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Marketing Automation Systems are on the Rise

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Guest post by Gene Morris.

Two common business terms combined describe the an increasingly popular outreach tool: marketing automation. According to marketing research firm Raab Associates, the marketing automation system industry will reach $750 million in 2013, growing 50 percent from 2012. Developing a personal rapport with businesses has been an enduring characteristic of successful B2B marketing, so it seem counterintuitive to rely on automated emails and social media platforms. But marketing automation systems aren’t meant to replace personal engagement. Rather, they provide a way to stay regularly connected to potential clients.

Marketing Automation Systems Automate Lead-Nurturing EmailsOnce an unproven strategy, marketing automation has emerged as a vital B2B tactic. As you scale your brand outreach, marketing automation systems can keep you relevant, in touch and on time.

What is Marketing Automation?

Nurturing a lead into a customer is a gradual process. A series of emails may pique a client’s interest, followed by phone calls to get more in depth and a meeting to seal a deal. In the past, if your business wanted to market to a wide audience, it took an armada of dedicated outreach specialists. Marketing automation software handles some of the menial tasks that take up marketers’ time. Professionals can pass along first-contact emails to marketing automation systems, enabling professionals to focus on prospects that have expressed interest. Automation systems can also remind professionals when it’s time to check in with a client, follow up with a prospect or search for new leads.

Marketing automation systems can benefit both B2B companies large and small, whether you’re looking for cash flow at American Express or growing a customer base from scratch.

How Does it Work?

The systems may be automated, but the set-up is under your control. To launch an automated email campaign, marketers draft templates explaining the benefits of a potential partnership. The system can either send out emails automatically or pass through an approval system to ensure relevance. A web display marketing campaign used to require hours of research to find relevant sites at appropriate rates. Now, marketing automation systems can search for web sites in your industry at your price. Systems like Marketo can unify marketing and sales efforts. Marketo can connect with Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics systems, further simplifying the outreach process.

Why Should I Use It?

Marketing automation systems are a significant step up in sophistication from email service providers (ESPs). We might look back some day and think how trite these systems were compared to (blank), but in the current marketing space, marketing automation is proving its worth. The Internet has opened up a new sea of advertising space, and savvy companies are using technology to get on top of technology. It’s the only logical solution. The longer you wait to adopt technology-driven marketing strategies, the lower you’ll be on the digital marketing totem poll. These systems will help you win business.

About the author: While finishing his degree in finance, Gene Morris enjoys spending his free time reading and writing about business and tools for financial management.

Book Review: Revenue Engine

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In the foreword to Revenue Engine: Why Revenue Performance Management is the Next Frontier of Competitive Advantage by Steve Woods and Alex Shootman, Eloqua CEO Joe Payne writes that “This is not a book about marketing. It’s not about sales. This is a book about the only thing that matters: revenue.”

Revenue Engine by Steve Woods and Alex ShootmanWoods, CTO and co-founder of Eloqua, a provider of marketing automation software, and Shootman, the company’s Chief Revenue Officer, present a bold and comprehensive framework for realigning sales and marketing groups around a data-driven process for maximizing revenue. The authors rather audaciously position the concept of revenue performance management (RPM) as “the final frontier for transformative investment,” following in the footsteps of the development of the principles of scientific management, total quality management and supply chain management.

Whether or not readers are ultimately persuaded by the authors’ arguments, there’s no question that their diagnosis of the changing landscape for b2b and considered consumer purchases hits the mark. Buyers now control the process; through search and social channels, buyers now complete 70% of their decision process before making their first contact with a sales person.

Yet at the same time, marketing and sales professionals now have access to far more data about what types of information buyers are seeking, where they are looking, what questions they are asking and what sources catch their attention, than ever before. Woods’ first book, Digital Body Language, explained how to capture and interpret that data; this book carries the process through to its conclusion, showing how to tailor content and communications based on that data to maximize sales revenue.

After examining the changing landscape and explaining why the traditional separation of sales and marketing functions no longer makes sense, Woods and Shootman delve into the buyer behavior and psychology, and what can be learned about these elements through online data collection; a framework for optimizing media and content investments; and how clean, high-quality data provides the foundation for the revenue engine.

Part 2 of the book, sub-headed “Stop Crunching Numbers—Start Crushing Them” delves into the detail of data collection, cleansing, benchmarking, optimization and utilization. It’s a practical field guide to building and running a revenue engine, though this isn’t an exercise to be taken lightly. It is in many respects a fundamental reordering of marketing and sales functions based on observation, testing, measurement and continuous improvement.

Among the insights offered along the way:

Search and social must work together to connect buyers with content: “The resulting challenge for marketers is interesting. If searches become more precise, we must strive to create a wealth of interesting, relevant content at all phases of the buying process. Similarly, as search results are increasingly guided by social influence, we must also build influence and reputation among the appropriate audiences so that our results are found to be relevant.”

