Getting the most out of marketing automation solutions can be a big challenge, especially for those who are new to the technology and its capabilities. Once these systems are up and running, it’s critical to keep the content and creative part of the equation up to high standards in order to keep audiences engaged.
Some marketing teams are turning to strategic partners to help maximize their marketing automation efforts. Marketers can get excited by the promise of new tech solutions, but may not know exactly where to go with it once the new technology is implemented. And if the sales team is not on board with it, marketing automation can become just another lead-gen solution. If marketers don’t put the processes in place to bring the two groups together, they are not going to see much success. A third party can help facilitate communication between sales and marketing and put a change management plan in place, focused on things such as lead management, lead management processes and dataflow processes.
Consultants with The Pedowitz Group began noticing clients with these needs and have begun focusing on them.
“We began to get approached by clients who couldn’t handle all of the things that go on leveraging 
marketing automation, with regard to content and creative. Once you get it up and running and you start putting in nurture programs and specific targeted campaigns with personalization, you need the content that’s really going to move people to engage and convert. We’ve established a marketing services team where clients can outsource it to us. We put a program together, we take a top line number and work out the funnel and what it means from a leads perspective,” says The Pedowitz Group vp of sales and revenue marketing Scott Benedetti.
Here’s how marketing teams are leveraging this kind of help:
Rackspace
The cloud-hosting specialists at Rackspace were trying to increase engagement and fully take advantage of the marketing automation tools that they had invested in, namely Marketo and Salesforce.
“We had systems integrations complications—like any large enterprise—and data issues. We have a very powerful inbound engine and lots of new data coming in all the time, so our goal was building out an ongoing conversation with prospects and customers. The challenge was, how do we pick up that initial conversation and continue it, leveraging automation, lead scoring and being able to pass that information through Marketo into Salesforce, where our salespeople could pick up the conversation from there?” says Rackspace director, demand marketing Amy Hawthorne.
The cloud market is changing so quickly, Rackspace needed to keep up by staying relevant in the conversations and content that it was putting out to potential prospects. Teaming with Pedowitz helped Rackspace revive its key touch points and how the marketing team was leveraging lead scoring.
“We have three or four different lead scoring models that we are working on right now, all built around the buying audience, their personas, the kind of companies we’re selling into and what the average sell cycle looks like. So we are adjusting our sophistication on both lead scoring and our nurture programs, so that after someone reaches a lead score threshold, sales knows what to expect from marketing. No matter which campaign they came out of, they know that when they get a sales-ready lead it looks the same,” Hawthorne says.
Once Rackspace has prospects in these more targeted messaging tracks, the team can focus on how to best to proceed if they become inactive or stop engaging, and to send them messages that will drive them into more compelling purchasing options.
“There’s no way to do it the right way without automation,” Hawthorne says, adding that the team at Pedowitz Group helps her team us with best practices, strategy on making sure her team has a consistent flow to their conversations with customers, and helping them optimize based on who they’re targeting.
It’s also important to customize the messages sent to prospects based on their level of engagement.
“If they’re really engaged, we want to continue to serve up content to convince them to come to us, but we have to be very careful not to turn people off by over-communicating with them if they happen to not be in a buying cycle right now, or if we have don’t the right type of communication pointed at them,” Hawthorne says.
Pinstripe
Recruitment Process Outsourcing (RPO) provider Pinstripe and its marketing team entered the marketing automation world from a traditional background, with marketing acting as an in-house creative agency, as opposed to a more robust lead-gen machine.
When marketing manager Bethany Perkins joined the team earlier this year, her goal was to own lead generation and to put quality, quantity and revenue goals against what the team was producing.
“I thought that marketing automation would be the next step for us, to really get into nurture, tracking, analytics and all of the pieces that support those efforts. We use Marketo fully integrated with Salesforce, with a HubSpot CMS, and we integrate those three platforms so that we can become more intelligent with regard to the people we’re reaching out to,” Perkins says.
Being able to track individuals and their engagement with Pinstripe from a behavioral and demographic perspective has enabled the brand’s sales team to be more focused and dedicated to those individuals that are showing the right kind of interest, Perkins says.
“It’s definitely taken what used to be a handful of systems and taken it down to a finely tuned machine. It’s been really invaluable from and time and targeting perspective, knowing who’s doing what and being able to make smart choices. My role has transformed since the adoption of marketing automation, from being more tactical to being far more strategic and content marketing-focused, because we’re able to see and react to what’s working and what’s not in a user-friendly way,” Perkins says.
Pinstripe has been able to transform its practices as the marketing automation tools transform, and the team has evolved from putting simple nurture programs together, to more complex streams that allow marketers to react to customer information and behavior.
“It’s a fun evolution to be a part of, and remaining on the cutting edge is important to us. Working with a marketing automation partner like Pedowitz is like an extension of our team. It helps us make sure we’re taking advantage of everything that’s out there and continuing to refine, but also try new things. You’ve got to try and fail. As long as you’re failing forward, you have to be OK with it. Companies that embrace that are going to be more successful,” Perkins says.
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