Don't Let Your Marketing Automation Feel Like a Bad Guided Tour

Let’s sample a situation where you have been to a guided tour at a foreign place.

I want to take you back to a zone filled with excitement and many offerings in store that may overload your senses.

If you strike a parallel with your marketing function, it too holds the similarities of a guided tour. Your system probably has multiple options to explore and many places to visit. All this translates into a large array of experiences. Here, they can choose the main place of visit or spend more time there - request a demo, or go for minor attractions like visiting the water fountain or open bus ride - read a blog post or a watch a video. Whatever,may be the customer behavior on your website, you ensure to keep him/her engaged all through the journey. A loose hand may lose your prospect forever.

Everyone accepts the fact that the best tour experience brings the visitors back to the place. As a marketer, the prime objective of every interaction is to create an everlasting impression that converts many leads. So more than the number of leads you work on, focus on the quality ones who like your product and want to schedule a demo. Like the ones who are happy with the tour and want to go for a bigger version with many add-ons

What is the price of your Marketing Automation? Is it an overpriced tour ticket?

Always be candid in your approach to know the status quo of your marketing automation programs. Ensure that there are no data leaks in the process and the message is consistent all through the nurture cycle. Or else, it’s time for an update.

An obsolete system is like an old tour guide, who knows all about the place and can’t click with the crowd and the result is half-baked. This bitter experience can send negative vibes of your product and the prospects may not return to you.

Though the system needs an overhaul, incremental changes are a better way to speed up the process. Rather than firing the tour guide and searching for a replacement, put efforts on training him so as to connect with your audience and get the ball rolling.

As a smart marketer, you can invest a lot in interactive content for the much needed improvements in your systems. This content goes well with your leads to enhance the engagement levels and harnesses the potential to score more leads and nurture them. So. your tour will be more exciting.

It’s an arduous task to win the hearts of your customers on Day 1. But a series of engaging content pieces can take your there to increase the likability of your product. Make them feel special and don’t bog them with so many downloads. Just ensure that they are not lost in the crowd and stay with you. Make the tour more enjoyable so that the prospects ask for a demo real soon.

Interactive Content gives a better experience. 

Examples of interactive content include sales graders, assessments, contests, quizzes, opinion polls etc. There are innumerable use cases to get the most out of marketing automation with the help of interactive content. These are three reasons that can make the cut.

 1. Better Profiling

Incomplete profile data can clutter the marketing automation platforms. Your goal is to fill in those gaps, but the only way to do that (it seems) is to present long lead forms – dooming your conversion rates.

With interactive content, you can include a lead form to collect your basic demographic data, then use the questions and answers throughout the experience to gather the specific qualifying information you and your sales team need to score, nurture and close deals. It’s like progressive profiling wrapped in a much more entertaining package.

Let’s say you’re building an ROI calculator. Your audience is interested because it will help them understand what they can expect to gain by investing in your product or service, so they’re happy to answer questions your sales team cares about – like how many units they might purchase, or the size of their implementation team.

Suddenly, your prospect profile is filled with way more information than you had before – and your prospect is happy to have the info on their potential investment. Win-win.

2. Greater Lead Scoring

Amusement parks excel at guiding visitors from one ride to the next. Your marketing automation platform should do the same through lead scoring.

Typically, marketers base lead scoring on demographic characteristics and basic behavioral triggers – web pages visited, content offers downloaded, etc.

Traditional lead scoring often works well, but occasionally passes over leads that aren’t ready to talk to sales. It also gives the salesperson little to grab on to when driving that initial conversation.

Through interactive content, marketers can ask questions their sales team uses to qualify leads, passing the answers into marketing automation and on to CRM when the prospect converts to a sales-ready lead.

3. Focused Nurturing 

Many marketers invest in marketing automation for the ability to send “one-to-many” messages with the feeling of “one-to-one.” According to a DemandGen Report study, 73% of B2B marketers cited better response to campaigns/offers due to targeting/relevancy as one of the biggest benefits of lead nurturing. The challenge there is maintaining personalization and the feeling of a true face-to-face conversation.

Segmenting for lead nurture is important, but can be time-intensive. With a database of tens or hundreds of thousands of leads, how can you apply unique characteristics to each lead to give them hyper-targeted follow-up materials?

With interactive content, you can feed all the question and answer data into your marketing automation system and trigger nurture emails associated with those results. This is supercharged marketing automation – rather than simply nurturing according to behavior or demographic data, you can now nurture according to what your prospects are really thinking and saying.

Win “Tour of the Year”

So here are the three ways to make the most of the marketing automation system. Don’t cry about missed opportunities and with better profiling, greater lead scoring and focused nurturing, you will deliver more marketing qualified leads quicker than ever. All these strategies will enable you to win tour of the year with many visitors coming to you year after year.