Are you working too hard for underwhelming marketing campaign results? Often it’s not limitations within the marketing automation platform but a lack of strategy behind it that is setting your campaigns up for weak ROI and marginally useful data.
Investing time, energy, and human resources into a powerful marketing automation platform is a smart first step toward success. But it’s a first step only. An underdeveloped marketing strategy, or one built on ultimately meaningless or incomplete data, will cripple any marketing campaign and put you leagues behind your competition regardless of the platform used.
A modern marketing strategy combines people, processes, and technology to create and execute campaigns that are based on clear business objectives and that generate revenue. Everything else flows from that strategy, including how you use your marketing automation tools.
Here are three signs that the weak link in your organization’s success chain is not the marketing automation platform you’re using, but an ineffectual strategy.
1, Campaign set-up and reporting are a resource drain
Your strategy should inform which tools you use and how you implement them, not the other way around. Most marketing automation platforms, provide what can feel like an overwhelming number of options. Which ones you implement and train the marketing team to use are, ideally, the ones that best support your strategy.
Defining your strategy before you implement the marketing automation tool
streamlines the process, reduces timelines, and increases ROI. Clear campaign objectives ensure your marketing team is trained properly on the most effective tools for the job. Time will no longer be lost to performing repetitive tasks because the team knows the capability of the tool and is trained on how best to use it.
By starting with strategy, the marketing and sales teams will have the right expertise to optimize the automation tool’s features for success.
2, You’re sending emails and getting... *crickets*
Modern marketing is all about guiding prospects on a journey. They receive the right messages at the right time through the right channel, and then they buy. Without a defined strategy, the messages won’t resonate, and the results won’t deliver.
A thoughtful strategy based on meaningful data will produce a campaign that hits the mark and presents the prospect with what they need in the moment. Go in with a weak strategy based on the wrong data and you’ll be sending out a message that is forgettable, irrelevant, and quite possibly annoying.
Your sales team is better positioned to bring in the sale if the prospects have
experienced relevant and useful messaging on their journeys. This is driven by thoughtful strategy and a marketing automation tool which supports it.
3, You end up with meaningless or indecipherable data
You know that identifying the most effective campaigns and strategies is a must in today’s market. To have your message seen as relevant to your customers you need to know how to identify the good stuff—the data that helps you crack the code of your customers’ intent. You can’t do this without first building a strong foundation of strategy.
Your strategy will inform which data you collect, when and where you collect it, how you report it, and how you interpret it. Marketing automation tools are
designed to make the data collection process flow smoothly when thoughtfully and strategically implemented. Remove the strategy and you constrict the tool’s ability to produce the data that lead to higher conversion rates and revenue.
Targeting, segmentation, lead management, and marketing measurement are all exciting features of marketing automation tools but the usefulness of the data is entirely dependent on an underlying strategy.
The elements of a modern marketing strategy
If you have a marketing automation tool you’re already taken the first step. Here’s how to build a powerful modern marketing strategy that dovetails with your tools’ capabilities.
Study the buyer’s journey
Identify where automation can help before, during, and after the sales process. Some points to consider:
- Where can automation educate and interest new prospects as they move through the awareness stage with your brand?
- Where can automation engage prospects as they research and consider their options?
- How can automation aid the decision-making process for potential customers?
- How can automation encourage customer loyalty after purchase?
Set goals but stay flexible
You need to be able to produce reports on how well your strategy is working. To ensure you can give the C-suit hard data to prove ROI, your strategy needs goals that are SMART: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound.
As you collect data, you will more than likely need to shift your strategy to evolve with the information you are receiving about your customers.
Know what to optimize
Developing a winning strategy requires knowing where to invest your time and energy. Starting with strategy and then implementing your marketing automation tool to support it will boost the ROI of your marketing and help your
organization make more informed decisions that are rooted in meaningful numbers.
When marketing automation and a strong strategy meet
The answer to what’s holding you back from achieving strong sales and glorious revenue could be strategy. Aligning a strong strategy with your marketing automation platform tailored to support this strategy could be all that’s standing in the way of your success.
Curious to see if a strategy redirection can optimize your marketing technology for you? Thinking about switching away from your current platform because you’re not seeing the results you want?
Reach out to us. We know the leading platforms inside and out—including Salesforce, Oracle, Adobe, Sitecore, and Pega. We are marketing strategists and technologists and we’ll integrate your technology with your strategy so you can deliver seamless, connected experiences to your target audiences.