Marketing Automation

Marketing Automation is the art and science of automatically managing the targeting, timing, and content of your outbound marketing messages in response to prospects inbound actions and online behaviors.

Introduction to Marketing Automation

Good demand generation and lead management processes require marketers to respond individually to each prospect in the buying process. However, truly understanding and responding relevantly to buyer interest cannot be done manually. To ensure that marketers are able to target customers and prospects with the right messages at the right time, marketers need a software platform that customizes content and automates the timing of marketing communications.

The buyer’s ability to self-educate has increased astronomically over the last decade. Buyers use vendor, analyst, and social media websites to understand the available choices and their own preferences. By the time they pick up the phone to speak with a vendor, they've probably made their buying decision, based on information provided by you, your competitors, and multiple third party sites.

This transition has meant that we as marketers need to work differently. In the past marketers, and marketing software, focused on developing and sending high volume, outbound emails. Now, if we hope to guide buyers to consider, prefer, and select the products and services we offer, we need marketing software that provides the precise information buyers need as they move through the buying process.

By observing and understanding a prospective buyer's digital body language, marketing automation software can understand much about where they are in the buying process, and what is most of interest to them. Lead scoring, a key part of the platform, allows us to carefully categorize these observations in order to know whether the buyer is ready for a conversation with sales, or should be held back and nurtured with high value web content until buying signals emerge.

Similarly, in order to deliver the right message, our content needs to be highly personalized to the buyer's role in the organization. Executive buyers will respond to different messages than their employees, and those in marketing will respond to different concepts than those in human resources. One thing to consider is that to truly segment our messaging, we need to trust the data in the marketing database. No matter where the data comes from, it needs to be cleansed and standardized continually. Most of today’s marketing automation solutions provide at least some form of data management as part of the service.

This individualized approach to relevance, in terms of targeting, timing, and content, of each marketing message can only be successfully accomplished with marketing automation. Only by automating the underlying lead scoring, nurture marketing, and data management can we successfully understand our prospective buyers and deliver the right message to them.

Marketing, as a discipline, remains as much an art as it ever was. Compelling offers, captivating visuals, great positioning, and elegant copy are as difficult as ever to create. Even as today’s new buying process requires elements of science in automating how the targeting, timing, and content of a marketing message is delivered, the understanding of market segments, buyer journeys, and what moves a buyer along their buying process still differentiate excellent marketers from merely good marketers.

However, as we shift from bulk outbound messaging to understanding and facilitating a buyer's buying process, we need new capabilities. We can only deliver on this shift in how we engage our prospective buyers if we are enabled with a marketing automation platform that guides the conversations, timing, and personalization needed.

RELATED CONTENT

Articles:

DemandGen Report: Fifth Third Banks On Marketing Automation To Grow Correspondent Banking Unit

To support its more aggressive marketing and sales initiatives for the Correspondent Banking division, Fifth Third Bank selected Eloqua for the automation and management of marketing programs. “Eloqua is able to deliver valuable insight on our client base’s Digital Body Language, providing us with additional ways to help drive revenue even in a challenging economy,” Terry Lyons, VP, Fifth Third Bank’s Correspondent Banking Services.

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B2B Marketing POSTS by Laura Ramos: B2B Marketing’s Job #1: Sales Enablement

When marketing delivers a new batch of leads, sales wants to know quickly which have the most potential. In my research, I show how top marketers build practices that score leads numerically, route top-scoring leads to sales, and – more often – use visual tools to engage with sales. This is where many marketing automation vendors are heading and Eloqua has taken a major step in this direction with its announcement of Prospect Profiler today.

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CRM 2.0 The Conversation by Paul Greenberg: Philadelphia Flyers Rock! - When It Comes To Customer Experience, That Is

...the Philadelphia Flyers fan engagement program is by far the single most well thought out and successful CRM strategy and program Ive seen to date in professional sports. Bar none - including my beloved New York teams. Shame on the Rangers.

Using a combination of salesforce.com, marketing ubër-application Eloqua, and a stored value program ... [the Philadelphia Flyers] ... are able to capture the kind of information about a fan that lets them know fan behaviors from the time they walk out the door to the time they leave the stadium.

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The WebMarketCentral Blog: Marketing Automation: Bringing a Gun to a Knife Fight

One of the biggest challenges b2b marketers face is what to do with all of those "names" that come into your system that aren't really "leads" yet; contacts collected from white paper downloads, webinar registrations, trade shows and other activities. How do you separate hot leads from long-term leads from tire-kickers? How can you efficiently nurture those long-term prospects, learning more about their interests in the process, until they are really ready to engage with sales?

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B2B Marketing Online: PROFILE: Card sharp

Andrew Buckley, vice president of global marketing and strategy at American Express, doesn't shy away from a challenge. Having taken the decision a couple of years ago to 'globalise' marketing in the organisation, he's now working on the company-wide implementation of Eloqua's lead nurturing software – and the concomitant upskilling of staff in the organisation.

eBooks:

Digital Body Language Chapter 4: The Profile of the New Buyer
An Excerpt from Digital Body Language, by Steven Woods

The first step in re-ordering one's thinking about a buyer's digital body language is observation. Without the ability to view and aggregate the telltale signs of digital body language, no marketer can use those signs to tailor their marketing messages and approaches. The marketer must understand the buyer along five key dimensions to leverage digital body language most effectively. They correspond to the key questions about a potential buyer that any sales professional would want to evaluate before initiating a sales cycle.

