Using Marketing Automation Throughout an Organisation
The days of organisational silos are behind us and gone is the belief that marketing is the only department that can benefit from marketing automation technology.
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These all-in-one platforms can help entire organisations make smarter business decisions and more effectively engage with all audiences. In this blog, we explore five departments that can utilise marketing automation leading to a significant impact on business goals and ROI.
Sales
One challenge sales departments face is how to focus on the most qualified leads while still building a pipeline. The answer can come from marketing automation, specifically through lead nurturing campaigns. These campaigns put pipeline prospects on autopilot and keep your brand and message top of mind without committing valuable sales resources.
Marketing automation can also support sales with web intelligence, allowing sales teams to understand prospect behaviour and what interests them most. Armed with better prospect intelligence, the sales team can begin nurturing potential relationships quicker and more effectively serve potential customers with the information they need.
In addition, sales teams can more easily determine the sales readiness of a lead with marketing automation solutions. By utilising lead scoring tools that prioritise leads in a data-driven way, sales teams can quickly and easily determine which leads to pursue by providing a “score” for each lead.
Sales departments are further equipped to increase deal sizes and overcome objections with email drip and cross-sell campaigns that both provide targeted content at each stage in the buying cycle, as well as drive customers from one product to another.
Marketing
Marketing automation solutions allow marketing departments to transcend the traditional role of the department and support the organisation better than ever before. By automating campaigns, marketers create campaigns once and have the next actions and interactions automatically triggered as new participants join the campaign or show interest in a product, allowing the department to work more efficiently.
Additionally, an automation tool helps marketing departments reach audiences where they interact the most. From email marketing to SMS to social media marketing and more, marketing automation platforms provide the essential tools to engage audiences everywhere.
Also, marketing departments can gain insight into revenue and pipeline contribution with marketing automation reporting, which helps marketers gain credit and attribute revenue and pipeline to the campaigns that created it. This also helps when it comes time to evaluate campaign performance.
Customer Service
With marketing automation solutions, customer service departments are able to build stronger customer relationships. By personalising the customer service experience automatically, representatives can connect with customers in more engaging ways. Service teams can increase customer satisfaction and pinpoint areas for improvement through surveys and customised messages. Surveys provide the real-time feedback and qualitative information needed to improve many organisational processes. Customised messages and content based on the customer’s preferences or demographics is stored in an organisation’s CRM and this is where it pays to have a seamless integration between CRM and marketing automation as it can be sent to suit a variety of customer service scenarios.
Customer service teams can also drive renewals and upselling opportunities. Reminder campaigns can send periodic messages leading up to renewal; upsell campaigns can help customers discover related products or services of interest.
Training
For training departments, it’s often all about attendee numbers. Marketing automation solutions can help by providing everything from event management to email marketing to forms and landing pages – utilising a variety of features to drive better attendance to training events.
In addition to attendance, marketing automation can help improve learning effectiveness within the organisation. Surveys and forms can test learners on the material they covered and follow up materials can be recommended based on their responses.
Additionally, automated campaigns can deliver training materials or lessons in a timely fashion, ensuring the appropriate information is delivered in a timeframe that keeps learners engaged.
Human Resources
Marketing automation solutions help human resource departments recruit skilled employees. Social media is at the forefront of recruiting efforts today, and social media tools within a marketing automation platform can assist with publishing, targeting and tracking those efforts – effectively streamlining the recruiting process and identifying qualified candidates for open positions.
Marketing automation features can also be used to send satisfaction surveys to employees, making it simple to receive necessary feedback for employee engagement and retainment.
Lastly, HR teams can easily communicate company-wide change by using automated campaigns – ensuring the entire organisation receives consistent and timely communications.
Utilising marketing automation technology across multiple departments not only eases common challenges by streamlining many day-to-day tasks, but positions the larger organisation to meet goals more efficiently. Marketers and business leaders looking to get more out of their technology investments should consider cross-department implementation, as it drives each team and the entire business forward. Join Storm and Click Dimensions on Tues 22nd June at 10am (GMT) to find out how Marketing Automation can benefit your whole organisation. Don’t miss out, reserve your seat today.
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