For SME’s, finding the resources to focus on each lead is a challenge. Often teams have only one or two sales reps. They struggle to give the proper attention to each opportunity.
For such businesses, especially in the construction products and services industry, marketing automation can be the ideal solution to help convert as many opportunities as possible.
By implementing marketing automation into your business, your team can streamline, automate, and measure marketing tasks all while increasing your efficiency and growing your sales.
Even though the construction sector may be a ‘no-frills’ industry, marketing automation is the sort of tech stack that is essential in this digital era. Digital marketing allows you to market to customers online, wherever they are and at whatever time they wish. And it can be used alongside marketing intelligence services like Glenigan.
In this blog, we will cover 4 best practices for utilising marketing automation to not only make the most of the software but also to drive results for your business.
Knowing your buyer’s journey will allow you to set up the automated workflows relevant to them and what will move them further down the sales funnel.
If a visitor lands on your pricing page, a great marketing automation practice is to set up a trigger for an email with content such as FAQs or testimonials. This sort of information will help them make their decision, whilst also reminding them of your brand before they go for a competitor’s product.
By sending the right message at the right time in their buyer’s journey, marketing automation will work hard for the benefit of your team’s lead nurturing.
Even if you are automating your marketing, it still needs to be human and helpful. Your automated customer service rep should be just as lifelike as a real one. As your team sets up automated campaigns it’s important to remember to add a personal flair and friendly tone of voice.
Another element to being human, however, is to make sure any triggered emails have a delay built-in. It’s more than slightly creepy if you receive an email the exact moment you land on a website – and it is a clear indicator the automation is at play.
Marketing automation allows you to engage your customer and stay top of mind but is only as effective as you make it by humanising and personalising those automated reach-outs.
Marcus Sheridan, content marketing thought-leader, states that there is a magic number of touchpoints with a prospect needed before they (subconsciously) trust your business, and (consciously) convert.
For his own company, Marcus realised that potential customers who viewed 30 pages on his website of content (blogs, product information, videos etc.) had an 80% closing rate, compared to his average rate of 15%.
Using your marketing automation system, you can analyse and plan out sequences that make sure your prospect hits this number through emails with key content pieces relevant to their product interest. You can then also take this a step further by setting up a trigger once they hit that ‘magic number’ inviting them to get in touch or book a meeting with your sales team.
Targeting interested specifiers in this way means you have a higher chance of converting whilst also knowing those leads you reach out to already know and trust your brand.
Never again will you forget to follow up on new opportunities or existing customers. Marketing automation will do it for you.
One of the biggest challenges growing companies face is being able to follow up on leads generated. According to HubSpot’s report, less than half of marketers with well-planned-out lead management processes have sales teams capable of following up on at least 75% of leads.
In the construction industry, projects can last for months or years, so having the software ready and waiting to reach out when you have programmed it to, can mean you are the first in line for the next project where a specifier is primed for upcoming product research.
With marketing automation, you can maintain that awareness and relationship with opportunities and existing clients, keeping your business growing.
Marketing automation allows you to nurture your leads through automated emails, interactions and follow-ups. When customers who engage with your website content show interest, you can rely on the system to automatically begin that relationship on your behalf, even out of hours! It can be used in partnership with other systems such as Barbour ABI to qualify prospects that you know are in your target market so you can get them on the phone the moment they’re ready.