide on your goals for each campaign and the few KPIs to measure your success and design accordingly. Three simple KPIs to start with are:
- Contact volume.Automation helps marketers manage greater lead and prospect volume with more efficiency and effectiveness. So, it’s important to keep an eye on how many contacts, prospects and leads are engaging with your content to better understand where they are in the buyer’s journey and if there are any actions to be taken.
- A common goal is to better move contacts through your buyer’s journey and into your sales reps’ funnels, and track progress to identify what content is working and what’s not. Measure how campaigns impact MQLs, SQLs, and unsubscribes: are your campaigns better qualifying leads, improving the marketing-to-sales lead delivery volume, generating deals that are actually interested and helping nurture leads and prospects not yet ready to buy?
- Track engagement – email opens, click-throughs, website visits, shares, etc. – to identify the most effective messages and content that moves the needle with your audiences. Tracking engagement also allows you to identify the most active contacts and whether they need attention from sales.
Keeping it simple will only require you to focus on the buyers and purchase influencers you want to engage with right now. There are all sorts of advanced features and complex segmentation that is possible but this is a distraction in the short term. When you are just getting started we recommend that you leave the segmentation, tagging, etc. for later campaigns, once you’ve warmed up your audience with your educational, trust-building content.
No matter how you slice it, the move to marketing automation is growing and will be a requirement to compete for sales successfully in the next several years. Currently, 67% of marketing leaders use a marketing automation platform, while over the next two years, an additional 21% of marketing leaders plan to use a marketing automation platform (Salesforce “State of Marketing” 2017). Those numbers are not surprising because marketing automation works and saves time and money for organizations that leverage the technology to their advantage – 80% of marketing automation users saw their number of leads increase, and 77% saw the number of conversions increase by 2X over the first 18 months of implementing a platform (VB Insight “Marketing Automation, how to make the right buying decision” 2015). It’s no wonder, 91% of the most successful users agree that marketing automation is “very important” to the overall success of their marketing across channels (Marketo & Ascend2).
About Us
Gabriel Sales specializes in helping SMBs and Startups grow business with modern sales and marketing operations. Our team can augment gaps in your existing sales and marketing operations or we can be leveraged for full service campaigns that include:
- Integrated Sales and Marketing Strategies
- Database Research and Targeting
- Automation and CRM Systems Best Practices
- Systems Implementation
- Inbound Lead Generation
- Outbound Lead Generation and Lead Scoring
- Sales Qualification
- Closing
To learn more about how we can help you grow your business (or decide if we are the right fit for you), we invite you to visit our page that details our integrated approach to sales and marketing outsourcing. Or feel free to contact us for free initial consultation and discovery session to see if our approach is the right fit to help you hit your revenue targets.
Reasons to Consider Outsourcing Sales and Marketing
Reasons to Consider Outsourcing Sales and Marketing
For many businesses ready for growth, it’s fairly typical to consider outsourcing sales and marketing and various other functions including: human resources, accounting and IT. And historically, when it comes to growing sales, most companies initially consider building a team of dedicated sales and marketing professionals. The conventional process was to hire lead gen reps and a senior sales professional, and then assign an existing employee with multiple marketing and demand generation functions.
But over the past several years, the requirements of buyers have significantly changed. First, they expect to be able to educate themselves digitally online, and they expect continuing education. Then, they expect to engage with both thought leaders and sales professionals as they make their purchase decision.
So, sales success in this new buyer-driven market now requires a team of sales and marketing professionals with a variety of skill sets, all focused on making it easy for the buyer to buy. These skill sets can be time consuming and difficult to assemble effectively and quickly. As a result, many companies are discovering the old model of hiring and building a sales and marketing team on their own is just not enough to generate what they need to produce sustained sales growth and success.
Consequentially, businesses are increasingly discovering that outsourcing their sales and marketing team is an attractive and smart business decision for growth and many other reasons as well. The different justifications for outsourcing all result in reducing costs, increasing results and lowering risks.
7 Reasons to Consider Outsourcing Sales and Marketing
- Access to strategists who craft an effective plan quickly – Companies that outsource get immediate accesses to integrated sales and marketing strategists. With all the shifts in buyer behavior, companies can work with experienced strategists who will help craft a plan that works for their business and their budget. And these strategists are experienced, they understand the trends and have access to benchmarks and research tools to help get the most out of their budget.
- Access to the right talent for both sales and marketing – Outsourcing sales and marketing provides businesses with the ability to source all the talent needed, quickly. On the sales side, this includes access to lead gen reps, closers and, in some cases, sales engineers. On the marketing side, it includes access to content producers, email marketers, inbound specialists and marketing technologists.
- Outsourcing sales and marketing is more cost effective with less risk – Outsourced sales and marketing gives you access to a team of blended resources. This eliminates the need for paying top dollar to multiple vendors for specialists, or having to carry full-time talent that’s underutilized. This, combined with removing the need for additional office space and eliminating the costs of recruiting and management, results in lower startup costs to get the team off the ground in the short term, and reduces ongoing overhead in the long term.
