Whether you want to increase lead generation, or customer retention, you can’t be competitive with a manual process. Automation increases the amount of qualified leads by 5 and the sales pipeline by 10% on average. Last but not least ⅔ companies are outperforming competitors with help from marketing automation. But where do we start with anyway? We need to understand first the concept of Revenue Operations before jumping into marketing automation.
"Half of the companies out there are now using marketing automation."
At some point of maturity, you start to automate your tasks and workflows for your marketing, sales and customer success processes. These three roles used to act in silos but with the evolving technologies, we must now integrate them altogether to get the most out of automation. This is what we call Revenue Operations also known as RevOps. Building the right operational model to make sure that you optimize your revenues.
If your company aims for sustainable growth, strong operational foundations will be vital. These operations include touchpoints all along the customer journey from first contact to closed deal and aftersales.
At Digitag, we help businesses bridge the gap between marketing, sales and customer services. It’s all about how we can optimise the overall revenues in the long run. The first step is to consider the customer journey as a priority and setting up the right tools and processes within a customer centric vision. Having this 360 vision of the customer has become a huge advantage to both fluidify the customer experience, lower costs and increase revenues. It’s also a prerequisite to start automating your operations.
More than 1 out of 2 companies are currently using marketing automation. We could define it as using software to automate repetitive tasks to gain efficiency and to provide a more personalised experience to customers. For example, by integrating and structuring all the data from sales and marketing actions within a CRM, we can automate many time consuming tasks.
In the event that a customer is identified as being in search of a specific product or service, we know he visited a product page recently. But he also downloaded an ebook, read several blog articles about the topic, opened the last newsletter and discussed with the chatbot. All these data points when summed up allow us to qualify the customer as highly interested and trigger automated actions. A first email will be addressed to the customer with a proposition to meet with a salesperson for a demo or a first introduction. All this process can be automated so that it saves time and energy for your team.
Another scenario could be sending a survey automatically to the customer 3 months after the purchase to assess his satisfaction. If the feedback is not good enough, a meeting is scheduled automatically with the salespeople so that you have the opportunity to rectify this.
As a Media and Hubspot agency, we are accompanying organisations in their automation efforts. We put in place customer profiling, lead scoring, automated personalised emails to support lead nurturing and customer engagement.
The very first step to create a connection with potential customers is to genuinely help them solve some of their problems. In order to do so, we promote special content to our audience so that we can start building a relationship and retarget them afterwards. As soon as a content has to be downloaded or exchanged against contact information, it becomes what we call a lead magnet. The leads are then integrated into your database so that you can directly get in touch with them through email from now on. Note that depending on the business model, this can also be done with a combination of outbound efforts where we advertise by pushing the information to your specific audiences.
The format of a lead magnet can vary from blog articles or video masterclass to chatbots or more complex engineered marketing among many others. It has to be adapted to both your business goals and audience. No matter the selected format, it has to comply with a few prerequisites to make sure you don’t push the wrong content.
Even if you comply with these prerequisites, it doesn’t mean you will have it perfect right away. We can share best practices and give our best gut feeling at DIGITAG but we can’t read the future yet. What we can do though is to track the engagement with your content and A/B test to optimise your lead generation.
Finding the right communication channel can be hard. New media are appearing all the time as technology enables richer interactions. Every day there are more and more options to promote your product and getting the combination is not an easy task. Is traditional media relevant for you? Should you rather focus on social media or use programmatic platforms? Can you rely on third party ambassadors? Are search engines still a viable option today? Your media mix will have to evolve and adapt during the overall customer journey. Now the question is how do you select your channels?
At DIGITAG, we conduct a permanent market watch to compare every option so that we can guide you through this process. We categorise the different channels based on several variables.
Once we have shortlisted the main channels, our goal is to start testing and measuring the return on investment for each single channel. This is also when we start integrating different media together to create a multi-channel approach.
