Marketing Automation Helps a Small Staff Do Big-Time Work

As a small team, it might seem like you are stuck in an endless loop of tasks—there just aren’t enough people to distribute the workload, and you find yourself wearing multiple hats. Often this switching cost bleeds your team’s total capacity.

Take for instance lead nurturing. You can spend months, even a year or more, crafting and sending personalized pieces of information to each consumer based on their needs, interests, and buying phase—all in the hopes of closing the deal.

With marketing automation, you eliminate repetitive tasks like emails and multiply the value of each team member. Your team of four will now be able to get the work of 8 done.

Here’s how you can beef up your team’s efforts and help them waste less time on time-consuming tasks.

Marketing Automation Increases Productivity

When you’re a small team, you know the name of the game is speed and efficiency. The quicker you are able to complete tasks, and do them with precision, the greater the return for your company.  

Marketing automation software was designed with marketing teams of all sizes in mind—its purpose to automate marketing actions so marketers can be more productive and efficient when it comes to sales flow, accelerating lead nurturing, and more easily gathering data around marketing campaigns.

Automated Sales Flow

When working within an organizational structure, it is critical that information and tasks get moved from one team to the next—in a synced fashion. Especially if you are a B2B marketer, you must move lead and lead information quickly to sales.

This can be challenging when you are running a variety of marketing campaigns and are crunching data attached to those campaigns. You can easily miss an opportunity to catch a lead when they are warm or hot or, due to your hands being tied with other marketing tasks, you can move too slowly and turn that hot lead warm or warm lead cold.

If you want to move leads as soon as they are ready, and thus bear the fruit of your marketing efforts, marketing automation is the way to get it done faster—and with little time commitment.

When integrated with your CRM, marketing automation becomes an intuitive tool that examines and tracks consumer behavior and based on the specifications you’ve set, it automatically scores leads according to implicit buying signals like form submissions or page views.

Consequently, the system shores up the best leads, removing the guesswork from your team. Those leads are then sent to the sales team via the system, which sends a trigger email for you.

In the big scheme of it all, you are getting leads to your sales reps faster and are helping your team, as well as the sales team, waste less time on leads that aren’t likely to convert. The extra time you’ll save not barking up the wrong tree, so to speak, can then be devoted to other crucial tasks, or nurturing those who are the right fit for your product or service.

Quick Tips on How to Automate the Sales Flow

  1. Talk to your sales team to determine how they qualify leads. What does a qualified lead look like? What actions do they take?  
  2. Set parameters in your marketing automation platform and qualify leads based on their activity and how closely they fit the profile of your ideal buyer.
  3. Qualify your leads and let your marketing automation tool send automated alerts to your sales reps. The lead is passed with a score or grade information, and this allows your sales rep to decipher which ones they need to follow up with.
  4. Help your sales team close the deal by continuing to nurture and engage leads with personalized, on-brand messaging that the system automatically sends out based on timelines you’ve set.

Accelerated Nurturing through Email Marketing Campaigns

It’s taking you and your team hours of every day to construct and send personalized emails to customers, prospects, and leads. You’re wasting time, especially when you consider only a percentage of those leads you’ll spend time nurturing will actually convert.

Let marketing automation nurture and handhold those leads for you, without you having to manually engage each time.

When you load all of your contacts and inbound leads into the system, marketing automation will help you segment them based on their commonalities. Your contacts are thus cleverly grouped according to things like industry, interests, and buying phase.  

You and your team can then produce an email marketing campaign—a single email series that progressively builds the conversations you know your consumers want to have with you, and each email takes into account the action you’ve set up for the consumer to take (e.g. make a consultation).

When you attach dynamic content tokens (e.g. name, industry, business insights, interests, etc.) to your leads’ profiles and place those tokens strategically throughout those emails, this is where personalization comes into play.

As consumers engage with your email and take your intended action, the system receives a message that triggers it to respond in kind by pulling in personal information from the lead’s profile and sending the next personalized email in your chain.

What this means is you’ll have to spend time initially creating shells for the email series, but once you’ve done that and loaded them into the system, it does the hard work of monitoring consumer behavior and sending emails to everyone in that targeted group based on their individual behavior.

So, in theory, one email series can serve dozens, if not hundreds of highly personalized content in one swoop. You’ve just gotten hours back, and have increased your chances of generating new revenue for your company.

Easier Data Collection and Analysis

Sixty-eight percent of marketers consider data collection and analysis to be the most painful and time-consuming part of their job. The struggle comes in trying to understand the contribution of their marketing activities, turn data into insights, and turn insights into actionable items.

Marketing automation, luckily, gives you a system of record for all of your marketing information. It can be used to test, measure, and optimize marketing tactics, allowing you understand what worked, what didn’t, and where improvement can be made.

As consumers interact with the digital channels connected to your marketing automation software, the system monitors, tracks and collects this information for your viewing. This puts you in a position to better understand your consumers' needs, how they behave, and what causes them to take action (or no action at all).

Now armed with this data, you can formulate meaningful insights that help you address roadblocks to conversion, deploy highly-targeted content and campaigns around your buyer personas based on their buying stage, tweak underperforming campaigns for better outcomes and most importantly, understand which campaigns are a valuable investment of your company’s time and money.

With marketing automation, you and each one of your team members can harness the ability to be not only a marketer, but a customer relationship manager, data analyst, and so much more—all while exerting less time and energy.

 

Get Help With Marketing Automation. Waste Less Time.