B2B Marketing Automation Solutions

Problems and Solutions in the Marketing Automation arena

From WhatIs.com, marketing automation is defined as “the use of software to automate marketing processes”. This marketing automation software plays a very important role in helping marketers drive revenue and also improve accountability for their marketing mix. One downside of these fantastic-sounding software platforms is that they can be very expensive or require a huge amount of IT support. But that is the price to pay when making sure your marketing program stays superior, right?

A marketing automation firm located in San Mateo, CA called Marketo actually offers a pretty inexpensive marketing automation solution. Marketo’s Marketing On-Demand is a web-based solution, integrating Google AdWords and Salesforce.com with no up-front investment or heavy IT support necessary. And because of the free demos available on the site itself, you can learn how to use these products for your company in as little as 5 minutes.

Okay, so what exactly are these marketing processes we must automate?

Pay-Per-Click Management

So you think pay-per-click might be the right advertising tool for you? Great! But can you get over the intimidation of setting up a PPC campaign? Setting up your company’s PPC campaign can be a high-stress time, especially when you are unsure as to what to bid on words, how much you should spend each money or even which keywords would drive the most qualified traffic?

Finding pay-per-click software that can bridge the gap between driving traffic AND converting traffic into leads in a rarity. Marketo Search Marketing actually offers all of this to you to make sure you have all the tools you need for a successful PPC campaign.

Landing Page Optimization

Landing pages are an important part of any search marketing campaign for the following reasons

1. Search engines care about the relevancy of a landing page, so a well-optimized, highly-relevant landing page gets better PPC rankings (and more clicks) for less money.

2. A relevant and optimized landing page has dramatically higher conversion rates, meaning you get more leads for the money you put in to your campaign

With the landing page optimization software available with Marketo, you can publish AND test your landing pages. And if you are already using your own landing pages, you can begin testing them with Marketo’s software to see how they match up.

Lead Management

So you captured some leads, huh? Well, did you know that only 25% of leads generated by marketing campaigns are ready to speak with a marketing representative right away? Without the right capabilities, the other 75% of leads (potential buyers) tend to fall through the large crack between marketing and sales.

Lead nurturing (the process of building relationships with qualified prospects who are not yet ready to speak with sales) requires three things:

1. The ability to dialogue with qualified prospects through automated “drip marketing” campaigns

2. Lead analytics to understand and score the prospect’s interests and intent

3. Connections into Salesforce.com to automate sales tasks and track sales follow-up

Marketo’s lead management software understand that marketers cannot design static workflows that are hard to change, especially when marketing is ever-changing. By nurturing leads captured by your PPC campaign and optimized landing pages, you shrink the gap between marketing and sales to build up your revenue and brand recognition.

As you well know, marketing is a dynamic job that requires flexible, dynamic software to let marketers quickly and easily create and modify campaigns themselves. Because these solutions are easy to learn and manage, your up-front costs and need for IT support go way down, and you can’t help but increase revenue and accountability with your search marketing campaign.

Jon Miller is VP of Marketing for Marketo, a provider of affordable, easy-to use-marketing automation software that helps B2B marketing professionals drive revenue and improve accountability. Jon's blog, Modern B2B Marketing, explores best practices in business marketing, ranging from pay-per-click management to lead nurturing to marketing accountability. To learn more about Marketo visit http://www.marketo.com