Starting out strong
Marketing automation is an effective strategy that allows you to put your marketing efforts on a pedestal as well as, develop the crucial relationship between your marketing and sales teams.
When you have gained familiarity with your marketing automation policy you will discover the wide range of people, skills and knowledge that it will retrieve from throughout your company.
Having a sound comprehension in the early stages will allow for operations to then progress efficiently for future campaigns.
Delegating roles and responsibilities
Your sales, IT, designers and content producers will be working side-by-side in order to produce campaigns and manage databases, therefore making up your marketing automation team. In doing so, it is vital to delegate who you will require and the function they will be responsible for.
What you will gain early on:
- You will be able to distinguish if there are any gaps in assignments that need to be filled by hiring or assistance from an agency.
- Each team remember will be well aware of their responsibilities in the process and how they can best utilise their time.
- When you are ready to implement your marketing automation you’ll be well equipped in creating users and deciding access/permissions.
Training and developing skills
Through the use of Marketo and Hubspot, either online or onsite, you will be trained in your use of marketing automation. Both companies offer their own university courses and have tools that can be utilized online as well as specialist trainers who can provide training specifically for your company.
What you will gain early on:
- Your team will be ready to approach campaigns immediately
- By making use of your company’s marketing automation skills from the beginning it will make the monetary investment worthwhile.
- You will be able to distinguish the gaps in the company and the extra training that needs to be undertaken in order to succeed.
Database analysis and segmentation
Through a sound knowledge of who is in your database you will then be able to determine who your target markets are and the demographics in which they are identified with and therefore what will appeal to them. By utilizing this information, you will be able to aid your engineering of up selling and cross selling to existing customers as well as developing new leads.
What you will gain early on:
- As you become more familiar with your marketing automation platform it will be important to keep this information on hand. Therefore, you will start developing new ways to apply it when you are setting up new customers and integrating apps.
- You will be able to distinguish between relevant and irrelevant data in your CRM, which will aid you in mapping, which will we go onto explore shortly.
Planning for CRM integration
The relevant information that will be travelling from one platform to another is crucial in executing an effective CRM integration. Planning for each field that needs to be mapped or created in the marketing automation is a very important step in any integration. You will need to make use of your CRM administrator, your marketing team, your platforms out-of-the-box-fields and in specific cases your IT team.
A spreadsheet can be the simplest way to achieve this. It will require one column for CRM fields and another for your automation fields. As such, it will match the fields as necessary and identify any custom fields that need to be introduced.
What you will gain early on:
- The chances of errors will be greatly reduced. Therefore, resulting in a much more successful integration and therefore can be signed off by all relevant parties
- The most relevant information will become evident when exploring your CRM and marketing automation platform. Therefore, excluding all irrelevant information.
Tracking your website
Installing tracking codes across your website and landing pages once your marketing automation is established is crucial.
What you will gain early on:
- You can analyse large amounts of data in relation to visitors on your site
- Frequent users can be tracked, even if you don’t have their information
- Matching data between people who submit their information can be done which will give you historical data on how they have taken to your content previously.
Sales Alignment
Marketing automation boasts for its ability to align sales and marketing to creating users itself and working as an effective scoring model. Therefore, the sales team plays a vital role in overseeing how the marketing automation platform is set up and how from then on it is utilized.
Benefits of completing this step early on:
- You will gain a clear understanding of the goals, needs and processes of your sales team which will allow you to specify everything that is necessary for your sales team. Such things will include their roles and responsibilities to lead scoring and CRM integration
- Team work skills will be strengthened early on and will help towards the success of campaigns that require email marketing directly from the salespeople themselves
- Consistent goals in relation to marketing automation and good leads throughout the company can be established. Furthermore, making sure that the sales team are fully aware of all the communications that have been established up until the point where they make contact with the lead.
Thought, time and effort is necessary for a successful marketing automation to be established. Taking the time to understand the crucial aspects of what you will be working with will allow you the best chance in succeeding the first time.