Understand your primary marketing challenge in order to fix “leaks” in the buying process. Most marketing challenges fall into one of three broad categories: the Flying Car (“your business can solve a problem that most of the world is unaware can be solved…so potential buyers blindly continue with their inefficient processes…and do not actively look for a solution:);  the Wallflower (“you are not a vendor that comes to mind when prospective buyers look for alternatives”); or the Red-Headed Stepchild (“you are evaluated when potential buyers look for solutions, but buyers rarely select your solution”).

Your marketing emails had better provide value. “One or two uninteresting or non-valuable messages from a particular source will quickly lead the user to to reflexively delete or ignore any future content. This is known as an ’emotional unsubscribe’—the recipient has effectively tuned out of the communication.”

Provide prospects with multiple methods for direct contact. “Active searches for information also occur when prospects call a vendor organization, submit an online request for information, or attend a tradeshow seeking answers to specific questions” (or engage directly in an online conversation with a vendor representative).

Understand who the key influencers are in your market and engage them. “The most reliable way—indeed, perhaps the only way to ensure your messages are fully discoverable in social media is to build strong relationships with the influencers in your space who are more likely to share those messages and ensure that your messages are sufficiently interesting, relevant and non-salesly.”

Use multiple methods to help prospects discover your solutions. “There are three primary avenues for buyers to become aware of your company and solutions: by actively seeking information (often via search), passively encountering information (often via ads), and being influenced to consider new information (often via social media).” PR can help with any of these methods as well.

And there’s much more.

Smaller companies with modest lead flows may find that this motor has more horsepower than they need, but marketing executives at mid-sized and larger b2b firms should give the Revenue Engine a test drive. They may just find it to be the key to a faster and more efficient vehicle for accelerating sales growth.

Book Review: eMarketing Strategies for the Complex Sale

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Marketing automation systems—from vendors like Eloqua, Marketo, Genoo, Manticore and others—are great tools for moving prospective buyers along the path from interest to desire to action. But they’re just that: tools. Without a solid content strategy to support that movement through the marketing and sales cycle, all you’ve got is a nice email system. The brilliant Ardath Albee provides the missing piece, a reliable recipe marketing automation, demand generation and content marketing success in her new book, eMarketing Strategies for the Complex Sale.

Some business books are mere “information snacks,” but Ardath provides much more here, a substantial three-course meal of marketing strategy: she covers the “why,” “what” and “how” of using compelling content, email, social media and microsites to turn prospects into buyers.

eMarketing Strategies book coverDivided into six sections, as an appetizer the book starts off with eMarketing Essentials, the “why” of using content marketing for complex sales. Here she expounds on the shift in technology buying processes I outlined in a previous post, How Social Media Changed the Sales Cycle into the Buying Cycle. Buyers today expect to be able to gather the vast majority of the information they need to make a purchasing decision without ever talking to a sales rep. They begin in most cases with some basic online research, which is why web presence optimization has become so critical. From there, they will “raise their hands,” looking for more information from specific vendors, most commonly by downloading a white paper or  registering for a webinar. What happens next is critical; prospects at this stage are not usually ready to be “sold,” but they are open to being convinced, through compelling thought-leadership content, that your company is uniquely capable of solving their problems. In this first section, Ardath explains this shift, what it means for marketing and selling complex products, and how the vendors who understand and capitalize on this shift will benefit in increased sales and a stronger competitive position.

Sections two and three, Customer Consensus and Natural Nurturing, begin getting into the meat of the strategy. Here the author outlines the crucial preparatory steps to a successful lead nurturing strategy. Begin by creating buyer personas—who are your buyers? What problems do they face? What keeps them awake at night? What information do they need to make a decision? Just as importantly, what information do they need to be your advocate within their organization? It’s critical at this stage to recognize the different personas you’ll need to appeal to in crafting a content creation strategy. The primary buyer for a complex b2b product or service is often someone in operations seeking to solve a problem or perform a process faster/cheaper/better. However, the purchasing committee will generally include someone from IT, the CFO, and in smaller firms possibly even the CEO. You’ll need different messages to appeal to all of these groups, based on their concerns (technical simplicity, financial impact, high-level business benefits, etc.).

Sections four and five, Contagious Content and Persistent Progression (gotta love the alliteration of these titles), are the main course. With an understanding of who your buyers are and what problems they are focused on solving in place, the chapters in these two sections walk through the creation, development and tuning of thought-leadership content to attract buyers and move them through the decision process. The section begins an explanation of the three types of content you’ll need to provide to buyers: education (what buyers need to know in order to think strategically about solving a problem or taking advantage of a new opportunity), expertise (showing why your product or service is uniquely capable of addressing their issues) and evidence (proving through case studies, customer stories and third-party endorsements that your offering provides real business benefits).