- Speed to market – Outsourced sales and marketing gets you to market two to three times faster because you gain access to a team that already works well together and has already generated business successfully.
- Immediate systems infrastructure – Selecting, purchasing and assembling all the tools you need for successful growth is expensive and time consuming. Outsourcing gives you access to the databases, automation tools and CRM, with both the technical talent and best practice expertise you need to get the most from the system.
- Operational efficiency – Effective sales growth requires efficient use of budget and talent. Combined with the right systems infrastructure, outsourced sales and marketing allows you to execute cohesive strategies with all the data and measurement you need for effective management. It also provides the middle management layer required for success.
- Proven stability – If you have been involved in sales and/or marketing for any period of time, you will have experienced sales teams and marketing teams that are not always unified and that don’t always “play” well together. When you outsource sales and marketing, you’ll be working with an organization with one shared goal of putting deals into your sales funnel. And this team will have a proven track record of success.
If you would like to learn more about outsourcing sales and marketing, contact us for a FREE consultation and to see if it’s the right fit for you. Give us a call at (720) 279-7511.
How to Use Content Marketing and Automation for Consistent B2B Lead Generation
57% of B2B buyers have already made their purchase decision before ever speaking to a sales person (CEB Global).
Ask any modern marketer one of the keys to generating consistent leads, and one thing they’ll say – if not the first – is automate your content marketing. Automated content marketing makes it easy for you to send compelling messages at a thoughtful and coordinated cadence. Scoring your buyers engagement with the content allows you to understand your audience and where they are in the buyers’ journey. This process is the most effective way to generate and develop leads without breaking the bank. It also produces superior results because content marketing costs 62% less than traditional marketing and generates about 3-times as many leads (DemandMetric). Furthermore, B2B marketers say the number one benefit of marketing automation is the ability to generate more and better leads (Pepper Global). Add analytics to your content marketing automation efforts, and you have a good recipe for generating quality leads consistently – 42% of B2B marketing professionals state that a lack of quality data is their biggest barrier to lead generation (BrightTALK, 2015).
In today’s B2B market, buyers research and engage digitally with content through 67% of the typical B2B buyer’s journey before they even consider talking with someone regarding a purchase(Lenati). In fact, 47% of buyers want to view 3-5 pieces of content before engaging with a sales rep. (Demand Gen Report, 2016). So it’s paramount for your content marketing strategy and lead gen success to run campaigns with enough content to generate trust with buyers looking for you to:
- Prove you understand the problems they face
- Understand what problem your solution solves
- Understand what does this solution do better than the others
- Confirm this solution a good fit for their need
Addressing these FAQs that occur over and over again in your sales process can be automated with educational content that discusses industry trends, common pains, different ways to approach various solutions to industry issues, etc. This simple and substantive information that you can share as a thought leader gives buyers the information they need as they move through their buyers’ journey. Not only does it build trust with the buyer, it offers them insight to make an informed decision about solution options. Because in reality most buyers look at sells reps as a necessary evil. Only 29% of people want to talk to a salesperson to learn more about a product, while 62% prefer to consult a digital content (HubSpot, 2016).
Align Marketing and Sales to Improve Lead Generation Efforts
With the multiple moving parts involved in the modern sales and marketing machine, both departments must work together to generate leads, educate them, and move them towards a purchase decision. Marketo finds that companies with an aligned sales and marketing strategy are 67% better at closing deals. Having an aligned sales and marketing process that works well for generating leads is critical to any firm’s growth. With alignment, both entities understand the target audience, the sales cycle, the appropriate content to send through the proper channels at the right time. The coordination of sales and marketing bridges the communication gaps that otherwise stifle messaging consistency and lead qualification collaboration. By bringing marketing and sales together and making us more effective as a team, we can build a stronger program to meet advisor needs and achieve business results.” – Mary Rosai, Senior Vice President of Institutional Services Marketing, Charles Schwab (Marketo).
Create Authentic and Subtantive Content, Score It and Automate It
If you talk to any modern sales and marketing professional these days about content marketing and how they approach it, you’ll most likely hear four things in common. Think of them as “the four pillars,” of content marketing:
- Tell simple, direct and compelling stories
- Be insightful and helpful
- Leverage data when possible to back-up your claims
- Offer advice without hard pitching your solution
In this day and age, B2B buyers are squeezed for time, so they’re interested in useful, and simple to consume educational content that is easy to access and digest. Case studies, white papers and educational blogs helps buyers compare their efforts, challenges and pains with their peers and/or justify their investment. 9 out of 10 B2B buyers say online content has a moderate to major effect on their purchasing decisions (Lenati). The most tangible way to link your business to B2B buyers needs is to show how you solve problems better than your competition.
Marketing automation allows you to share your educational and thought leadership content along the buyers’ journey to develop trust and stay top of mind with consumers that are not quite ready to buy. Automation tools allow you to score leads according to the value of the content their engaging with, allowing your sales and marketing team to predict their readiness to buy based on the content they consumed. In a recent survey of companies leveraging marketing automation with quality educational content on a a regular basis 80% of users saw their number of converted leads increase, with 77% seeing the number of sales conversions from those leads increase (VB Insight).
