This content has been moved to Marketing Automation: Like Bringing a Gun to a Knife Fight on the Webbiquity blog.
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Contact Tom Pick: tomATwebmarketcentralDOTcom
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Contact Tom Pick: tomATwebmarketcentralDOTcom
With the economy now officially in a recession (as if we didn't know that), marketers are under increasing pressure to do more with less. On the interactive marketing side, few marketers will get budget increases enabling them to drive more clicks. The challenge, then, is to maximize marketing productivity—to get more leads out of the same number of clicks. This is the first of two posts that will look at how to improve conversion rates to get more value from each click. One answer to this challenge is provided by "post-click marketing," a.k.a. lead automation management vendors. While the specifics of each service vary, all of them essentially: automate the process of extracting visitor IP information from your log files; match the IP address to an organization; filter out ISPs; and map the company name to one or more external databases to provide additional information (company size, industry, key contacts etc.). The better services also use geo-location filte...
Comments
I agree marketing automation is a misleading term, but think that demand generation is often considered a synonym for lead generation, which only describes part of what these systems do. Missing in your description is the part about giving sales the information they need to focus their efforts on the right people with information that allows them to work as partners or consultants instead of contract writers.
I think the other thing that is missing here, is that while it takes time and thought to create a good process using these systems, the benefits often go much further than better landing pages and more emails. Implementing marketing automation sparks conversations between sales and marketing, and pushes these teams to do more together to achieve better results. One example of this is our Definitive Guide for Lead Nurturing (http://www.marketo.com/dg2lead-nurturing) which has workbook style pages that can be filled out to plan out and calculate the ROI of nurturing programs. We are hearing from numerous marketers that when using this book they sat down with their sales teams and created buyer personas to map content to their nurture programs. While organizations don’t need to have software to have conversations, these systems show companies where there may be bottlenecks in their pipeline and require joint participation for true marketing automation optimization. Thank you again for the great post.
Thanks for the feedback and for the link to that excellent resource. I think we're in agreement that the most significant challenge in lead nurturing, whether automated with software or not, is getting the process right. That includes close cooperation between sales and marketing, so incentives and activities are properly aligned.