Digital Marketing Tools for 2021

Marketing Automation Tools A critical part of staying on top of, contacting, and nurturing leads for enterprise tech companies is employing marketing automation tool. To build a sustainable, and predictable, revenue model you’ll need to have automated systems for collecting leads, building a marketing pipeline, segmenting contacts, and marketing to them on a consistent (and intelligent) basis. Marketing automation helps B2B enterprise companies nurture, qualify and pass leads over to sales when they’re finally ready. This is essential in the technology space, as both pre-sales and sales cycles can last weeks, months and even years. What tool you use will depend on the size of your company, as well as the nature of your solution and target buyer. Here are three of the most popular, and effective, marketing automation tools that you should consider implementing within your organization (if you haven’t already): Marketo. One of the most powerful, and popular, marketing automation systems on the market. If you’re currently using SalesForce.com for Customer Relationship Management (CRM), then Marketo is almost a no-brainer due to its seamless integration. Marketo is great for managing and segmenting lists, as well as delivering rapid-fire email content. However, Marketo hits it’s limit and begins to slow down if your web page experiences high amounts of web traffic, or leads in the database exceed 750k. Eloqua. Recently acquired by Oracle and now under their Marketing Cloud umbrella, Eloqua is a robust B2B marketing automation platform that outperforms Marketo with large databases. Eloqua also has what is considered the best customer and prospect insights engine, giving marketers detailed and granular analysis of how users are reacting to marketing emails they receive. The major downside to Eloqua is that is has so many capabilities, that the user interface is often non-intuitive and easy to execute. Eloqua can do more than 99% of marketing automation systems out there, but the learning curve can be steep. SilverPop. Now part of IBM’s marketing cloud, SilverPop is a competitive enterprise marketing automation solution that differentiates itself with more mobile, text and SMS marketing capabilities than the competition. It has an intuitive UI, easy to work with database structure, and allows for relative ease of email creation. On the downside, Silverpop doesn’t have as many native and seamless integrations as Marketo and Eloqua, and tends to slow down when processing large data sets. There are many other Marketing Automation Systems available and now many that are part of a platform that includes CRM, Customer Service, and a wide range of other features. If you are an organization looking to generate leads for sales teams, then Marketing Automation combined with lead scoring can significantly improve your entire approach to marketing. Here are some high-level points on marketing automation to help you understand the value. Automation A process of automating follow-ups to potential customers. eMail sequences can be scheduled to automatically be sent based on rules to contacts captured through your website or other marketing tactics. Lead Scoring Each interaction that you have with a prospect can attribute points to them. Open an email, they get 5; click a link, they get 10; visit a page, they get 20. Combined with automation, we can consistently reach many people and create a ranking of the most engaged prospects. Segmentation The organization of prospects into like groups or leveraging data to target prospects with information most relevant to them. Segmentation is one of the most important topics in marketing and is central to marketing automation. These three aspects are only scratching the surface of marketing automation but they should be enough to perk your interest to learn a lot more about what platforms like these can do for your marketing – especially for technology and software companies. #ScottDroney @ScottDroney

ACT-ON AND GLEANSTER RESEARCH “Of the top performers in B2B, 69% use Marketing automation for Customer acquisition and 50% for Customer Retention.” FORRESTER “80% of B2B marketers consider it a core requirement of their jobs to understand and use marketing technology”