Marketing automation platforms can be complex.
There is a specific process to follow for set up, and then once the technology is set up it’s time to dig in!
But what happens when the training period is over, and your team is left to actually utilize the thing? Teams are tapping into only 30% or less of their platform’s capabilities, and Casey Cheshire really wants to help change that.
Marketing Leader, Speaker, Mentor, and now, the Author of Marketing Automation Unleashed, Founder & CMO of Cheshire Impact, and the host of The Hard Corps Marketing Show, Casey Cheshire, sits in the guest seat for this episode to talk about all things marketing automation.
Casey is interviewed by a former guest, Chief Evangelist of BombBomb, Ethan Beute, who is a marketing powerhouse in his own right!
Don Draper was cool, but let’s move forward, shall we?
Marketing automation allows you to automate processes that would otherwise require precious hours better spent doing, well, basically anything.
The technology is available, and savvy marketers see the ROI in implementing their platform of choice, but having it in place and not using it to its full potential doesn’t make any sense.
Would you buy a Tesla, and never drive it?
Would you order an ice cream cone and just watch it melt?
Of course not!
But so many teams just aren’t using their marketing automation tools and one reason is because they simply do not know how. They are overwhelmed. Once the training ends, they are on their own, 70% of that tool sits there gathering dust.
Let’s unleash marketing automation, and break it down into 4 key components: capture, nurture, automate, and report.
Capture
You’ve dedicated time, talents, budgets and energy to getting people to come to your website and there they are, poking around all of your hard work!
Well, that’s just the beginning. You need to capture their information, so you can educate yourself about who this person is, and then use that knowledge to drive them to the goal result through whatever channels you have in place.
This is the first place in the funnel that automation really shines. Research based techniques like progressive profiling, which simply allows you to ask a series of questions over several forms, hcan have a very significant impact.
Using your platform to customize forms and pathways that build your arsenal is a powerful tool. Capturing the buyers behaviors on your website gives you a solid understanding to work from as you move the buyer to the next steps.
Nurture
Once the information is captured, now it’s time to nurture your new contact.
It’s helpful, cultivated content based on the knowledge your trusty marketing automation platform is handing you. The forms they filled out, and the ability to track their behavior on your website gives you a roadmap to their pain and your job is to show them that you understand and share ways that your product or service can solve that pain, like:
- Slow drip email campaigns
- Social media
- Agenda based phone calls
- Newsletters
- and other techniques
However you choose to nurture your new leads, you can make strategic and creative choices that are based on actual knowledge that you’ve captured.
Automate
Automate applies to some of the inner workings in the platforms that when set up properly, can do some of the thinking for you.
Those key nurture actions can be automated, tracked and streamlined, allowing your teams to focus on the creative as opposed to the bones of it all.
Automation speeds things up, frees up time, feeds sales more effectively and prioritizes the human aspects of the marketing and sales process.
Report
A marketer’s report should display which marketing campaigns are working and which are not. More marketing activities does not necessarily mean more results.
- How many leads did we capture this month?
- Where did the leads come from?
- How many of those leads turned into revenue?
Those are just 3 of the plethora of questions that will be asked and examined in any organization when implementing a marketing campaign. Having the ability to turn to your marketing automation platform for these and other answers is a high level way of taking the temperature of your efforts, and providing fact based answers that budgets, direction and strategy are all based on.
Howdy, Partner!
So, this all sounds great, right?
But how the heck do you squeeze all of the juice out of your marketing automation?
Step 1 in the campaign to utilize is using an implementation partner.
Their experience can guide you through the mistakes and painful moments that inevitably happen, and keep the transition from being overly clunky.
It’s a process. Allowing for a learning curve is unavoidable.
Cutting that time down significantly by bringing an implementation partner in is invaluable.
Casey’s new book, Marketing Automation Unleashed, explores these and other details about marketing automation.
This post is based on a takeover episode of the #Flip My Funnel podcast! Guest Host, Casey Cheshire of The Hard Corps Marketing Show is interviewed by Ethan Beute, Chief Evangelist at Bomb Bomb
You can find this interview, and many more, by subscribing to Flip My Funnel on Apple Podcasts, on Stitcher, on Spotify, or here.
