Marketing automation is the method of employing software to carry out repetitive marketing tasks, specially designed to nurture qualified salesleads, customise content and messages and save sales and marketing professionals time and labour. Marketing automation software offers many features that will help in streamlining your channel marketing processes and increasing your profitability. This is especially beneficial when you are managing an expansive dealer network. By utilising marketing automation platforms, you can easily monitor your partners’ campaigns, measure performance and track leads.
The beauty of marketing automation systems is that you don’t need to be technologically savvy to use them; anyone with basic computer knowledge can use a lot of MarTech tools. This is helpful in channel marketing as your dealer network will probably be sales professionals, not marketing professionals. Marketing automation systems enable you and your channel partners to easily manage and analyse campaigns and revenue. They are designed with highly advanced analytical capabilities to provide the necessary reports to help in decision making and to guide future strategy. Most systems offer a wide range of flexible reporting options to ensure that you get accurate insights on the performance of your dealer’s campaigns, which helps you achieve your business goals, improve your revenue and understand the strength of the partnership.
Nurturing Leads
Nurturing leads requires dedication. Managing, creating, monitoring and tracking a large number of leads and customer relationships takes a lot of time, effort, and resources. With marketing automation workflows, such as email automation tools, you can reduce your workloads while increasing your productivity. Using an email marketing automation system will allow your channel network to identify high-quality prospects. Once good leads have been identified, they can set up a nurture workflow and automate the follow-up process by sending emails regularly, keeping track of how many prospects they have been in touch with and how many of them have actually bought your products.
Automation software allows you to manage the contact details of all your leads through one interface. This means your channel partners can manage prospect messages, opt-in levels and send them promotional content to keep them engaged. Because so many marketers are focusing on content marketing, including social media, email marketing and CRM tools, it is imperative that you develop an engagement strategy with your partners, that targets the right audience. This process could include creating highly engaging lead capture pages that will encourage visitors to fill out forms and sign up for free information. A strategy of this type allows your partners to build a list of prospects who are most likely to be interested in your offers, then guide them into an automated nurture workflow.
Each consumer touch point, how they interact with your brand, and what they do next all need to analysed and reported on if you are to learn from your campaigns and create repeatable processes that attract, convert and nurture prospects. Marketing automation software will allow you to segment prospects further and create marketing communications specific to them. This helps your dealers to create marketing campaigns targeting different demographics, buyer personas, and geographic areas. There is a suite of tools and software that can be used to create a systematic process to generate and qualify leads over time, with very advanced algorithms that will identify who is more likely to buy your product or service.
Another major benefit associated with marketing automation and CRM software is the lower cost associated with generating sales leads and nurturing them. It is becoming increasingly difficult for businesses to continually engage and monitor leads. Automating your nurturing process will allow you to lower the costs associated with creating and managing lead lists. By managing your leads through an automated system, it becomes easier for your dealers to ensure that the right ones are prioritised, or made available to you.
Final Thoughts
For channel marketing professionals, automation offers new and exciting opportunities for an enhanced customer experience with greater efficiency and greater insight into the performance and strength of your partner relationships (Digital Marketing Institute). Marketing automation can seem a little daunting, but it’s something more companies are getting on board with, so you should too! With the right advice, automation can provide you with more leads, conversations, and sales – all with less work (Digital Marketing Institute).