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Steven Woods: Beyond Lead Flow
Enabling Sales Through Marketing Automation

This paper explores areas in which marketing can help sales identify and manage deals in their sales pipeline through technologies and business processes that amplify existing CRM systems. Marketers need to recognize that determining lead criteria is only the first of many steps they can take to enable their sales teams. New enhancements to CRM systems are driving truly evolutionary changes in marketing’s relationship to sales.

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Jill Konrath: How Marketing Can Impact Sales

The strategies outlined in Jill Konraths’s eBook, How Marketing Can Radically Impact Sales, are having a major impact on companies just like yours when it comes to critical problems that can seem intractable: New sales reps are slow to get up to speed, sales reps fail to read prospect buying signals or pursue the wrong leads and forecasts are based on hunches instead of data... to name a few. According to CSO Insights, firms who have invested in demand-creating marketing automation systems have achieved impressive results, most notably with sales win rates. This eBook is a must-read for any marketer tasked with lead generation.

Podcasts

What Makes a Successful Demand Generation Plan?
Gregg Holzrichter, senior director of global demand generation for VMware talks about what makes a successful demand generation plan, how VMware is successfully using marketing automation, and what his plans are for the future. Gregg honed his demand generation and sales and marketing alignment skills as a star marketer at Siebel Systems.
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Effective Marketing Automation with Knowlagent
Debbie Qaqish of Knowlagent, a call center solutions company talks about a unique business challenge -- nobody knows they need what Knowlagent provides (until they hear about it!).
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Automating the Lead to Sales Process with Aberdeen Group
Alan Hubbard of Aberdeen talks about the interesting results from their report:

53% of companies are currently using marketing automation solutions for lead management; this number is expected to jump to 83% in the next 24 months.
To deploy a lead management solution, 54% of survey respondents indicated the need to demonstrate a return on marketing investment (ROMI) to justify implementation.
62% of best-in-class companies are focused on lead scoring and lead prioritization as strategic actions to focus sales efforts and reduce the sales cycle.

Webinars

Social Media, Demand Generation, and the Evolution of Marketing

The new emphasis on social media is forcing marketing departments everywhere to find new ways to succeed as they transition into this new reality. In this information-packed session led by Steven Woods you’ll get beyond the buzzwords and hype surrounding social media and learn how to think about social media in the context of your demand generation strategy. With real world examples from a variety of industries, Woods will bring a new perspective and challenge the way we think about campaigns, marketing assets, analysis, and our prospects.

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Digital Body Language: Deciphering Customer Intentions in an Online World

The shift to online from face-to-face marketing has crippled our ability to see body language and "read the room" when interacting with prospects. That leaves us less able to connect with prospects to determine their level of interest and their willingness to hear more—and ultimately, less likely to convert them. The solution? Marketing must step in to read "digital body language" and use that knowledge to guide the buying process.

Eloqua Press Releases:

Eloqua First Marketing Automation Provider to Earn TRUSTe Certification
Company Becomes TRUSTe Sealholder for Commitment to Consumer Privacy Protection
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Eloqua Advances Marketing Automation and Redefines Sales Intelligence Tools with Launch of Eloqua Prospect Profiler
- New Sales Application Helps Reps Visualize Buyer Activity and Needs –
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Video

Relevance drives conversion! How relevant your messages are will determine how prospects respond. Lack of relevancy is the number one reason why prospects unsubscribe or opt-out. Watch this short video and learn how to stay highly relevant to drive conversion and avoid erosion.

Blog Entry

Best Practice Tip: 6 Ways to Segment
2009-09-03 Laura Cross

Relevance drives conversion! How relevant your message or offer is to the recipient determines how likely it is they will respond. #1 reason why people unsubscribe or opt-out is due to irrelevant messaging, the communication does not make sense or is not targeted to me, so I do not respond and I opt-out. So how can we make sure we are highly relevant to drive conversion and avoid erosion?Segmentation Pie Chart

We do this with effective segmentation strategies. To help, here are 6 ways to segment…
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Blog Entry

Video: Marketing Automation Reliability
2009-08-19 Steven Woods

In selecting marketing automation software, there are considerations that go well beyond features and functionality. In this short but information-packed video, Abe Wagner, co-founder and V.P. Engineering with Eloqua talks about what he would look at if investigating a marketing automation or demand generation software investment.
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Blog Entry

Marketing Automation: Facilitating the Conversation
2009-07-21 Steven Woods

I was at a conference recently where a guy was talking about Marketing Automation with a cocktail party analogy. His idea was that in a cocktail party, you don’t know what stories you’re going to tell in advance, you just get a sense of people and then tell the appropriate stories. He then jumped to a conclusion that, therefore, you could not automate your marketing as that would be like pre-scripting which stories you were going to tell at the cocktail party.
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Blog Entry

Top Automated Marketing Personalization Tactics
Anything Goes Marketing: 2009-06-29 Chad Horenfeldt

Blog Entry

Is Good-Enough-Marketing-Automation Really Good Enough?
Digital Body Language: 2009-06-06 Paul Teshima

NEXT STEPS

WHITE PAPERS

Reading Your Buyer's Digital Body Language (TM)

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Automating Demand Generation

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The Business Case for Integrated Demand Generation

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