Marketing Processes You Need to Automate

As Director of Marketing, I’ve learned a lot about how to be efficient and effective with small marketing teams. This post is part of a series where I share a few tricks of the trade with my marketers in arms. We’re in this together. The series includes:

1. 10 Tips for Small Marketing Teams
2. Marketing Processes You Need to Automate
3. Where and How to Augment Your Small Marketing Team

With a small marketing team take time to automate as much as possible. It allows your resources to work smarter, not harder. You can’t do it all yourself, and things like scoring, tracking, reporting, lead flow, alerts to salespeople are all ripe for automation. Using automation allows you to outsource the everyday busy work and focus on strategic, critical thinking tasks instead. It’s not necessarily “set it and forget it”, but it is “set it and put it on the back burner”.

Here are three other processes you should consider automating.

Lead Collection and Movement Through the Funnel

Removing manual processing will help you scale as your business grows. Remember, the ultimate goal of marketing is to drive business growth. If you plan to manually process your leads and give them to your sales team when there is only one Contact Us form filled out in a week what are you going to do when there are five, 10 or 15 coming in that should be assigned to team members by specific criteria? It’s not scalable.

True marketing automation tools – not just email marketing – can help you have a full visualization of your records from leads and MQLs to prospects and customers. If someone downloads content and you have to manually add them to the database to be nurtured, you are adding unnecessary tasks to your schedule.

If you take the time to set up an automated system that allows people to download content, automatically be added to the database, assign a stage, score them and add them to a nurture campaign, you have just made your future self very happy.

Web Activity

Tracking web activity is another must-have. Google Analytics is fantastic, but it’s much more impactful to tell a salesperson “Jane Smith from 123 Company, downloaded X, read our Services page and entered the database from a conference,” rather than “52 people visited x web page.” If your marketing platform and sales/CRM tool are integrated, the activity can be accessible on a person’s profile and a salesperson can have visibility on their own. The more they know about a prospect the better, right?

If it’s sounding expensive, rest assured, even enterprise tools have a base price that can make sense for small marketing teams with small marketing budgets. Sell this to your C-suite by sharing available data when these automated processes are set up. They will love to see how much information they have at their fingertips.

Event Attendance

As you begin to automate more, consolidate your tools. Try not to add more platforms to your martech stack, but if you have to, be sure to sync them. For example, if you’re hosting a webinar. Track registrants and attendance automatically in the same marketing platform you are using for email sends and content downloads. Otherwise, you may not have a complete picture of that leads’ activity. Manually exporting data, cleaning lists, importing data, etc. takes time to process, and has a greater risk of error and duplicate records.

How-To and Next Steps

Automation is possible with the right tools. You’ll need a marketing automation platform, not just an email send tool, event management tool, or CRM software. Remember, automating processes is an investment. Your future self thanks you.

Check out the third installment in the Tips for Small Marketing Teams series and subscribe to receive future communication from Adage.

Third installment – Where and How to Augment Your Small Marketing Team