Marketing technology delivers the biggest impact when it directly drives company revenue growth.
That's particularly important to marketers who recognize their value to the company is directly aligned to their ability to deliver revenue growth. These are the leaders that are co-contributors to revenue and accountable for their contribution to the pipeline, forecast and sales.
But how do they do it?
Marketing technology research found that a small number of tech tools deliver the majority of company revenues. And for most companies, the enterprise Marketing Automation Platform (MAP) was the single biggest driver of marketing sourced revenue growth.
MAPs include popular brands such as Adobe Experience Cloud, Oracle Eloqua and Salesforce Marketing Cloud. So, how do they grow company revenues?
Here are 6 ways to use this technology to grow revenues for the company.
Lead Scoring
Start by only delivering sales-ready leads to the sales force. Rather than throwing unqualified leads over the fence to sales, use this technology to apply digital lead tracking, lead scoring and email nurture campaigns to advance leads to agreed upon qualification scores. Then send only sales-ready leads to the sales team.
This by itself delivers a significant business impact. When sales staff allocate their scarce selling time to the most qualified opportunities, sales productivity rises, sales velocity increases and sales win rates go up.
Precision Marketing
MAPs can also improve engagement with capabilities such as customer segmentation, contextual communication and personalized messaging – each of which contribute to acquiring more leads.
Enterprise marketing automation technology can segment prospects beyond demographic and firmographic criteria which are static and very poor predictors of buyer intent. These systems leverage far more powerful behavioral attributes gleaned from the buyers’ digital footprints and online behaviors.
Nurture Campaigns
Lead scoring combined with nurture campaigns will double the volume of qualified leads sent to the sales force. That's because newly acquired leads incur a bell curve in terms of lead quality.
In most B2B industries, about a quarter of new leads are sales-ready when received. About 45-55% of new leads are not yet sales-ready when received but about 60-65% of this group will eventually become sales-ready over about 10-18 months. The final group of about 25-30% of new leads are not sales-ready when received and never will be.
When the not yet sales-ready leads are forwarded to the sales team they get ignored and exacerbate the lead leakage problem. If instead the not-yet sales ready leads are nurtured using a combination of behavioral attributes, successive messaging and relevant content, about half that group will eventually convert into sales-ready leads. This has the effect of doubling the overall sales-ready lead volume.
Retargeting Campaigns
Most systems are overtly focused on getting new visitors to landing pages. It's a relevant tactical strategy, but incomplete as exceedingly few buyers are going to convert. In fact, most websites convert less than 2% of visitors into leads and most landing pages convert less than 5% of paid traffic.
That means the other 95-98% of the website visitors that came to check out your company didn't find a compelling reason to engage or complete a submit page, and left, never to return again. What if you could engage and convert just 5-10% of those departing anonymous visitors? You'd double your leads.
That's where retargeting campaigns come in. Using your MAP with Facebook Custom Audience or Google Customer Match will display your offers to website visitors long after they left your website. And because these prospects visited your website and know your brand, they are 4.5 times more likely to convert in a retargeting campaign than visitors in an initial campaign.
Multi-Channel Offers
Successive or sequential progressive engagement techniques acquire more leads than one-off campaigns. MAP campaigns can take it a step further and deliver multiple outbound flights over multiple channels.
That's important because offers or promotions viewed over multiple channels earn higher conversions. For example, if a website visitor shows an interest, but doesn't respond to a website offer, delivering related or progressive messages on additional channels will increase conversions compared to any single channel.
Real-Time Offers
MAP technology can detect real-time buyer behaviors and immediately (or perhaps upon a staged delay) apply highly specific campaign offers that capitalize on those behaviors. That's proven to significantly increase offer conversions.
The application harvests buyer digital footprints. It then applies them to achieve the elusive goal of delivering the right content to the right contact at the right time in the right channel.
Capturing each visitor's online behaviors and using that data to offer real-time, personalized and contextual content – pursuant to a content marketing strategy and based on persona and buy cycle stage – converts leads by striking while the iron is hot.
And one more thing.
Enterprise Marketing Automation Platforms are instrumental in reducing lead leakage.
For several reasons, leads scored as sales-ready can be transferred to the sales team and then stall. Leaving stalled leads with the sales team drives lead leakage. Instead, use enterprise marketing automation software to identify stalled leads or opportunities. Then revert them back to the marketers for continued nurturing until they again become sales-ready. This process will salvage a high volume of leads that would otherwise die on the vine. At Johnny Grow, it's what we refer to as 'no lead left behind.'
There are many additional opportunities to leverage enterprise marketing automation for things like revenue visibility beyond the sales forecast or revenue predictability based the revenue cycle duration. These systems can engage anonymous visitors that don't respond to offers, deliver sales intelligence with new leads (i.e., deliver the digital footprints with the lead to salespeople) and lower the overall cost per lead (CPL) by using efficient campaign automation. But as this blog post is getting kind of long, I'll discuss these methods in more detail in a follow-on post.