Understand Marketing Automation
Learning Objectives
After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:
- Understand the value of marketing automation for your company.
- Define common marketing automation terminology.
What Is Marketing Automation?
Marketing automation is technology that manages marketing processes and multifunctional campaigns, across multiple channels, automatically. In its most basic form, marketing automation is a set of tools designed to streamline and simplify some of the most time-consuming responsibilities of modern marketing and sales roles. In using it, businesses can target customers with these automated tools across all channels of social media and digital platforms seamlessly. This allows both groups more time to focus on higher-order problems.
When visitors or prospects engage with your brand, they’re looking for something more than a sales pitch. They want to trust your brand and feel good about buying what you’re selling. Lead generation isn’t about getting every lead you can find and sending them on to your sales team. It’s about finding the right lead through the right channels.
When thinking about your lead generation strategy, you need to figure out how you can get those visitors converted into prospects, and then move them from the top of the funnel to the bottom. Lead generation is all about awareness. It’s bringing your company to your prospects’ attention by making prospects aware of the value of your product or service.
Then, once you have the prospect’s attention, keep their interest through lead nurturing. This is where marketing automation tools really help you tailor your message to reach the customer when, where, and how they prefer. Ideally, you want to fill the top of your funnel (stages one and two) with as many quality prospects as possible. Let’s look at things to consider to do just that.
Not every lead or prospect is the same. How do we know if a lead is a good one? In general, there are five types of leads or prospects.
Visitor |
Any potential prospect that you know something about but still need an email address for |
|---|---|
|
Working
|
A prospect you are currently communicating with |
|
Nurturing
|
A prospect that you are communicating with but is not ready to buy |
Unqualified |
A lead that is not interested (also known as a dead lead) |
|
Qualified
|
A prospect who is ready to do business and should be passed on to your sales team |
The goal of your company’s lead generation strategy is to convert as many prospects into qualified prospects or leads as possible.
Generate your prospects and leads. Go digital! Meet your customers where they are—and that is online. Building a great website and landing pages is a good place to start. Then expand to social media, blogs, and email campaigns that generate more prospects and leads that funnel traffic back to those landing pages.
Meet your customers where they are on their journey. Use content and resources that answer a business need customers may have. Give them opportunities to act to improve their own business. This includes white papers, free trials, webinars, and so on, on how customers can enhance their tactics and find greater success. Learn how your business can help their business. The key here is positioning your company to consistently add value to the prospect’s business.
Let’s define some other common marketing terminology before delving in further.
Term |
Definition |
|---|---|
Lead |
A potential customer who at some point decided to purchase a product or service with a company. |
Sales Funnel |
A marketing term that describes the journey potential customers go through, from prospecting to purchase. While a sales funnel consists of several steps, the actual number varies with each company’s sales model. |
Visitors |
Anonymous people who visit your website. |
Prospects |
A site visitor who has given you their email address and opted into marketing communications from your company. |
Tracking code |
A unique tracking code that each Account Engagement campaign has that tracks visitor and prospect activity when you place it on your web pages. |
Cookies |
Small pieces of data sent from a web browser and stored on the user’s computer.
|
Marketing Consent |
The practice of honoring and respecting customers’ wishes in regard to communication with your company and opting out of certain types of data sharing. |
Conversion |
The point the potential customer gives their email address and becomes a prospect. |
Campaigns |
These mean something different in Account Engagement and Salesforce. An Account Engagement campaign refers to the first marketing campaign that the prospect interacted with, similar to a source field. A Salesforce campaign is more like a multitouch campaign. Prospects can be related to many Salesforce campaigns at one time with different statuses in each one, but a prospect will always have an initial first-touch Campaign in Account Engagement. |
That’s a lot of information to cover quickly but knowing these terms will set you up for success throughout the rest of this module.
This is Leung Chan, a marketing genius at Get Cloudy. She has great ideas and is a master at executing them, making her a big part of Get Cloudy is growing rapidly. Every time Leung kicks off a new campaign, new leads increase by 3x.
And this is Alan Johnson. He was promoted last year from the sales ranks and now leads a team of closers. While he may be new to managing people, he’s doing well so far and the team has been thriving.
Leung and Alan are your examples as you work through this content. They work for Get Cloudy, a high-tech consulting firm specializing in CRM implementations. They’ve built a successful business as a Salesforce SI partner and an ISV partner. Their implementation experience includes Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud Engagement, and Communities.
Alan is working at the Acme Technology conference for Get Cloudy. Before going to the conference, a visitor does a search online and sees Get Cloudy as a potential solution for their company. They access the site but provide no further information that first time. Not to worry—Get Cloudy has tracking code on their site, so the visitor’s been cookied to track their activity.
A few weeks later, the same visitor attends the Acme Technology show and uses their laptop to fill out a form to enter a drawing for Get Cloudy’s tablet raffle. The visitor enters their email address and other information into the form and is now a prospect and has been added to the welcome engagement program and the conference follow-up campaign. The information they provided on the form, like location and email address, was used through progressive profiling to help customize the welcome email, through (mail merge fields, email address, location, and so on).
Now that you understand the value of marketing automation for any business, let’s look at how Account Engagement’s marketing automation tools can help you and your business thrive.