marketingcopilot Find Customers. Keep Customers.

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1 The Marketing CoPilot Guide to understanding 4 main questions we tackle: 1. Do I need marketing automation? 2. What data should I have before I launch into marketing automation? 3. What roadmap should I use to understand requirements for marketing automation? 4. What additional resources should I consider?

2 Use this worksheet to determine if your company is ready for marketing automation. For each category, select the appropriate number. If you strongly agree, choose 5. The numbers between 1 and 5 correspond to your level of agreement, neutrality, or disagreement. Tally your score when you re finished, and follow the instructions at the end. Disagree» Agree We understand our buyer s education process and recognize it involves many touches from marketing or sales. We understand that buyer behavior has changed and our target market wants several types of content to help them research and self-serve before they contact sales. Our company requires more insight into the exact value that our marketing programs deliver so that we can quantify our investment. Our customer base is larger than our sales team, so we can only develop personal relationships with a small percentage of the marketplace. Many of our new leads aren t ready to buy from us the first or second time they meet with us. They require nurturing. We would improve our sales results if we could develop other means of nurturing relationships with early stage prospects other than through sales team follow-up. Data, not opinion, drives every decision that we make in marketing. We have the ability to generate personalized content for segmented prospects and schedule through a formal content marketing plan. Our management team understands that 60% of the sales funnel is happening in the digital space and they allocate money and plan resources to support that new reality. We realize that digital marketing is not a campaign, but a process and we are prepared to use marketing automation as a way to test and evolve our program, not just automate it. To interpret your results, tally your score. If you scored >35, you re ready for marketing automation as a lead generation process tool. If you scored 20 to 35, you re moving in the right direction. You should consider confirming your lead management process and deciding how you could improve it by automating certain steps. If you scored under 20, you may not be ready. But that doesn t mean you can t keep working to improve your lead management program. Regardless of your score, here s the good news In order to get more leads, get better leads and know how to develop content that helps a prospect in the sale process, you re reading the right document.

3 Question Q: How many leads do you need to generate a month to hit your revenue targets for the year? Q: How much do you want to spend to generate each lead? Marketing CoPilot Best Practice Many companies do not have clear goals established before embarking on marketing automation. In order to calculate ROI, you need these numbers. If you don t have a ball park idea of what it costs to generate a lead in your business, you won t be able to budget or calculate ROI on an investment of software and resources to run marketing automation. Q: Have you done everything you can with Google Analytics? There are many things that Google does that people don t realize can add tremendous value to their current marketing program. Before looking at new systems, see if you have truly maxed out your data opportunity in Google. Q: Do you have specific goal-oriented dashboards set up in Google Analytics to measure trends over time? Many people have not set up goals properly in Google and therefore are missing out on important data they need to understand conversion and if marketing automation can improve what they are already doing. Q: Are you tracking specific leads and goals? Audience segmentation is poorly developed in most companies and this will cause issues when it comes time to set up a new database. Q: Are you looking at your data weekly to understand what is working and what is not? If you aren t using the data currently available in social media, and content management tools to understand how to improve your program, then adding a new layer of detail and reporting is only adding complexity to your program, not improving it. Q: Are you using data to make decisions and changes to your website? Q: How often are you sending out content and do you have segmented content for customers, prospects and suspects? Lots of people like to change graphics, content and navigation of their website. But few do it by mining data to understand what visitors are telling them about the usefulness of their content and the navigation path they follow. Use data, not opinion to make website enhancements. Many companies lack a schedule or formal content strategy. Without this, content distribution and campaigns end of being ad-hoc and not tied back to sales objectives. A marketing automation tool will make messy, messier. Q: How often can you commit to making changes on your website? Q: Do you have your sales process clearly defined? Marketing automation tools are providing data daily with respect to how prospects and the marketplace are engaging with your company. This means you are learning things everyday about your prospects. Without making changes regularly to your website, you are not improving the buying path and your conversion strategy. Remember the definition of marketing automation is to help streamline sales and marketing organizations by replacing high-touch, repetitive manual processes with automated solutions. You can t automate something that doesn t exist.

4 Question Q: Do you have your buyer personas documented? Q: Do you have list segmentation complete? Q: Do you have 12 months of marketing data that you can model to understand how to improve efficiency? Marketing CoPilot Best Practice Much of the lead tracking that exists in a marketing automation tool allows you to do lead scoring and track various types of visitors. If you don t have a clear lead definition or understanding of the stages in the sales process, this becomes a wasted option in an MA tool. One of the great things about an MA tool is that you can send different campaigns to different groups within your list and learn about what type of content matters to them. If you just have a big list without knowing who is in that list and what stage of the buying process they are at, you are wasting an opportunity. If you are not currently sending content and tracking it, you don t need marketing automation yet, you need an marketing platform. While is a component of MA, you can spend $30/month to learn a lot before you spend $2500 on the cost and resources associated with a formal MA tool.

5 What you are trying to determine is where your current process breaks and how the use of marketing automation could be better for each step of the process from development and distribution to tracking. Segment 1st Touch 2 nd Touch 3rd Touch Outcome Raving Fans Suggestions with teaser blog content Sharing via social media Direct send to the website Like content share in their network Customers Prospects Suspects Disinterested Partners/Industry Past Customers Questions for content and distribution map: What do I need to send? When do I need to send it? What is the follow up action? What is the continuum action/result I am looking for? How will I measure success? Where will this action drop into my buyer map?

6 Get the definitive roadmap to digital marketing success» Join the Marketing CoPilot Community Marketing CoPilot Content Gap Checklist Marketo Definitive Guide to Marketing Automation