What is Marketing Automation?

What is Marketing Automation?
Michael White, Jun 2011

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If you increase automation in Marketing, you can generate more sales leads, make more sales and earn more money

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The B2B buying process is shifting to the web
More of the buying process happens online and more of it is controlled by customers
B2B Marketing units can play a key role in supporting Sales by driving sales leads and opportunities through the use of digital marketing, “Sales 2.0” techniques and Marketing Automation

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The problem
Marketing units in business-to-business companies spend a lot of their time trying to identify the contact details of people who might be interested in their products or services – this is ‘lead generation’.
When they obtain contacts they pass them to their Sales team who pursue them and try to convert them to customers.
But the way Marketing units generate and handover contacts is often badly automated and inefficient
And lead generation at a lot of companies does not reflect changes in buyer behaviour

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The problem
How buying has changed for B2B
1950s to 1990s
Sales teams find and persuade the buyers
Buyers start to search online, find product information from multiple vendors
1997
Buyers confer with each other via online networks
2006
Sales now use online tools to prospect, generate and qualify leads
Marketing Automation
2009
“Sales 2.0”

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The problem
Typical problems with Marketing Lead Generation today
Online lead generation is not systematically managed
Marketing teams generate a limited number of leads from one or two sources such as tradeshows
Marketing teams pass every contact they generate to Sales without sorting out the good from the bad
Sales teams believe the leads they get from their Marketing units are low quality and so do not follow them up effectively
Some leads are not followed up within a reasonable time frame, or at all
Marketing can’t see what happens to the leads they pass to Sales
Marketing can’t compare the quality of leads generated from two different sources because they can’t track their progress in sales
Marketing teams are not sure which activities generate ‘good’ sales leads
Marketing aren’t sure which elements of promotional spend produce the best sales results

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The solution
Marketing Automation means using technology and digital marketing to generate more leads and to process those leads more effectively so you make more sales
To generate more contacts you can use company web-sites, Google pay-per-click ads, email marketing campaigns, search engine optimization and social media
Once these contacts have been captured, you can automate a lot of what happens next:
Qualification, which means figuring out how likely the contact is to become a buyer based on information about her company, her location, how often she’s come to your web-site, other online behaviours we can observe .
Routing to sales: you can apply sensible rules about which sales guy should get what lead, you can specify how quickly a lead should be acted upon, and you can provide your sales staff with much richer background and profile information on the contact.
Monitoring: you can see which sources tend to generate high quality leads, and what kind of leads are more likely to convert to customers; this helps you learn how to spend your marketing money with greatest effect.
Using this kind of automation will help you:
Generate more leads, faster
Pass better quality leads to Sales, so they don’t waste time chasing someone who has no real interest in your products
Cut down wasteful spend

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The solution
Lead Generation
Lead Management

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Key Components of Marketing Automation
Lead Generation – support online and offline lead generation
Lead Capture – capture leads at the website, on social media, elsewhere
Lead Qualification – gather information on the lead, including past behavior, contact history
Lead Scoring – assign a numeric score to the lead based on standard criteria – high scores go to sales, medium scores stay with marketing, low scores get qualified out
Lead Nurturing – manage ongoing interaction with mid-score leads until they become ‘sales ready’
Lead handoff – integration to sales force automation and CRM systesms
Lead recycle – taking back a lead from sales
Other elements of marketing automation include:
Campaign management – managing email, Google ad and other campaigns
Marketing resource management – managing resources such as content and graphics
Analytics – dashboarding marketing performance, identifying improvements

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It reflects how people buy today
In a survey of technology buyers in the US, 80% of these buyers said they found the vendor, not the other way round.
Source: MarketingSherpa B2B Technology Marketing Benchmark Survey 2008
Buyers are doing most of their initial research online before initiating conversations with vendors and are better informed at an earlier stage.
We're moving from a focus on 'outbound' techniques like press advertising, mail shots and cold calling, to 'inbound' techniques based on websites, online ‘pay-per-click’ advertising and ‘content-based’ marketing.

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There’s a clear business case
There’s a clear return on investment for Marketing Automation.
Gartner has estimated that automating marketing processes can increase revenue by 20% and reduce marketing costs by 25%
A CMO Council Survey estimated that 80% of leads are either lost, ignored or discarded. Calculate the proportion of your marketing budget you spend on lead generation; how much is 80% worth?
MarketingSherpa also estimated that around 75% of leads generated by most companies are not followed up if they’re not a short-term opportunity (i.e. going to close in this quarter). With the average B2B lead costing about $100 to generate, that can quickly add up to a lot of money.
So, if you want to scale up your sales, you’ll have to scale up demand generation and that in turn means you should to start looking at marketing automation technologies.
Luckily, there are a lot of technologies becoming available, most of them delivered as software-as-a-service, with low entry costs and no installation or desktop deployments necessary.

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Objectives for Marketing Automation
Generate more leads
Generate better quality leads (i.e. generate more 'hot' leads and less 'cold' ones)
Ensure we respond to all leads (i.e. that none of them go un-contacted)
Make sure this response happens faster than at present (e.g. minutes or hours rather than days)
Ensure we respond to all leads consistently, using an approach based on information we have about the lead, rather than based on a given sales person's current location, their workload or their access to the CRM system or other circumstantial drivers
Record sufficient information about how we manage leads so that we can usefully analyze them and draw conclusions about how to improve our approach

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Objectives for Marketing Automation
Generate more leads
Convert more leads to sales

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Automate each stage of the funnel
Digital marketing
Top
Middle
Bottom
CRM
Close deals
$

Email michael.white@dohertywhite.com
Mobile +353 86 383 8981
Phone +353 7493 81986
Twitter @michaelgwhite
www.dohertywhite.com
DohertyWhite helps business-to-business (B2B) technology companies to generate leads online and convert those leads to sales. We provide marketing automation, website design, digital marketing and PR services.

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What is Marketing Automation?

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