In 2019, French B2B companies stated that only 27% of their leads are generated by their Marketing Department (B2B Lead Barometer, Companeo, June 2019)! There is therefore huge room for growth for marketers, while 80% of business leaders and salespeople identify as the main cause of these poor performances a failing Marketing/Sales alignment.
Against this backdrop, it’s not surprising that investing in a Marketing Automation tool is among the priorities of Marketing Directors for 2019 (Adobe’s Digital Trends 2019 report). Let’s be clear, however: Marketing Automation is a tool that supports an overall marketing strategy and, in particular, Inbound Marketing. It won’t revolutionize your performance with a wave of a magic wand if it isn’t accompanied by a more far-reaching discussion that goes beyond each department’s own view.
To ensure the success of your Marketing Automation strategy, you need to give yourselves the means: you will need time (count 6 months to 1 year before you see the first results) and resources to produce the content required for your campaigns to run properly.
In short, whether you’re a large company or an SME, get support from an agency to help you with the following points and optimize your ROI:
1. Alignment between Marketing and Sales
The agency brings an outside perspective and cross-functional expertise to reconcile marketing and sales teams. First of all, to launch your content strategy, the agency helps you define your targets by bringing Marketing and Sales together to create buyer personas: both departments therefore share the same view of the target prospect! These personas will enable Marketing to set a clear editorial direction.
Your agency helps you carry this process through by leveraging its cross-functional view to get Sales and Marketing aligned on the definition of a hot lead (Sales Qualified Lead). Thanks to this upstream work, the content strategy attracts qualified leads (who match the personas) and Marketing provides sales teams with hot leads to increase their conversion rate!
2. A Marketing Automation strategy within your overall strategy
Next, it’s time to build your Marketing Automation strategy based on the foundations put in place beforehand. Here too, agency support is valuable because it provides the necessary perspective and helps consider the customer journey as a whole. By mapping the customer journey (up to, for example, its use of after-sales service), the agency highlights low-performing touchpoints—or ones that have not been identified at all—making it an opportunity to automate that relationship. Agencies specialized in Marketing Automation have often started by building an Automation strategy for their own lead lifecycle and then run several similar projects with their clients: they’re well equipped to advise you on your scenarios, establish priority ranking from the outset, and handle the technical setup.
This experience also enables them to implement rigorous processes, define relevant KPIs, and monitor them so they can propose ongoing improvements.
Digital agencies often combine multiple skills to offer you global strategies: for example, strong SEO will boost the results of your Marketing Automation strategy, just like a well-thought-out website.
3. Resources to fuel Inbound Marketing
The fuel for your Marketing Automation strategy is content: it must be relevant, segmented, rich, and renewed regularly. If you don’t have the internal resources to handle this production, consider getting support from an agency that has these resources so you can subcontract it.
Moreover, in 2019, 46% of B2B companies that did not have a Marketing Automation tool stated that their main obstacle was a lack of human resources to manage the tool (2019 B2B Lead Barometer, Companeo). For the operational onboarding of the software, you can choose to have your teams trained by the software publisher or delegate it entirely to the agency that supports you. Some publishers (this is the case for Hubspot or Webmecanik) even certify their partner agencies, demonstrating that teams are regularly trained in the operational and strategic use of the tool.
4. Take the tool further
Thanks to their expertise, agencies help you go further to maximize your ROI with your tool. Let them guide you beyond simple marketing uses and think about Sales Automation (for example, quote follow-ups) or HR Automation (candidate management).
5. Advising you on the tool that best suits you
Agencies generally know the main tools available on the market. Each tool has specific features that target different audiences, and some criteria are very important when choosing a tool: price of course, but also whether such a native plugin exists to connect your CRM, a more or less open API to meet your needs for flexibility, or even hosting in France to comply with GDPR.
Agencies have the resources, skills, and time that may be missing for very small businesses and SMEs, as well as the cross-functional perspective and flexibility that large groups often need. So, to ensure the success of your Marketing Automation project, don’t hesitate to get support from a specialized agency!
You can find here the list of Webmecanik certified partner agencies.
Want to become a partner to improve your clients’ ROI? Tell us!
