7 Step Guide to Marketing Automation

If you're not yet using marketing automation software to produce marketing results, you should start considering solutions like Eloqua, Marketo, Act-On, Salesforce Pardot or Hubspot today. More and more businesses are digitizing operations and marketing and it's becoming increasingly difficult to remain relevant and effectively reach a broader audience. Marketing automation is no longer a "nice-to-have;" it's becoming the industry standard to drive revenue, and a key component to successful marketing campaigns.

Learning how to leverage a CRM to properly get results out of a MAP (marketing automation platform) can be a challenge. Forcery is New York City's top Salesforce Pardot agency, and this step by step guide of how to get started with marketing automation is a great place to start.

If you think that marketing automation is simply about mass email-marketing, you are simply wrong wrong. Both B2B and B2C marketers rely increasingly on tools like Pardot for behavioral intelligence and to deliver contextual, multi-touch and automated journeys of outreach to consumers.

1. Select the right MAP (Marketing Automation Platform) With good reason, we're huge fans of Salesforce and Pardot. However, the marketing automation tool you choose* is only as good as your CRM (customer relationship management system). Check out our vendor analysis comparison of Hubspot CRM vs Pardot marketing automation.

2. Integrate Marketing Automation with your CRM Your CRM should be a single source of truth, with a robust and clean data set. We love Salesforce as a repository for contact information and sales process data points. If a businesses contact database is disconnected from marketing information, personalization and effectiveness of marketing campaigns are functionally useless.

3. Choose a Partner with a great track record of solutions implementations. BEWARE the "Quickstart." Salesforce and low-quality vendors will often try to sell a low-cost implementation called a "quick start" package, which is typically looks like a cheap solution, but which often is the bare minimum to launch feature functionality, which often needs to be re-built or re-architected by another Partner at a later date. Instead, ensure your Partner is invested in the businesses long-term success, and provides the best onboarding and training during implementation. Ask if your marketing automation consultant is certified, and make sure you review thoroughly.

4. Import your Prospects These can be leads or contacts; and the beauty of marketing automation is that tools like Pardot or Hubspot can be used for email and lead generation, as well as also cross-selling and upselling.

5. Build and Import Creative Templates Once you have contacts in your system, it's time to start thinking about what you plan to market to them. Many systems have drag-and-drop email builders custom made for each marketing automation tool. Start out with an email blast letting your customers and prospects know about new or upcoming product releases. Or use your first email send to distribute an email newsletter.

6. Launch a First Campaign With all of the hard work complete, it's time to get started! With contacts loaded, emails prepared and the system ready to go, you can start testing out marketing campaigns. We recommend the adage KISS (keep it simple, Sam...) as a simple campaign can be refined and improved over time, but complex variations are difficult to troubleshoot out of the gate. Define the objective of the initial campaign by thinking of the marketing automation goal the business is trying to achieve.

7. Analyze, Report and Measure Results. A marketers job is never done. The beauty of MAPs is that all performance is quantifiable (if systems are integrated). By benchmarking campaign data, strategy can be applied across different channels, and different marketing campaigns can be optimized over time. Messaging and content can be targeted, and the entire customer experience becomes more personalized and relevant to potential consumers. Using marketing automation allows businesses to serve prospective customers with information, services and products when and how consumers want them.

Getting started with marketing automation can seem like a challenge for any complex business, due to technical constraints or operational resource bandwidth. But marketing automation tools are incredibly powerful, and often repay their initial investment back in dividends due to the additional revenue they bring.

Marketing automation can be a powerful tool to facilitate rapid business growth. Using behavioral insight, automation and email marketing B2B businesses are able to systematize and automate cumbersome or laborious marketing operations activities, and derive useful data points about internal operations and customers creating levers to allow businesses to scale.

If businesses are disciplined with their approach and benchmark KPIs, they can iteratively improve marketing automation performance over time, and streamline revenue streams, increase ROI, and add to overall business performance in the long run.