You’ve heard about it, you know marketers who swear by it, and perhaps you use it yourself. I’m talking about marketing automation – one of the biggest, most valuable technologies that sometimes gets marketers thinking, what is this all about?
To put your mind at rest, marketing automation is defined by Marketo a technological platform that allows companies to streamline, automate, and measure marketing tasks and workflows, so they can increase operational efficiency and grow revenue faster.
As it turns out, marketing automation is really embraced in the B2B sphere. The last time I checked (exactly three days ago), 55% of B2B companies have adopted marketing automation, while 68% of marketers see an increase in customer engagement and 80% see an increase in the number of leads.
These staggering numbers demonstrate the importance of marketing automation to the overall success of your marketing strategy. However, like any technology or software, marketing automation has its loopholes.
If you look at all of the lead or prospect activity that’s currently being tracked by platforms like Marketo, Eloqua, and Act-On, such information comes from three major data sources: your website, email, and data synced with your CRM platform (for example, Salesforce).
You see, the typical marketing automation dataset neglects lead activity from social media.
In other words, if your buyer journey is one big puzzle board, then at the moment, your puzzle is incomplete. On one hand, marketers monitor their website, email, and CRM for every possible lead activity– such as open-rates, sign-ups, CTR’s– but on the other hand, they’re totally ignoring social media activity.
If marketers need to be where their audience is at, then they should also be monitoring social media. Social is where the majority of your leads are engaging with your content. It’s too valuable to be ignored. In fact, 55% of B2B buyers use social media to search for information, while 84% of C-level and VP executives use social media to guide their purchasing decisions.
Research from CEB also shows that by the time a potential buyer reaches your website, they’ve already done 60% of the research elsewhere online – this could be on your Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter pages.
As a marketer, you have to keep an eye out for every behavior taking place in the online world so you can better tailor content to audience’s needs, interests, and pain points. And with so many leads taking action on social media, there’s no platform that needs this data more than marketing automation
If you think about it, the more behavioral data you have on leads (especially social media behavior), the better you can manage and target them with marketing automation. More specifically, having the additional layer of social media data allows you to enrich your lead scoring, lead nurturing, and lead attribution programs.
As you can see, we’re quite passionate about this topic; so passionate that we’ve recently joined forces with Marketo and Socedo to release a webinar called “Marketing Automation 360º: Using Social Data to Enhance your Lead Nurturing, Scoring, and Attribution”.
On this webinar, Sapir Segal from Oktopost, Adam Hutchinson from Socedo, and Lisa Marceys from Marketo make the case for social media in marketing automation. As the Senior Marketing Manager at Socedo, Adam shares some actionable examples of how his company is physically integrating social media data with its marketing automation platform, Marketo – the results are seriously mind-blowing!
If you’re looking to turn more social media leads into customers, this webinar is worth your time!
