I’ve been advocating marketing automation systems for quite awhile, because as a lead management company, we feel responsible for just not getting your company found on the Internet, but getting those prospects to become sales.

Marketing automation is a tool that guides prospects through their purchase cycle via quality, compelling content until they become sales-ready leads. Marketing Automation is a key component of our lead management process that we offer companies.

A fairly new technology, these systems are not just being utilized by fortune 1000 companies, but can be used effectively by smaller and mid-size companies as well. There is a pre-conceived notion that marketing automation is overly expensive, but that is not the case. There are many systems that are quite moderate in pricing, yet still perform well.

Marketing automation provides the solution to many companies’ objectives

• Improves the quality of leads that are passed on to sales
• Optimizes conversion or profitability from various sources of leads
• Measures marketing performance more effectively

The main benefit for replacing manual lead generating processes with marketing automation is that it allows companies to reach out to potential customers in a timely, more efficient, manner.

Here’s a simple look at how marketing automation works:

• A sound advertising and social media strategy is developed, and tactics like SEO, Pay-per-click, and valuable content bring visitors to your website.
• The website or landing page offers strong benefit copy and valuable content, and visitors fill out forms to become leads.
• Based on the questions asked on the “contact us” web form AND website behavior (downloads, pages viewed), leads are automatically scored (a model defined before the system is in place).
• Leads are segmented based on their score and enter various tracks for follow-up. Following up with leads through email is called lead nurturing and includes links to additional valuable content such as white papers and webinars. Nurturing allows increased engagement of potential customers. The more engaged they are, the more likely they will become customers. Learn more on Lead Nurturing.
• Higher quality leads are turned over to sales immediately. Lower quality leads remain in the system until additional engagement occurs. In essence, salespeople receive less total leads, as they only receive the quality leads. When they can spend more time with quality leads, their time is spent more efficiently, they close more deals, and the revenue per deal increases, thus overall ROI increase.
• By integrating with Salesforce and other CRMs, salespeople report their deals and win values, which then are reported within the marketing automation system, which in turn allows us to evaluate what media sources, messages, events or other tactics generate the most efficient quality leads and sales, thus an analysis of “cost-per-deal” can be done.

We offer the following for your perusal:

• Our ebooks that cover B2B Marketing strategy and marketing automation/lead nurturing tactics. Click Here
• Demos of marketing automation from 4 companies. Without IT, these systems are easily implemented. NuSpark Marketing assists in the implementation and training.

Act-On Software Demo

Manticore Technology Demo

Pardot Demo

Silverpop Demo

NuSpark Marketing will evaluate your needs and budget and choose the platform that is right for you. Keep on mind that we also provide the content, landing page design and analytics, so that you take advantage of all of the feature of marketing automation.

For those who wish to take a test drive, we can set you up with trials, or, for those with a modest database size, Loopfuse offers a free platform. Loopfuse doesn’t include a landing page design module, but offers other bells and whistles that make it a reasonable solution. Again, NuSpark Marketing will offer implementation and content to support Marketing Automation. Here’s the Loopfuse Demo.

Consider:

10-25% of leads are sales-ready; 10-25% of leads are not. That means, 50-80% of leads are wasted or ignored if not handled properly.

By implementing a lead management system, highlighted by a marketing automation platform and a sound content marketing strategy, those ignored leads are communicated to throughout their buying cycle, and many end up being sales!

Here’s a scenario.

1. 15% of leads are sales-ready
2. 10% of leads unqualified
3. 75% of leads go into nurturing so that they can become sales-ready.
4. 15% of those nurtured leads turn into sales. Guess what- you’ve just doubled your sales!

According to a SiriusDecisions 2008 report on conversion rates, companies with a sound lead management process close an average of 25% or greater than companies that don’t. According to Aberdeen 2009, nurtured leads achieve a 47% higher order value when they closed compared to non-nurtured leads.

More benefits:

• Increase in Qualified Leads
• Decrease in Sales Cycle
• Decrease in Cost of Sales
• Improved Conversion Rates of those leads
• Increase in Quality of Leads Going to Sales
• Increase in Transaction Size
• Increase in Marketing ROI

SO, now that it’s budget season, let’s consider Marketing Automation. Answer these questions:

• How much time and money saved by consolidating tools and automating email campaigns
• How efficient marketing and sales teams would be by sharing a unified interface
• How many more opportunities created if sales can follow-up with every promising lead
• How much easier it would be to demonstrate the marketing team’s influence on revenue and ROI
• How smoothly your business will run if sales and marketing worked together to achieve your company’s goals

Got it? Next step? Contact Paul Mosenson, Founder and President of NuSpark Marketing, [email protected]