Summary
B2B lead generation is one of the top sales challenges facing many SMBs that want to grow their sales revenue. Generating a consistent flow of quality leads is critical to be competitive in the market. Telling simple stories in a systematic way and executing content marketing campaigns using modern sales and marketing operations is crtical to any business that wants to consistently grow their sales funnel in todays buyer driven market. Implementing the right strategy, lead generation techniques, and technologies to allow your sales team to focus on selling to qualified leads, while your marketers focus on sustained and consistent lead generation efforts will improve your sales results and help you meet your revenue targets.
About Us
Gabriel Sales specializes in helping SMBs and Startups grow business with modern sales and marketing operations. Our team can augment gaps in your existing sales and marketing operations or we can be leveraged for full service campaigns that include:
- Integrated Sales and Marketing Strategies
- Database Research and Targeting
- Automation and CRM Systems Best Practices
- Systems Implementation
- Inbound Lead Generation
- Outbound Lead Generation and Lead Scoring
- Sales Qualification
- Closing
To learn more about how we can help you grow your business (or decide if we are the right fit for you), we invite you to visit our page that details our integrated approach to sales and marketing outsourcing. Or feel free to contact us for free initial consultation and discovery session to see if our approach is the right fit to help you hit your revenue targets.
B2B Content Preference Report What your B2B buyer consumes before making a decision
B2B Content Preference Trend: “A typical firm with 100-500 employees, involves an average of 7 people in most buying decisions” (Gartner Group).
In today’s B2B marketplace, time-starved buyers are using digital content to research solutions for their current pains – 67% of the buyer’s journey is now done digitally (Sirius Decisions). So as a modern marketer, it’s critical to understand your B2B buyers’ journey and then to create educational and thought-leadership content around each buyer stage. Content is critical because 80% of business decision-makers prefer to get learn about new solutions from company articles versus a advertisements or cold callers (B2B PR Sense Blog).
So, B2B content preference tells us what types of content are B2B buyers looking for to learn about solutions? Understanding the answer to this question is key to sales success because 57% of B2B buyers have already made their short list for purchase decision before ever speaking to a sales person (CEB Global).
So as content marketing continue to increase in importance and becomes more competitive – 90% of B2B buyers say online content has a moderate to major effect on purchasing decisions (CMO Council) – and we move full-speed ahead in 2018, we wanted to look back at the trends of 2017 to gauge where we should concentrate our efforts according to the research performed by Demand Gen, in its 2017 Content Preferences Survey Report.
We sifted through all the data and pulled out our top 5 B2B content preference statistics for 2017-18 – we’ll keep it short because as the report states: 34% of buyers have less time to devote for reading and research on purchases than last year.
1. 78% say they prefer case studies because it allows them to benchmark themselves against their peers and study real-world examples of a potential solution.
2. 71% prefer content that’s easier to access – 62% want more benchmarking data 87% of buyers give more credence to industry influencer content.
3. Email remains the channel most buyers employ to share content, while LinkedIn remains the leading social network.
4. 97% of B2B buyers prefer prescriptive content that recommends a formulaic solution.
5. 95% of buyers said they are willing to share their name, company, and email in exchange for the following content types:
- white papers (76% said they will share information),
- E-books (63%), webinars (79%),
- case studies (57%)
- third-party/analyst reports (66%).
They’re less willing to register for asset types such as:
- podcasts (19%),
- video (19%)
- infographics (24%)
Summary
Content is the most effective way to educate buyers about your solution and ignite meaningful conversations. It is important to share relevant and educational material. And it is important to share that content consistently and at the right time. Great content organized in a way that creates a memorable experience keeps your buyers engaged and allows them to easily choose the solution that makes sense for them. Delivering content in a calculated and coordinated process allows you to educate and build trust with prospects and move them through the buyers’ journey and into your sales funnel at the same time. And the modern B2B buyer prefers receiving content digitally before engaging with a sales rep. Content can help sales reps sell faster because 63% of consumers need to hear company claims 3-5x before they actually believe it (Edelman Trust Barometer).
About Us
Gabriel Sales specializes in helping SMBs and Startups grow business with modern sales and marketing operations. Our team understands B2B content preference and can augment gaps in your existing sales and marketing operations or we can be leveraged for full service campaigns that include:
- Integrated Sales and Marketing Strategies
- Database Research and Targeting
- Automation and CRM Systems Best Practices
- Systems Implementation
- Inbound Lead Generation
- Outbound Lead Generation and Lead Scoring
- Sales Qualification
- Closing
To learn more about how we can help you grow your business (or decide if we are the right fit for you), we invite you to visit our page that details our integrated approach to sales and marketing outsourcing. Or feel free to contact us for free initial consultation and discovery session to see if our approach is the right fit to help you hit your revenue targets.
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