Start comparing from the need(s)

When you, as a team or manager, come to the conclusion that a marketing automation tool might be the best way to increase your return and deliver better leads to sales, it is important to better understand how the different marketing automation tools differ from each other.

To get a good picture of this, we should first look at the exact need(s) of your organisation. In doing so, we distinguish between six possibilities for using a marketing automation tool:

1. Streamline the lead generation process: bundling all the tools you need as a marketer to turn visitors into leads.

2. automate lead nurturing: offering the right content at the right time, helping leads with challenges throughout the buying journey until they are ready to be handed over to sales.

3. Customer insight across all channels: insight from lead to customer. You can then capitalise on this with smart marketing campaigns.

4. Run clear reports and demonstrate 'Marketing ROI': how did marketing drive more traffic, more leads, more customers.

5. Personalise content: provide content that fits the buying journey and thus the context of your key audiences.

6. Less reliance on IT: Directed by marketing, making changes quickly without the need for technical knowledge.

Have you ticked your boxes? Then take a look at our advice per section.

2. Automate lead nurturing

A clear second motivation for professionals to deploy marketing automation is to set up and make manageable the (perhaps not yet existing) processes around lead nurturing. Think of centrally storing and tracking the various lead lists and business cards you have. Or those 50 leaflet requests from the website that you still have in your CMS.

Nurturing leads is a process that is normally time-consuming and often forgotten because the focus is on new business and other activities. While existing leads have already taken the step to get in touch. Nurturing leads is possible by contacting them through channels such as e-mail marketing or sending physical documents, for example. But here it can also help to address them in the right way on your website, in chat, by showing the right ads on Google and by presenting them different content online than an unregistered lead.

So look for a marketing automation tool that gives you a full range of this functionality, now but perhaps also for the future. Start your lead nurturing process with your existing database, test your campaigns on small groups and see the results. The right marketing automation tool will also allow you to make selections of your leads based on their profile and/or behaviour and interactions. These allow you to even better understand what their next step in the buying process is.

3. Understanding customer behaviour

Marketing automation is about automating marketing. And you really only automate when you want to make something more scalable and/or effective. Marketers are automating more and more, because the daily number of interactions with leads, customers and prospects is becoming so high that as a marketer you can no longer control everything. Certainly not because this takes place on sometimes dozens of channels simultaneously. By setting up marketing automation in the right way, you assure yourself that all communication is automatically based on the best-practices you have gained or analysed.

You also want your sales team to know what information the prospect/lead has taken in. So you have to ask yourself whether you need profile information. And do you only want profile information from known leads and/or prospects or also from as yet unknown users (so-called visitor profiling)?

Lead tracking and selecting in opptylab

A final important consideration is whether you also add value to the valuable information around interaction with your organisation's emails or social posts. But also consider [SEO](/services/search engine optimisation-seo) or AdWords integrations, automatic link setting and keyword research tools?

Some tools integrate that, others don't. In our experience, it is extremely valuable and often makes other tools and licences redundant.

4. Clear reporting & ROI insight

Linking all the data we described in the previous paragraph is at the heart of presenting clear and accurate reports. You can only make your ROI transparent if you have insight into all touch points and can steer them (to increase that ROI).

So a marketing automation tool, when chosen correctly, is also your best friend when it comes to explaining all that data you, as a digital marketer, are probably used to analysing and interpreting. Those days can be over when you can suddenly make your marketing activities very concrete, substantiated with data presentable to the organisation.

The tools we deploy provide consistent reports, at different levels (think sales, marketing, social and content/seo reports) without requiring a whole team to link all the data together.

5. Personalisation of content

You can only really deploy content personalisation when you have a good picture of your visitors and understand which funnel and buying process they follow. At that point, you can start speeding up the conversion process by offering personalised content on subsequent visits to your website.

For example, consider sending a newsletter when someone is at the beginning of the funnel and visits a blog for the second time. Or offering a free 30-minute consultation to the visitor who downloaded a white paper on a product from your organisation yesterday. Good and effective personalisation is the result of doing three important tasks well:

1. Establishing good buyer personas.
2. Insight based on data about the funnel and conversion points in the funnel.
3. Linking all the data to that individual and having the technology provided to make that actionable.

Personalised content without the three above is quite honestly no more effective than guesswork. So choose whether you want a marketing automation tool that enables personalisation AND whether you have the time and/or resources to set it up properly. Otherwise, it might even do damage instead of increasing conversions or lead nurturing.

6. Less reliance on IT

In many organisations, 'online technology' is the domain of IT. But many organisations also see that data (also from IT in origin) is increasingly shifting towards marketing, communication and sales. It creates more effectiveness within departments. However, data is obtained from tools, especially marketing automation tools that have a profiling function. This allows you to present content to individual users yourself, without interference from your IT department. So in that sense, you are not less dependent on IT, but your field of work and expertise is increasingly moving to the same level.

So, with the right marketing automation tool, you work more pleasantly together with IT and you can also standardise the technical facets such as a website, data storage and/or api's and set up and adjust them yourself within the agreements with IT.