Many companies are now embarking on the implementation of a marketing automation strategy. A true technical and organizational revolution, it effectively improves the productivity of sales and marketing actions through predefined scenarios, an efficient content strategy, and effective opportunity detection. While it is an important growth lever, implementing such a project often remains complex for companies to develop.
To help you properly structure this approach, we have identified the 7 steps to follow to make your marketing automation project a success.
1.Overcoming preconceptions
Before launching into the creation of an automated marketing strategy, make sure to set aside all preconceived ideas about this practice, whether positive or negative. Keep in mind that :
- Marketing automation does not work miracles : its success is based on implementing a complete Inbound Marketing strategy.
- Marketing automation is not only intended for marketers : this technique helps you acquire leads, which must then be handed over to salespeople. They must therefore master this automated process.
- Marketing automation requires training : for the chosen tool to work perfectly, you will need to master all its ins and outs. This means dedicating a few days of training to learning how to use it, configure it, and read its data.
- Marketing automation is not expensive : before cutting all budgets allocated to communication and marketing, take the time to learn about the cost of such a tool. Expect to pay between €5 000 and €15 000 excluding VAT per year, depending on your needs and the size of your company.
2.Assessing your environment
To make your marketing automation project a success, it must be implemented in an environment that supports it. To do so, ask yourself the following questions :
- Is there close collaboration between the marketing department and the sales team ?
- Have you defined, structured, and documented the profile of your various buyer personas ?
- Do you have a detailed, segmented, and updated prospect/customer database ?
- Are you capable of producing all the content required for the marketing automation strategy ?
- Do your marketers have any knowledge of marketing automation ?
- Are your teams able to commit to an automated project ?
The answer to all these questions must be “ yes ”. If you answered “ no ” to one or more of them, you must first fix the problem before moving on to the next step.
3.Defining your objectives
The prerequisite for launching any strategy concerns the objectives being pursued and the associated performance indicators. Marketing automation can help you achieve several goals :
- Increase lead acquisition
- Increase the conversion of your leads into qualified leads
- Refine your scoring
- Process a large number of leads
- Increase the number of appointments
- Increase the number of participants in your webinars
4.Defining your sales cycles
Since you answered “ yes ” to all the questions in step 2, you therefore have between 3 and 6 different prospect profiles on hand. It is time to define a sales cycle for each of them.
To this end, you will need to create specific content to attract them into your conversion funnel. Obviously, this content must address the main issue of each buyer persona.
Next, you need to establish the form required to capture their contact details and obtain additional information about their needs, their objectives, and even their profile. Without being too complicated, this form must allow you to assign a score to the lead.
Moreover, defining the criteria for your lead scoring takes place during this stage. Depending on the score received, your automated scenario will be different.
5.Creating and planning your content strategy
The content strategy is inseparable from your marketing automation. It is your articles, white papers, infographics, tutorials, videos… that will attract the prospect and nurture them throughout their consideration process.
For each persona, you will need to create a workflow that goes from acquisition to conversion. Hence the importance of knowing each segment of your prospects perfectly ! You need to think through and create the content that will :
- Rank for the queries entered in search engines
- Encourage them to fill out your form
- Give them additional information they consider useful
- Prove your company’s skills and expertise to them
- Convince them to book an appointment with a salesperson, sign up for a trial offer, etc.
6.Ensuring team cohesion
For your marketing automation strategy to work perfectly, avoid creating it on your own in isolation. Your management team, the marketing department, and the salespeople (at the very least) must be involved in the project. Involve them, from the very beginning, in implementing this strategy and regularly schedule meetings to discuss the progress of the project.
The employees directly concerned by this technique will need to work together to build an efficient automated strategy. That is the key to success !
7.Choosing your marketing automation platform
Now comes the time to choose your marketing automation platform, as many players are now present in this market. Each platform addresses different issues, depending on your company’s needs, its size, or the volume of contacts to be managed. Each offers you what is needed to implement your project quickly. It is not a matter of rushing onto the most renowned platform or the one a colleague recommended.
To find out more and guide your thinking around implementing a marketing automation project, download this white paper which will help you make your project a success.
