Establishing efficient marketing processes may take up-front time investments, but they will help teams to be more productive in the long run, and encourage better customer relationships. Smoother processes are just one benefit, but in time, tracking performance becomes easier, which in turn allows companies to more quickly adjust and make changes, rather than spending resources on a project just to find out something isn't working.
There are many different tricks to making the most of your marketing initiatives, but these are our top three productivity hacks, and the results that can come from them.
1. Marketing automation
We are in the age of digital tools, and as such, more and more of our marketing and sales processes can be automated. While automations can take some time investment to set up, as well as associated costs for powerful systems and specialized manpower, the payoff can be huge.
Automations not only allow you to tackle many prospects at various stages of the customer journey all at the same time, automations can allow you to build robust reports, and more easily identify patterns in customer behavior and the efficacy of your efforts.
What are examples of things that can be automated? Content delivery is one of the biggest and most widely used automated marketing processes, and this goes for companies across all industries and of all sizes. Promotion through social media, ad campaigns and other omnichannel efforts can be pushed automatically, and more importantly, tracked for performance analysis.
With the right productivity tools, there are a number of helpful automations you can set up for yourself, especially when it comes to reporting, documentation, and follow-up.
2. Email lead nurturing programs
With modern marketing processes, sales alignment is now fundamental. This means not only are we focused on prospecting, promotion, driving traffic and generating leads, but we’re highly focused on nurturing those leads for sales.
This is where email marketing plays a very important role. With email lead nurturing programs set up in marketing automation tools, you can in large part create workflows that track and measure conversions, then enroll converted contacts into specific nurturing campaigns based on a number of parameters. Consider this: before you needed to follow-up individually with every potential buyer, and/or use generic marketing emails. Now, you can handle a greater volume of prospects at the same time, while tracking crucial metrics like opens and click throughs, that can determine the next event in the buyer’s journey - allowing you to be much more targeted and personalized.
What does this mean for results? While handling a greater volume of prospects and customers, but still tailor-making campaigns to interests and previously consumed content, you can engage a larger audience better, which can lead to higher conversion to sales and better overall revenue. In short - you can be incredibly effective at shortening the buyer’s journey while spending less one-to-one time until a buyer is qualified as sales ready.
3. Task triggers for sales
And speaking of qualifying a buyer as sales-ready, one of the best productivity hacks for marketing processes is setting up triggers that alert sales teams to execute tasks. With a powerful system like Marketo, your prospect’s activities and engagement is tracked, from webpage visits, email marketing opens, email link or CTA clicks, and content consumed.
When your system registers a prospect as executing enough high-purchasing-intent activities, your sales teams can automatically be alerted to start a more personalized conversation in which they communicate directly with the prospect, empowered by the information regarding the types of pages and content they’ve already looked at.
The result is prospects who never slip through the cracks. One of the biggest challenges in modern marketing and sales is ensuring there is proper internal alignment and communication which is designed for complete control over the entire customer journey. When marketing fails to pass the “ball” or sales fails to pick it up, a sale can be lost, and time is wasted.
Through hacks like setting up task triggers, you can ensure that sales is on top of their prospects and are prepared to close the deal. In fact - when you create proper lead generation and robust lead nurturing campaigns, your sales team’s job should be 80% done, and conversion from this point should be higher.
Results of the top three marketing productivity hacks
When we look at these three productivity hacks as relational components all necessary for truly exceptional marketing and sales automation, you can see how results are not just easy to procure, they’re easy to measure. By using automations, email nurturing programs, and task triggers, you can increase your conversion rates, and also have a better understanding of attribution which in turn leads to better decision making in the future, and clearer ROI.
Let’s use a hypothetical scenario: your organic search traffic is up by 20% (source reports) thanks to your marketing team strengthening up your content library on specific SEO-targeted pieces. For every 100 landing page views, you get 20 new leads through filling out a form to download a gated piece of content (conversion rate of 20%).
By measuring engagement of email marketing lead nurturing campaigns that follow the content download, your marketing team determines that 4 leads are Sales Qualified (MQL to SQL conversion rate of 20%). Their activity information and details are sent to your sales team, who then move the prospects further into the sales process through discovery calls, demos, presentations, and other high intent activities, and two of the original leads become paying customers (SQL to Closed Won conversion rate of 50%).
Here is where you can establish attribution. Do you give credit to first-touch (which goes to marketing), or do you spread your attribution to different parts of the journey and weigh different activities as more or less valuable? Within your organization, you can have a much better idea of what makes sense, based on your activities and results.
While there are countless ways to leverage powerful marketing tools to improve internal processes and results, we’re willing to bet that automations, email nurturing programs, and task triggers will be three of the most important for your business.
Learn more about how your organization can leverage powerful marketing tools to be more productive:
