… or why the use of marketing technologies dramatically simplifies the path to more customers.
How many frogs do you have to kiss before you find the prince? Or put another way, how much effort does it take today to develop a sales opportunity won online? Let’s put it to the test …
A simple calculation illustrates the challenge.
For one customer, we need at least three hot candidates. For these three candidates, we need about 15 reasonably interested people who have at least looked at our range of services. For this, in turn, we need – let’s say 30 sales prospects who want to get an overview of our offering. And we find them among approx. 90 interested parties who have listened at least once. 90 to 1, or a little more than 1%. That’s about what we have to manage and a classic backward calculation in marketing.
Just don’t lose the overview …
However, this equation only works if the interested parties are supported throughout the course of their decision-making process. In theory, and on a very small scale, this can be done manually. The trainee David can, after all, enter all requests for a brochure or a whitepaper into a list, then create them in the CRM system, send a follow-up e-mail, and then make the prospects further targeted offers on a regular basis, for example every 3-4 days.
He then captures those who shout “Yes, more of this…” in his list or enters them into the CRM. Those who haven’t responded, he sets aside for now. He then does this for 3-4 weeks for the group from the first week of the campaign. Of course, he does the same for the responders of the second week, the third and so on.
Small challenges quickly turn into big problems.
But what happens when we receive not just a few, but (hopefully) a large number of requests? We can only hope that David is not completely stressed by his studies and that everything is fine at home, because he will need all his Excel skills to manage this process and also to compile the weekly reporting for his client. It is also not out of the question that he – David – will look for a slightly less demanding job after a few weeks.
Why complicate things when they can be simple?
Maybe we can do David some good after all, before the frustration of constant repetition gets the better of him. After all, the activities that David performs one after the other actually follow a linear choreography, with quite clearly defined trigger moments and follow-up actions? So we can assume a process that can be controlled. We don’t want to anticipate the end of the story here, but it’s true: Marketing automation can dramatically simplify operational campaign management.
Online marketing needs special online marketing tools!
Indeed, modern online marketing offers the chance to set up campaigns for a large audience quickly. However, they are not easy to keep running. Those who like it do it by filling columns in spreadsheets one by one. If you’re smart, you’ll find out about marketing automation (MA) tools. They cover the entire range of David’s routine work and offer much more: intelligent lead scoring can be used to distinguish between different types of prospects in marketing.
Sales opportunities must be developed.
Lead Nurturing, i.e. the continuous development of sales opportunities along the customer journey, is one of the current top topics and currently represents the highest evolutionary stage of marketing. The goal is automated contact with targeted content based on individual scoring in order to optimally develop sales opportunities for sales.
MA tools track user behavior via simple, privacy-compliant mechanisms. They detect whether a mail has been opened and a link clicked. And they collect this information to learn from it. Recipients who respond to offers are obviously those whose interest is more pronounced than that of non-responders. The goal of marketing automation is to provide increasingly targeted offers to responders. Each interaction is assigned a score. The higher the score of a sales opportunity, the more offers are landed here and the better the prospects of actually landing a hit with this target group. Since all interactions are recorded, senders simultaneously receive a 360-degree overview of the interests of their clientele and the sales department an initial profile of the potential new customer.
Marketing Automation does not replace a CRM system – it complements it.
Of course, you may ask yourself whether all the activities described above cannot also be controlled from a CRM system. The answer is: partially yes. However, CRM systems are optimized for the work of sales, provide colleagues with a 360-degree overview of the customer, control the sales process and provide information about the potential of the pipeline. They are suitable for developing a prospect in a targeted manner as soon as we have captured his or her interests.
The process steps before that, i.e. addressing a large number of target persons and playing out content or offers in a balanced way, are not the task of the CRM system. But of course you can also turn a beetle into a Porsche killer. Provided you have the necessary means to do so. For everyone else, it’s worth considering other marketing technologies and integrating them into the existing tool landscape.
Entering a new era of marketing.
It doesn’t take much imagination to envision what will already result in the near future from the combination of ML/AI algorithms and MA results: the highly automated, operational campaign control of online marketing. Does this mean David and his colleagues will lose their jobs? Not at all, and in fact quite the opposite: instead of worrying about the small-scale control of campaigns, they can devote themselves to the creation of targeted content and exciting offer formats, for example the design of webinars, which are often and happily used in marketing automation. But that’s a whole other story again….
Next time we will deal with the content of Marketing Automation – the legendary content. Our prospect’s engagement stands and falls with it. Where are the tips and tricks to stand out from the crowd and really impress the reader once again? Still in the making, but soon to be read here. Until then, feel free to stay loyal to this blog. But most of all, stay healthy!
With suitable marketing technology to more customers? Marketing automation software makes it possible to automate many marketing processes and thus generate and nurture leads more quickly, efficiently and sustainably. Finding a suitable tool is often difficult, because the market for solutions is large. Our guide shows what you should consider in the selection process for the marketing automation tool that suits you best and presents a comparison of some tools for medium-sized businesses. Learn more and save the guide! (German)