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How to Implement Marketing Automation in the Workplace
Needless to say, marketing automation is a remarkably powerful tool for aligning your marketing efforts. On top of that, it enables the extremely vital task of aligning your marketing and sales teams.
As you begin using your new platform for more and more, you’ll find that it requires a huge range of people, skills and knowledge drawn from across your company.
Getting everything together and working in the initial stages will have it all running smoothly for your campaigns in future.
Keep reading to find out more about our six key areas to sign off a successful marketing automation software implementation.
1 – Setting Up Roles and Expectations
From developing marketing campaigns to managing databases, your automation team will consist of a range of players:
- Your IT Team
- Salespeople
- Designers
- Content Producers
During the early stages of implementing your new web CRM software, you should establish exactly who you’ll need. Also, consider what function they’ll fill.
Benefits of completing this step early on
- You will get a clearer picture of the gaps in the workload – an easy way to tell if you need a new hire or some help from an agency.
- Each of your team members will have a good idea of what is expected of them in the process.
- It will help your teams to better structure their time.
- You’ll have a much easier time creating users and deciding permissions/access when it comes time.
2 – Training & Skilling Up
Many companies offer both online and onsite training to assist in your use of marketing automation.
Marketo and Eloqua both offer their own University courses and a huge range of online resources. They also have specialised experts that will train your team.
Benefits of completing this step early on
- The obvious benefit of training and upskilling your teams is having them ready to tackle campaigns straight away.
- Using a Marketing Automation Platform will increase your agency’s costs. This is why having a team ready to use the new automation tools straight off the bat will feel much less stressful on the hip pocket.
3 – Database Analysis & Segmentation
Having a good idea of who makes up your database is a great way to initiate new communications and break down your targeting efforts. Take a look at the core demographics of each of your buyer types and start considering what would most appeal to them. This information is extremely useful for upselling and cross-selling to existing customers, as well as nurturing new leads.
Benefits of completing this step early on
- Keeping this type of information in the back of your head can be very useful. As you get more familiar with the capabilities of your CRM automation software, you’ll start discovering new ways to apply it. Especially, when you’re setting up nurture streams and integrating apps.
- Knowing the ins and outs of your database will also help you understand which data in your CRM is most relevant to marketing automation activities and which are not. This is essential for the field mapping, which we will explore in the next point.
4 – Field Mapping for CRM Integration
When it comes to initiating the CRM integration, it’s crucial that you know what information needs to be travelling to and from each platform.
An important step to take in any integration —particularly those that aren’t native integrations— is to plan for all the fields that need to be mapped or created. This step requires your CRM administrator, your marketing team, a list of your platform’s out-of-the-box fields, and in some cases, your IT team.
A simple way of doing this is to create a spreadsheet that has one column for your CRM fields and one for your automation fields. Start by matching the fields as necessary and identifying any extra custom fields needed.
Benefits of completing this step early on
- If everything is laid out correctly and signed off by all relevant parties, the chances of messing up your integration are greatly reduced.
- This step forces you to consider what is most relevant when pulling information to and from your CRM and marketing automation platform. Keeping nonessential fields could result in running out of the set number of custom fields.
5 – Website Visitor Tracking
Once you have your marketing automation instance, one of the very first things you should get done is install your tracking codes across your website and landing pages.
Benefits of completing this step early on
- You can start collecting masses of data around how people are using your site.
- Start tracking the users that make up the masses of data, including people whose information you don’t already have.
- You can start matching this data to anyone who submits their information. This gives you historical data on how they have interacted with your content in the past.
6 – Sales Alignment
Arguably one of the most exciting things about marketing automation is its ability to align sales and marketing.
From creating users on the platform itself, to creating a detailed lead scoring model, the sales team plays a crucial part in how the platform is set up and its ongoing use.
Benefits of completing this step early on
- Understanding the needs, goals and processes of your sales team enables you to make things relevant to them. This ranges from roles and responsibilities to lead scoring and CRM integration.
- Get your sales team on board early on. Keeping them informed will strengthen the collaboration and aid any campaigns that involve email marketing ‘directly’ from the salespeople themselves.
- You can start working together to establish what constitutes a good lead. Ensure that all lead generation and marketing automation activities are working towards the same goal.
- Follow up with the sales team. Make sure they are up to date with all the communication up to the moment they make contact with a lead.
As our last “words of wisdom,” we can tell you that we know that implementing automation tools require a lot of planning. So, take the time to understand how to onboard your teams. Having everyone on the same page will really make the process as seamless as it can be!
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