Picture this: You’re a marketer working for a software technology company (this isn’t sounding too far-fetched yet, right?). On a daily basis, you and your team handle your company’s email marketing, lead generation, paid search campaigns, social media accounts, content marketing efforts, and more. When you sit down at your desk in the morning, the only time you stand up to leave is for the occasional coffee pick-me-up, your too-short lunch break, or when the clock finally strikes five. Things are busy — and you don’t see them slowing down anytime soon.
Does this scenario sound familiar? For a lot of marketers with too much on their plate, it should. If you found yourself nodding your head in agreement as you read any of the lines in the paragraph above, perhaps it’s time to consider a solution that can help you automate your marketing efforts, saving you time and effort while freeing you up to pursue more exciting marketing avenues. That’s right — I’m talking about marketing automation.
Not sure you’re ready for marketing automation yet? Take a look at the checklist below to see if you could benefit from implementing an automation solution. If you find that you agree with a majority of the statements listed, marketing automation might be the right solution to fit your needs.
1. You have quite a bit of marketing content, but you struggle to distribute and promote it efficiently.
2. You have a CRM, but it doesn’t include all of the functionalities that you would like, such as built-in lead qualification, simple automation, or segmentation.
3. You have very little insight into your ROI, and therefore no way to prioritize marketing spend. If possible, you’d like to be able to attribute closed deals back to their source, so that you know which campaigns are the most successful and which deals are marketing-sourced (helping you to prove marketing’s worth).
4. Your sales team needs more insight into what marketing is doing, and vice versa. Tension often exists between marketing and sales teams over lead quality and lead attribution, so it would be nice to have a system that could make these processes more black and white.
5. Your sales cycle is complicated and involves multiple touch points with prospects over time.
6. You have some data you can use to personalize communications, but no efficient way to do it. In an ideal world, you’d like to be able to collect even more information from your prospects, then use that information to target and segment your communications.
7. You don’t have the bandwidth to manually reach out to all of the prospects and customers in your database, and you have a hard time deciding which leads to pursue and which ones to come back to later.
8. Many of your prospects aren’t immediately ready to buy, and therefore need nurturing to get them to the point where they’re ready to talk to sales.
9. You interact with multiple marketing channels on a daily basis, including paid search outlets, your social media accounts, and email marketing.
10. You have a hard time deciding when leads are ready to be passed on to sales. If only you had a scoring system that could pass them along automatically once they reached a set threshold based on their activities!
Did you agree with more than seven of the ten statements above? If so, it might be time to consider looking into a more robust marketing automation system that can address all of the pain points that we listed. To get started, check out our free Marketing Automation Success Kit, and learn how marketing automation can meet your specific needs.
