Last week, we hosted a webinar to help make sense of two approaches to managing customer interaction and engagement: CRM (Customer Relationship Management) and MA (Marketing Automation). In the webinar, we discussed when and how to use what platform while presenting best practices and success stories.
While we had hoped to get through all questions posed, we, unfortunately, ran out of time. So, to make up for it, we have reasked (and answered) the questions below (you're welcome!).
- We have a large content library but not sure how to organize it or deliver pieces to prospects?
The first thing would be to develop a content audit of your existing assets. Once you have a good idea of what you have (case studies, white papers, blog posts, etc.), you'll then need to determine where those assets fall within the marketing funnel. High-level content belongs at the top of the funnel, while prospects are conducting research. Your content should get more engaging the further down the funnel your prospect goes. Your soft sell and hard sell content shouldn't be used until your prospect becomes sales-ready, based on your lead score model. Once you have completed your audit, you should plot your content pieces onto a calendar, like this one we've created. This helps keep your organized, knowing what content piece to deliver and when.
- In the SLA model shown, you had many different stages and processes. Our sales model is much simpler, do we have to follow this model?
This is an example model, it can be molded and reconfigured to match your specific business processes. It can be as simple or as complex as you need. The key is collaborating between the sales and marketing teams to define each stage and the trigger that moves a prospect from stage to stage. Once these stages and triggers are defined, you'll move into your Marketing Automation and CRM platforms to implement this model in an automated workflow.
- We are having trouble figuring out where to start with lead score, any suggestions?
To get started, ask your sales team to gather a list of key attributes they look for or need when defining a qualified prospect. This will give you the demographic data points that are needed before a prospect should be considered qualified.
Next, look at your marketing materials and website. What engagements would you want to see from a prospect that showed they were truly interested in buying your product or service? For example, visiting a product listing or pricing page, opening a specific email, attending an event, etc. These key engagements give you the behavioral portion of your lead score. Once you have these key demographic and behavioral data points you want to target, you need to list them in priority and assign a point value. Some values maybe as low as 1, such as opening an email, or as high as 25 for filling out a contact us form. You want the key engagements and profile information to add up to be a threshold that will be broken to be qualified.
There you have it, a lead score model has been created! Note that a lead score model will be constantly changing and should not be a program that is built and forgotten about. The key engagements or profile information will change over time and the lead score model will need to reflect these changes.
- How does pricing normally work for these types of systems, meaning Marketing Automation or CRM platforms?
Almost all of the platforms in the space have a baseline cost for their core platforms and a defined amount of database records. From there, they traditionally scale in cost with each 10,000 database records added, as well as any additional add-on feature sets. Many of the platforms include core marketing automation functionality in their base platforms and the add-on features include social integrations, advanced reporting, additional sales user access, etc. Additionally, you can find pricing breaks below retail by paying annually rather than quarterly or monthly, as well as going through reseller partners like Hileman Group.
We hope these answers have helped shed some light on some aspects in the world of digital marketing. For your reference, here is the webinar presentation. And, as always, feel free to ask questions in the comments below. We are here to help!