Prioritizing your precious marketing dollars: website vs. marketing automation?

E-Marketer  estimates that digital will make up 45% of marketing spend by 2020, bypassing any other category by far. Within digital, however, marketers often struggle to prioritize their precious dollars across SEO, websites, email, social, online advertising alongside possible investments in platforms such as marketing automation, social monitoring and so on.

Over the course of 2 sessions totaling more than 20 marketers in transportation and logistics at last June’s TMSA Conference, four key themes about marketing automation emerged. They were voiced as:

1. I’m a single person managing both sales and marketing. How can marketing automation help me? (I answered this question in a previous post, read it here.
   
2. I’m struggling with what to prioritize: my website vs. marketing automation?
3. I have marketing automation, but I’m pretty sure I’m not using it in the best ways I should be.
4. My company wants to send tons of outbound email to promote just about everything we want to say, but our open rates and other metrics are really bad with this approach.

In today’s post, we’ll answer the question “I’m struggling with what to prioritize: my website vs. marketing automation?”

Here’s the short answer: your website! 

To quote one of my clients in the warehousing and logistics industry and a fellow TMSA member “Your website is your storefront.  It’s where people who know you --- and people who don’t --- go to find more information on your company and what it has to offer.” No doubt, maintaining a modern, updated website that is relevant to your customers and prospects is Marketing 101 these days.

That said, it’s best to think about your website and marketing automation as two things that, if set up correctly, can integrate to help you manage a total customer lifecycle.

Here is a scenario to illustrate this point:

1. A person googles a search term that ‘finds’ a page on your website, as a result of investments you’ve made to optimize your website for search engine optimization (SEO).
2. The person is very interested in webpage’s service features, so they complete a form to request more information. As a result, you receive valuable information, such as how big the person’s company is, what their job title is, and so on.
3. The form data feeds into your marketing automation system, which automatically assigns the person an “A” grade for matching your ideal customer characteristics.
4. The person’s record (ie. a ‘lead’ in your marketing automation or CRM system) gets automatically assigned to your top salesperson since it qualified as an “A” grade.
5. At the same time sales is reaching out to the person to schedule their first consultation, the marketing automation system begins an email ‘drip’ campaign made up of fact sheets and case studies about the service he/she viewed on your website.
6. 30 days later, sales closes the deal and the person becomes a bonafide customer. Two weeks later, the marketing automation system sends the person a survey “tell us how your onboarding is going”.
7. Their survey score comes back as 98% satisfied, so the marketing automation system kicks off a “we thought you might also be interested in this service” campaign to upsell another service your firm has. 
8. The person visits your website to learn more about the second service, and the process starts all over again…..

Done right, both your website and marketing automation can enable the right touchpoints throughout the customer’s lifecycle, as the scenario indicates. 

Interested in exploring more ways Marketing Automation can help you prioritize budget and help your business thrive? Join me for a webinar on November 15! Click here to register.