Four New Year Resolutions for Your B2B Marketing Automation Strategy

This blog was originally published as a guest post on pardot.com and prior to the name change of Pardot to Marketing Cloud Account Engagement.

When it comes to getting ready for the beginning of a new fiscal year in a barrage of strategy and planning meetings, marketing teams are asking questions like: what are our goals for this year? How can we improve our current marketing automation programs? What new nurture programs can we create? So it’s time to get our pencils out: the roadmap needs to be drawn if it hasn’t already.

To help you on your way, here are four areas of your marketing automation strategy for you to focus on this year.

1. Build nurture programs designed for brand evangelism

Marketing automation has come a long way since the days of the linear if open, send this’. We’re now able to really drill down and see if Mr. Smith has engaged with us more than ten times in the last month, and this is extremely useful information that we can utilise. Why not automatically add him to a nurture program where he can receive a tailored newsletter with all of the information that he likes? By creating such a program, you’re sending content in context while making it incredibly easy for Mr. Smith to share with his network of like-minded people.

Converting prospects into customers is great, but converting customers into brand evangelists is even better.

2. Integrating your systems will save you time, money and a lot of hassle

Technology is advancing at an incredible rate, and it’s becoming easier to connect different web-based applications to your marketing automation platform. From data analytics software to your CRM, it’s important that you ensure that you have the capability to link your systems together, otherwise you could be missing out on so much insightful information that can be used for your campaigns. Not to mention the increase in productivity and ammo that your sales teams could be using.

Integrate your systems for deeper insights, a more efficient sales team and easier reporting.

3. Don’t just think about one-off automated campaigns, make them perpetual

One of the fundamental benefits of marketing automation is that it enables marketing campaigns to run with little or no human intervention. It sounds silly, but not a lot of companies are creating nurture programmes that can run in the background 24/7 throughout the year. 

Think about your core product offering, what you stand for as a brand, and the content assets you have. You can build an entry-level automation program for new prospects, which is designed to feed them into the next highly tailored and relevant program. Essentially, it could act as your very own robot virtual assistant.

Work out where you can fit a perpetual marketing automation program into your business, to save time and reap the rewards.

4. Think ahead, think mobile

We all know how big mobile has become – mobile optimisation is always at the front of marketers’ brain. And it’s about to get even bigger with Google splitting its index so that there will essentially be two versions of the internet, one of which will be mobile. 

With this in mind, it’s time to prepare marketing campaigns that are specific to mobile. One of the best things you can do for your audience is to let them choose how they receive content from you, and by building in a simple checkbox on your forms asking if they would prefer mobile, you’ll be able to segment your audience accordingly.

Got a question about how to put your new year’s marketing automation resolutions into action? We’d be happy to help - get in touch.