This is followed by a critical chapter (one of the best in the book) on “catch factors”—which are, in Ardath’s words, “the preferences and aversions that form a lead’s ‘gut reaction’ to your communication.” These include urgency (why you message is important to prospects, now), impact (what’s in it for the reader?), effort (how much energy is required to absorb the information—is it straightforward and easily digestible, or full of meaningless gobbledygook?), reputation (what’s known about your company, its image and brand?) and intent (do readers perceive that you are sincerely trying to help them, or merely doing a “hard sell”?).

The section continues with guidance on designing marketing stories, organizing content to move prospects through the buying process, scoring leads, and managing the interaction between marketing and sales, all illustrated with pertinent case studies.

The final section of the book—the “dessert,” if you will—is Meaningful Metrics, which provides a framework for what and how to measure results, for purposes of reporting and continual improvement.

The book is a bit repetitive in places, but it’s repetition with a purpose; this is important stuff!  eMarketing Strategies for the Complex Sale is a must-read for anyone involved in making demand generation and marketing automation successful within their organization, and increasing sales using content marketing strategies.

Marketing Automation: Like Bringing a Gun to a Knife Fight

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One of the biggest challenges b2b marketers face is what to do with all of those “names” that come into your system that aren’t really “leads” yet; contacts collected from white paper downloads, webinar registrations, trade shows and other activities. How do you separate hot leads from long-term leads from tire-kickers? How can you efficiently nurture those long-term prospects, learning more about their interests in the process, until they are really ready to engage with sales?

Those are the types of questions marketing automation / demand generation software vendors seek to address with their offerings. They apply technology to a difficult process. For b2b companies who are able to use such software effectively, the competitive advantage is akin to Indiana Jones taking on his would-be assassin in Raiders of the Lost Ark:

The challenge for b2b marketers in adopting marketing automation / demand gen systems isn’t with the technology, which is stable and reasonably easy to use. It’s with internal processes, office politics and other issues. In the scene above, although Indy clearly had the technology advantage, if he’d been a lousy shot, or didn’t have his gun loaded properly, he’d have ended up as shredded professor in a hurry.

I recently had the opportunity to sit down with Steve Woods, CTO and co-founder at marketing automation provider Eloqua, for a wide-ranging conversation about the future of marketing and the challenges faced by those adopting marketing automation / demand generation systems. Here are six key points that surfaced from our conversation.

1. “Marketing automation” is a misleading term. You can’t really automate marketing, of course, any more than you can automate gourmet cooking or great painting. “Demand generation” is a better term, though still not precise. “Software-that-helps-turn-raw-names-into-qualified-leads-by-delivering-the-right-content-at-the-right-time-and-monitoring-response” would be most accurate, but kind of a mouthful.

2. The buying process has fundamentally changed. Many marketers are starting to get this. Most sales people still don’t. Buyers no longer rely on sales people for basic information or exploratory “consultation.” They get 95% of the information they need from the Internet—online publications, analyst reports, vendor websites, blogs and other social media—before they have any contact with sales. They expect sales and marketing pros to be using the web as well to understand their problems before the sales conversation even starts. The key role of sales is to provide that last 5% needed to reach a buying decision: the company’s differentiating value, or what pain the prospect will experience if they don’t buy the right product or service.

3. Customers are those who’ve advanced from email service providers (ESPs). Small b2b companies often manage their email campaigns through hosted email services like Constant Contact, VerticalResponse or ExactTarget; when they’ve outgrown those and need more sophisticated segmentation, response tracking and automated response features, plus the ability to create and manage targeted microsites, they graduate to marketing automation / demand generation systems.

4. Building the logic behind the nurturing process is the hard part. Marketers who can do this effectively will command (or should be able to command) a premium. The technology is relatively easy. The hard part is mapping out the information delivery process. If we know that John Doe is the CIO at a medical manufacturing company with $100 million in revenue, what information should we deliver first? And we offer him two paths in that message, what should we provide if he chooses path A? What should we do differently if he chooses path B?

5. It won’t work if the processes and incentives between sales and marketing aren’t aligned. If, for example, marketers are focused on delivering leads who meet a defined threshold of interest as soon as they cross a certain point, but sales reps are comped on the number of calls they make, there is a fundamental disconnect. Calling even the right prospect at the wrong time, or trying to sell them the wrong product, can destroy the value of the marketing investment made to that point.

6. There is a crying need for this. It aligns vendor messages with buyer needs, saving money and corporate reputations. Prospective buyers are overloaded with information. Sending them more junk—information they can’t use or that isn’t relevant to them—makes your company look out of touch and reduces your ability to get the sale. Quick example: I used to have high-speed Internet service through AT&T. They would actually send me promotional mail for the dial-up service. Why on earth would they waste my time and their money trying to get me to downgrade my service with them? On the other hand, providing compelling information at the right time can reduce the sales effort required, shorten sales cycles, and make you look smarter than your competition as well.

The “science” of marketing automation / demand generation is well-established and readily available. The winning users will be those who manage to get the “art” part right.

Note: this post was originally published on the WebMarketCentral blog in September 2009.

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