Understanding Marketing Automation

Marketing automation refers to software platforms and technologies designed to automate repetitive marketing tasks. This allows marketers to more efficiently nurture leads, convert sales, drive ROI and adapt campaigns without manual oversight of routine processes. automation helps businesses scale their marketing and standardize processes using digital data and tracking.

Platforms provide features like email templates, landing pages, lead scoring, campaign creation workflow builders and integration with sales and CRM systems. Leading automation providers include HubSpot, Marketo and Pardot. Tools provided by these b2b marketing consultants and digital data consultancies act as a marketing automation specialist to help streamline campaign management.

Demonstrating Marketing Automation Through Real-Life Examples

Here’s a common example of marketing automation:

A prospect fills out a form to download an e-book from your website. They provide their name, email and other information. Your automation platform automatically captures this lead information and initiates a pre-set workflow.

This could involve adding them to certain email lists and nurture tracks and excluding them from others. It may score their lead based on information provided. A digital data consultancy could help analyze the lead scoring methodology to determine the optimal thresholds for identifying marketing qualified leads. Over the next few weeks, a series of 5 carefully timed emails is automatically deployed to nurture that lead. The messages educate readers further and aim to convert them into marketing qualified leads by directing them to book sales appointments.

Automated lead scoring also helps determine if they become viable sales qualified leads to contact directly. If lead scores don’t rise sufficiently, the automated nurturing cycle repeats to continue engaging them. If lead scores hit thresholds, the contact is automatically handed off to sales reps as a highly qualified lead.

What Makes Marketing Automation Useful?

There are many powerful reasons brands make automation for marketing a centerpiece of customer engagement:

• Consolidates customer data from all channels and CRM in one place to enable smarter marketing and sales decisions and tracking. Provides a holistic view of the customer journey.
• Automatically nurtures leads over time to become sales qualified without direct manual oversight.
• Frees up significant time for marketers and sales teams to focus on more valuable priorities than basic lead follow-ups.
• Helps ensure standardized, respectable contact with every lead to represent brand effectively.
• Enables running and optimizing many outreach campaigns simultaneously.
  Gives insights needed to determine the highest converting marketing assets and tactics.

Platforms and Tools

Many software options provide automation for marketing capabilities. When reviewing providers, it can be helpful to consult with a b2b marketing consultant to explore which platforms would best align to your budget, target customer profiles, in-house expertise and existing martech software stack. A marketing consultant that specializes in b2b can provide valuable outside guidance when it comes to selecting and implementing the right automation tools for your business needs and growth goals.

Here are some top marketing automation platforms to consider:

• HubSpot – Comprehensive inbound marketing and sales software with intuitive automation workflows. Strong mid-market presence.
• Marketo – Fully-featured marketing automation for enterprise brands. Complex but powerful. Adobe also offers Marketo Engage in its Experience Cloud.
• Pardot – Salesforce’s marketing automation offering tightly integrated with Salesforce CRM. An enterprise-ready solution.
• Ontraport – Affordable and intuitive solution well suited to small businesses’ needs.
• Zoho Campaigns – Capable marketing automation with approachable pricing for mid-market firms. Integrates with Zoho’s wider business app ecosystem.

The key is choosing a platform aligned to your resources and needs that can ultimately scale with business growth over time. Many platforms offer free trials to experience capabilities firsthand.

Next important steps involve mapping your ideal automated workflows, importing contacts, configuring lead scoring methodologies, establishing data tracking, designing campaign templates and assets to feed the system, integrating complementary technologies, and equipping marketers to run the software day-to-day.

While the setup process takes concerted planning, refined automation for marketing ultimately lets your business engage customers like never before possible at scale. Approach the beginnings thoughtfully, map it to long-term strategy, and marketing automation will produce game-changing results.

The post Beginner’s Guide To Setting Up Marketing Automation appeared first on Digital Di Consultants.

You have two options:

• Company A is a full-service marketing agency. It offers digital marketing, content marketing, sales enablement, lead generation, website design, and other services to help you improve results from your marketing and inbound sales efforts.
• Company B is a Marketing Operations (MarTech) agency. It focuses on bringing the human element and technology together to drive the company’s business operations forward by bringing marketing, sales, customer service, and leadership team together. It focuses fully on continuous improvement by making data-driven decisions, building effective processes, and a focused approach toward the company’s bottom line – revenue.

Both sound appealing, but how do you choose which is right for your business?

It’s critical to understand the differences between these two types of agencies and how they can impact your business.

The Growth of MOPs Agencies

A marketing operations agency is a marketing partner. It focuses on improving the effectiveness and efficiency of marketing efforts through:

• Data-driven insights – both for customizing audiences and messaging, alongside measuring campaign effectiveness
• Streamlined processes
• Cutting-edge technology
• Performance optimization

The services are built around six key pillars:

• Data: collection, management, and analysis
• Process: effective workflows, automation, and integration
• Technology: leveraging marketing technology for better results
• Analytics: tracking performance and optimizing strategies
• People: MarTech is only as good as the people behind it to make it effective.
• Sales & Marketing Alignment: ensuring marketing efforts drive quality pipeline aligned with sales, customer service, and operations teams.

As the marketing landscape grows more intricate, the demand for specialized marketing services has significantly increased. Gartner’s research supports this claim, revealing that 49% of marketers now have a marketing operations leader in at least one team.

As we’ve laid the foundation for understanding marketing operations agencies, it’s time to explore its significance in marketing.

Factors to Consider When Choosing a MarTech Agency

1. Business goals and objectives
   Evaluate your short-term and long-term goals, and assess which agency type is better suited to help you achieve those targets. MOPs agency will assist you in effectively driving captured leads to sales, and which will eventually help towards a company’s common goal, revenue.
2. Specific marketing challenges
   Identify your unique marketing pain points and determine if a specialized marketing operation or a generic marketing agency would more effectively address those issues.
3. Available resources and budget
   Consider your financial constraints and resource availability. This way, you can ensure the chosen agency can deliver the desired results within your budget.
4. Level of customization and personalization required
   Determine the degree of tailored solutions needed for your marketing efforts. Then, select the agency that can provide the appropriate level of customization and personalization.

Conclusion

As we’ve highlighted above, a MOPs agency ensures all the data, and processes are in place so that you can target your prospects and customers with the right message at the right time, and then report on what is working well to prove marketing-driven revenue. Marketing Operations also pushes the leads through to Sales at the right time, allowing for more targeted sales, and visibility of the prospect’s actions leading to more strategic, and informed sales calls. Marketing Operations allow the marketing team to really drive the start of the lead to cash process whether that is for net new, retention or advocacy.

If you’re ready to elevate your marketing strategy and optimize performance, consider partnering with a leading marketing operations agency like Digital Di Consultants or Sojourn Solutions. Agencies like these can help you and your company achieve their business goals. Get in touch today!

Author:

Shiv Panchagiri
CEO
Digital Di Consultants

Co-author:

Phil Boyden
Sales Consultant
Sojourn Solutions

The post Marketing vs. Marketing Operations Agencies: Uncovering the Key Differences appeared first on Digital Di Consultants.