Marketing Automation Best Practices and Resources

By special guest Adam Needles of Left Brain DGA

Adam Needles is author of the new book, Balancing the Demand Equation, and the Chief Strategy Officer at Left Brain DGA.

Introduction to Marketing Automation

Marketing automation, at its most fundamental level, was developed to help marketers better target and execute one-to-one communication with key prospects within the context of demand generation efforts, simultaneously orchestrating and tracking marketing resources against this activity. During this process marketing automation is able to collect information about and qualify that prospect as a ‘lead.’

CRM consolidates a great deal of information about prospects and customers; however, it provides virtually no framework or tools for true nurturing of earlier-stage prospects, and it definitely is not a communication platform. Marketing automation leverages CRM and addresses these gaps, but it then presents new capabilities for B2B marketers that enable them to take their demand generation programs to the next level.

Given a well-defined lead management process and content marketing strategy, marketing automation becomes the engine for moving the B2B demand generation process forward. It monitors our engagement with buyers; it semantically serves up content offers and/or responds to buyer-initiated page views and downloads; it learns from interactions with the buyer, developing an understanding of where (s)he is in the buying process; it uses this to nurture prospects; and it eventually governs hand-off of a buyer from the marketing to the sales organization. This ultimately makes sure that sales engages with a prospective buyer only when the time is right, and with the buyer already having been nurtured and educated.