Marketing Automation For Dummies (2014)

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Invigorating search engine marketing

Search engine marketing (SEM) combines placing paid ads on search engines with optimizing web content to display organically in search engine results. Connecting marketing automation to your paid search campaigns gives you three main benefits:

· Closed-loop ROI tracking: Closed-loop ROI tracking provides you with the ability to show the closed revenue each keyword brings in over a period of time. With marketing automation, closed-loop ROI tracking tracks every lead, giving you the ability to attach each keyword to a prospect record and continue to follow the lead until it is a closed opportunity in the CRM. You see the full closed loop and therefore know where each lead came from and the revenue it brought in, which in turn enables you to prove the value of each marketing channel.

· Better intelligence for sales: Because every lead passed to sales through marketing automation has a full history report, including the keywords a prospect searched for, the sales department can use this data to improve its sales process. For example, if your lead searched for your competitor’s keyword, a sales representative can assume that it is a competitive deal, and even know who his competition is.

· More relevant campaigns: Because marketing automation shows you the keywords that are important to each prospect, you gain the ability to use this information for segmentation, nurturing, and changing your paid search campaigns to match the prospect’s interests. These three main benefits of marketing automation for SEM give you the ability to prove your value, identify where your money should be spent, and increase the sales from your SEM budget. As a result, you’ll spend less and get more.

Removing the guesswork from SEO

A website’s ability to be found and ranked highly by a search engine is both an art and a science, and achieving it can also require a large investment of time and money. Because all your search engine optimization (SEO) efforts are costly, it’s important to prove the value of these efforts, which can easily be tracked with marketing automation.

Most SEO efforts are evaluated on the basis of how many unique visitors you generate and how high your website is ranked when listed on a search results page. Both of these metrics are great, but they are very subjective without the ability to connect them to actual closed business.

Marketing automation allows you to track ROI down to each keyword over a given time frame because the leads and their search terms are being connected, as shown in Figure 2-2.

Figure 2-2: Report showing the ROI on SEO efforts.

Keyword reporting is a basic feature in most marketing automation tools. Connecting a search term to a closed deal is very basic, and you can easily set up tracking so that every lead shows a history of search terms that follows the lead all the way to a closed deal in your CRM. This history of search terms leads to reporting closed business and connecting the cause of the business to every search term, piece of content, and web page. These features can easily give you the information you need to prove the return on your investment and take the subjectivity out of SEO.

Reinforcing your investment in content marketing

Content marketing is one of the hottest topics within B2B marketing today. Creating content involves coming up with new content ideas, creating the content, distributing the content, and tracking its impact to your bottom line. Many of these steps are made easier with marketing automation, helping marketers show the value of content marketing in new ways that weren’t possible before.

Creating content involves curating, creating, and producing. Marketing automation gives marketers the ability to test different content, see real-time engagement, and host their online content. The real-time insights such as which content is being read by whom, and how it is influencing people’s buying cycles, are insights that can be obtained only when a marketer has a marketing automation tool that can look at each person and his or her engagement with content. The visibility that marketing automation gives a marketer helps remove the guesswork from content creation. Marketing automation also is a single tool that helps people create and publish these content campaigns.

Publishing your content is another time-consuming part of content marketing that marketing automation makes easier. Publishing content through email, blog posts, webinars, and nurturing campaigns all becomes easier when you can use a single tool rather than have to combine multiple tools to execute your content campaigns. Marketing automation allows marketers to create cross-channel, fully tracked, content-promotion campaigns in a single step, saving a lot of time trying to connect disparate channels and tools. You can more easily publish content with deeper insights that provide marketers with better feedback than ever before on their campaigns.

The feedback obtained is then used to help refine and curate as well as to prove the value of the content marketing campaigns. ROI reporting allows a marketer to tie revenue back to the content that either influenced or generated the revenue directly. Marketers can therefore prove the value of their more resource-heavy campaigns.

Trying to ask for a budget for a new piece of content is difficult. It is hard to justify paying a speaker $15,000 for a webinar if you cannot track sales associated with the webinar. Likewise, it’s hard to justify creating a $10,000 ebook if you can’t prove that it will deliver sufficient closed business. Using marketing automation in conjunction with your content strategy will make justifying future content efforts easier, as well.

Making sense of social marketing’s impact to your bottom line

The largest barrier that companies face before investing in social marketing is their ability to prove its value. Marketing automation can easily solve this problem as well by looking at social media as a publishing platform for your content.

Through marketing automation, you can track each person’s engagement with your social posts and combine the engagement activity such as lead scoring, with other data in your marketing automation system (see Figure 2-3).

Figure 2-3: Showing a prospect’s engagement with Twitter and its effect on that prospect’s lead score.

You can track any social channel, such as LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, or other channels in the same way. You can also connect each interaction on social media to a lead record that can then show the ROI of social media and prove its value to your organization.

Proving marketing’s contribution to revenue

Before marketing automation, most marketers were looked at as an expense, not as a source of revenue. The problem was mainly attributed to the fact that the only reports available for marketing were subjective. When each tool operates in its own world, it is very hard to share data, and to connect marketing activities to closed revenue, because no clear paper trail exists. Just consider any report that you have to create whose data comes from two different places. With email and closed revenue, for example, many email tools can show you how many opens you had, but very rarely can you tie those opens directly to revenue because no connection exists between the two data sets. Any marketing automation tool can now combine these two data sets into one standard report because you’re using a single tool that shares all the same data.

When looking to find money for your marketing automation solution, you can easily cut back on a single campaign and reinvest this money in a marketing automation solution. The visibility of the reporting alone will help you better invest the remaining monies in the most effective campaigns. I’ve seen plenty of companies cut back their paid search by a small margin to reinvest this money in marketing automation. As a result, they were able to drive significantly more leads with less but more effective spending.

Marketing automation systems can produce quantifiable reports showing the revenue generated from each campaign so that a marketer can prove value to the organization. Figure 2-4 shows the reporting that is available if you have a single marketing automation platform for execution of online campaigns.

Figure 2-4: ROI reporting shows marketing’s contribution to revenue.

The ability for a marketing automation tool to connect to a CRM is also a key component to allow for ROI tracking. ROI tracking can become an automated report that does not require a marketer to move, manipulate, or tabulate data. Removing the frustration of reporting is a smaller value of marketing automation. The larger value is being able to create reports that you simply could not create before. The example I give earlier in this section about seeing the actual revenue generated from an email campaign is a great example of a report that was not previously available but is now a standard report for just about any marketing automation tool.

After a CRM is connected to your marketing automation solution, it becomes very easy to see which side of the house is driving more revenue. This also takes marketing from being a cost center to a revenue center.