If you didn’t make it to Technology for Marketing 2016 this week, then you missed out on some of the biggest technology players in the marketing landscape. Not to worry! We’ve got a recap of what you would have learnt on the day, as well answers to the most common questions we were asked at our stand.
Step back in time to the Technology for Marketing world…
So the stage was set, the doors opened and the crowds flooded in. We saw a lot of the usual lead generation and email marketing providers along with ourselves. B2B focused, B2C companies…you name it, there was a business for everyone. Of course, in such a data-driven marketing world, we’re all becoming more and more specialised. Personally, our focus was on B2B companies looking for the full platform: lead generation, email marketing, and marketing automation.
It wasn’t long before we started to notice a stream of common questions coming through….
The principle question: How are you different from other providers?
Naturally, with so many providers in lead generation, email marketing, and marketing automation (each with our own specialities) this was the most common question we came across. But the thing is – we don’t just specialise in one of those three areas. We specialise in all three, and that was our stand out factor.
Our focus begins with B2B lead generation. We start by identifying your website visitors and use lead scoring to categorise them into sales ready and marketing nurture ‘pots’. From there we break it down even further, showing you the individuals that work at the companies who are visiting your website.
That way, sales can begin nurturing the right key decision maker. Then based on what they are looking at (yes, our software can show you that too), you can tailor your sales pitch to that focus or add them to the relevant nurture stream. You can even purchase data based on particular criteria and feed them into the right nurture stream automatically too!
From there, it all depends on how they interact in your workflow. For example, what they click in within their first email determines what information they receive in the next. Allowing your leads to create customised email campaign journeys that suit what they want to know. Oh, and did I mention this was all automated?
For us, it’s all about getting the most conversions out the other side and this comes from combining web tracking, email marketing, and full automation. We have a big focus on integrating everything together – including your CRM. After all, we think it is hugely beneficial to have all your marketing under one roof. Once you do that, your sales and marketing teams can work together effectively.
Plus, we tend to be better priced than the guys that do this for corporate companies because we like SME’s!
Once we explained what CommuniGator was all about, we usually got: “Oh! So do you do this?”
Of course! We practice what we preach, we do what we say on the tin, we talk the talk AND walk the walk. We use and promote all our best practices because we know how effective they’ve been for our business. If we had to pick one factor, it would be our CRM integration that has been the cleverest part to improving our pipeline performance.
Which was followed by: “Ok, so what best practices are you doing with the software?”
Given that a lot of our customers had asked us this question in the past, we’ve decided to expand our platform to help clients implement what we’ve found to work really well with our software.
So, we suggest you start by segmenting your content by levels. For example, blogs are great for cold leads. Whitepapers and guides work for interested leads. Case studies are for hot leads and a sales pitch is for sales-ready leads! Separate all this content out into your core topic streams and you can then build a multi-level workflow to make sure all your leads are getting the right information at the right time for them, depending on where they are in the buying journey.
We would also recommend they follow this process across their website. So create content workflow trigger campaigns of the back of any form fills. Essentially, you want to make sure your marketing team is only passing on qualified leads to sales. You know, those ones that are showing purchase intent behaviour on the website. The rest you can automatically manage yourself within a marketing workflow.
You can even set up triggers within your CRM such as “sales have tried to call twice and not got through” to automate an email from the account owner. We recommend writing this as a sales message, outlook style 1:1 email asking for a good time to call. That way, sales don’t have to lift a finger.
“Great! What about my current marketing data? Can I upload it?”
Short answer: of course. Though we would warn you, you need to be careful as in 18 months you will have to abide by the new data laws.
This was followed by a deer-in-the-headlights expression and the hushed words “What new data laws?”
For those of you still in the dark, the EU GDPR is coming in to replace our current Data Protection Directive and it means you’re going to have to change your opt-in approach. You’ve got until May 2018 before it comes into force, but you want to make sure all your data complies by that date. Our advice? Start getting your data to opt-in to your communications now! If you’re not sure about what the GDPR means for you, here, have a copy of our whitepaper.
After a quick sigh of relief that we could help, we also were asked: “Do you sell data too?”
To which we answered (again) of course! You simply need to tell us what your killer values and target profile audiences are so that we can give you additional data that you can start getting opted-in to your communications moving forward.
After this, our Technology for Marketing audience were hooked. They knew what they needed to do with their marketing AND how to achieve it. So they asked to sit down with us and speak with us more for the insider info on using marketing technology to its true potential. If you’re looking at improving your marketing with specific requirements in mind, take a look at how we would start creating a performing marketing automation platform. Then maybe we can sit down and discuss the specific requirements YOU need.