Today’s customers use an extensive network of tools and channels to find and connect with businesses. Whether you sell to consumers or B2B buyers, you need a variety of technologies to meet customers on their preferred channels and deliver the right message at the right time.
Marketing automation encompasses the software and technology you should integrate into your processes to market effectively on digital channels and analyze the results. Most automation is designed to replace repetitive tasks, which allows your staff to allocate their time and resources on other efficient efforts, such as strategy and customer experience. According to one report, marketing automation drives a 14.5% increase in sales productivity and a 12.2% reduction in marketing overhead.
But the marketing automation on-boarding process isn’t always easy. There are thousands of marketing automation solutions on the market and determining how they fit into your marketing strategy can be daunting.
Thankfully, there are a few ways you can simplify the on-boarding process.
Choose the Right Marketing Automation Partner for Support
First, you should consider partnering with an agency that has a broad understanding of the marketing technology landscape. Simply choosing your solutions can be difficult enough; integrating them into your operations can lead to disruptions if you don’t have the expertise to do it properly.
You may need to integrate multiple marketing automation solutions to deploy the capabilities you want. Some of the most essential technologies include:
- Customer relationship management (CRM) software
- Customer identity validation tools
- Email automation applications
- Marketing and sales analytics
- Lead generation solutions
- Customer communication platform
Furthermore, the process of on-boarding marketing automation solutions involves several steps:
- Defining goals and objectives
- Identifying the right technologies
- Creating a plan or roadmap
- Setting a timeline
- Delegating responsibilities
- Overcoming integration challenges
- Determining KPIs
The right agency partner can help you select the best solutions for your needs and develop a comprehensive on-boarding plan. Get the Sales and Marketing Teams Involved from the Start On-boarding your new automation solutions shouldn’t be a side project. Instead, you should get both your marketing and sales team involved in the process, so they can make inputs and determinations about how you’ll use your solutions and why.
This is an important step because the tools you integrate will have a direct impact on both departments and their work.
The marketing team will be using their new automation tools every day. They need to become familiar with the new products and they need to have a say in how they will be implemented. By bringing marketing in at the beginning of the process, they’ll be better prepared to start using automation when you’ve fully onboarded your solutions.
Sales should also be in the picture because your new marketing automation solutions will play a significant role in how they receive, handle, and act on leads and data. You can also empower your sales team with certain types of automation, such as automated prospecting, meeting scheduling, data entry, deal management, and analytics.
Prepare Your Legacy Data Beforehand
Before you start your on-boarding project, work with your marketing, sales, and agency teams to prepare your legacy data for the switch. Data regarding your existing customers, prospects, and leads will be essential if you are to hit the ground running after the on-boarding process. Without taking this step, that data could be siloed in a legacy system, making it useless for your new marketing automation strategy.
If you’re working with an agency, they should be able to create custom templates for you to gather your existing data. By filling out the templates, you’ll be able to import that data into your new solutions.
Your partner should also help you identify custom fields for new data you’d like to collect. For example, you may have collected demographic and firmographic data on your customers in the past. With help, you could soon collect data on the technologies your customers use, quantitative data like click-through-rates and email opens, and qualitative data such as social media activities, reviews, and feedback.
Don’t Do All the Heavy Lifting Yourself
Businesses often feel overwhelmed or neglected when adopting new marketing automation technologies, even when they’re already partnered with a marketing agency. If you’ve never gone through such a transformation before, you may feel lost in a sea of vendors and sales pitches, unsure of how each solution can fit into your marketing ecosystem.
At Synchronicity, we simplify digital transformation and marketing automation on-boarding for our customers by taking care of the heavy lifting. We can help you select the right tools and improve collaboration between all your teams, so you can get your technology in place quickly and start seeing results faster.
Connect with Synchronicity today to start your marketing automation on-boarding project.