Last month, in Automate or Die (Part I), we described the principles of marketing automation solutions. This Core offers five specific recommendations for how business-to-business companies can use marketing automation solutions to find, nurture and convert leads more effectively.

As BtoB organizations continue to shift a larger portion of their marketing spend online, more and more online leads are being generated. This is great news, but presents a conundrum. More leads may not necessarily be as valuable, or accommodating to the Sales department. What Sales wants is qualified leads.

Our latest white paper, in conjunction with Pardot, is entitled Five Steps to Automate Your BtoB Marketing. It describes five proven tactics to help optimize your marketing automation solution to support the Sales team and deliver more qualified leads. What follows here is the quick take-away:

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Lock it up
Lock up your valuable content to ensure you are getting valid visitor information from your prospects. Using a “give-to-get” model for information like white papers, analyst reports, demos and webinars in the BtoB space is a best practice. While much on the net is free, don’t feel like you have to give away your most valuable content without getting something.

It’s OK to profile
Progressively profile your prospects by gradually capturing data. The best marketing automation technology allows you to draw more information from prospects each time they visit your website. Dynamic forms present returning site visitors with different data fields needed for downloading information. This lets you capture richer information and helps you better qualify prospects.

Multiple personalities
Use dynamic personalization to tailor your site content to visitors. If your site serves different audiences, as most BtoB sites do, then you can use information you have gathered about each visitor to present relevant and customized information to them. For example, if a visitor constantly frequents the case study section, you can set up your site to automatically modify the home page call-to-action to list the most recent case study when that individual views it.

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Nurture is where it’s at
Automate lead nurturing programs to achieve greater efficiency. This gives you the ability to construct campaigns based on behavior and then have them launch automatically using a one-to-one marketing approach. In addition to further qualifying leads, this tactic allows you to utilize sales personnel more efficiently, as prospect follow-ups get executed automatically.

Process makes perfect
Once your marketing automation system is running and you’ve crafted lead nurturing campaigns, it’s not yet time to stop. Working with your sales colleagues, develop a lead scoring system so you are now feeding only the most qualified leads to Sales. This may take time and a lot of tweaking, but this effort is what will help to ensure maximum effectiveness between Marketing and Sales.

For more information on how a marketing automation solution can maximize your investment in lead generation and facilitate more effective prospect conversion, download the complete white paper, Five Steps to Automate Your BtoB Marketing.

If you are looking for additional guidance on implementing a BtoB marketing automation solution in your organization, drop us a line, we’re always happy to help!

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