Regardless of how much marketing has changed, today’s ultimate business goal remains the same: acquire new customers. The key difference is that marketers are now directly responsible for contributing to that goal. They’re no longer simply influencers creating feel-good messages to promote brand identification (though those types of marketers still serve a purpose). Modern marketers must discover new prospects, fill sales pipeline and drive revenue.
And although CMOs and Marketing Ops are investing in marketing technology and systems to use prospect data in creative new ways and nurture potential customers along the buyer’s journey, the marketers who are responsible for acquiring prospect data in the first place are still relying largely on inefficient manual processes to get that data.
For instance, creating a media plan can require up to 42-steps that 89% of organizations use spreadsheets to complete. This doesn’t even take into consideration the many moving parts involved when marketers must execute that conceptual plan in the digital world. The inefficiencies that exist may often seem insurmountable.
With all the types of marketing technology available today, why are so many organizations still relying outdated lead generation processes? Until we approach our marketing tech strategy from the beginning of the buyer’s journey, starting with the automation of media-planning and campaign-management processes, we’ll be unable to reap the full rewards that technology promises.
We’ve put together this infographic to demonstrate two paths that exist for marketers when it comes to their prospect and customer generation strategies. One highlights common roadblocks that exist in a manual lead generation process, resulting in many inefficiencies and an inability to measure return on marketing investment. The other illustrates how to generate leads effectively and accelerate sales pipeline using an automated lead generation approach that can be applied through all the stages of marketing: planning, launch, execution, analysis and optimization—increasing return on investment and creating happy customers.
If you’re ready to embark on the path to automated lead generation so you can increase the return on your marketing investment, we often share tips to help you choose the right marketing technology for your organization. If you have experiences you’d like to share from your quest to generate leads effectively, we’d love to hear from you in the comments.
