The future of Marketing Automation and Lead Nurturing is here

It’s been a while since I wrote my last blog entry (my bad), I guess I’ve been busy adapting myself to a new country (Denmark) and a new an exciting role at FalconSocial (Unified Social Media Management tool for Enterprise). But the truth is that I’ve been holding for too long on some new ideas that finally I might be able to put in practice in the next few months.

Most of you might be sharing the same thoughts I’ve had for a while, why Lead Nurturing and Marketing Automation (via traditional MA tools) has to be limited to just emails and some social networks?

The reality is that email is still the easiest and most effective channel to personalise 1:1 communications with your prospects (B2B), but if used in a silo it becomes obsolete. There is too much going on in Social (and paid) to be ignored.

Social channels plus content is the most powerful mix for marketers since the internet boom started for two obvious reasons, ‘content is still king’ to educate your prospects along the journey, and social ‘owns’ the power to laser target your audience within their area of interest.

So, how can B2B marketers expand their Lead Nurturing and Automation efforts beyond the traditional channels, simple listening and manual engagement via social networks?

There are two main areas that you should explore in order to expand your nurturing efforts.

1. Integrating your Marketing Automation tool with your paid advertising channels.

   Most of the Automation tools these days have direct integration with commonly used Programatic advertising, retargeting and display advertising platforms. Marketo for example offers an easy built-in plug into Facebook, LinkedIn Accelerator, Trust,  An easy way to start is to leverage your current segmentation (by persona or stage in the lead lifecycle) and (re) target your leads along the journey.

   3 Steps to get started with the integration. 

   Step 1. Identify key leaks in your email flows
   Step 2. Use your Marketing Automation tool to enable automated lists of those leads that leak throughout the funnel. The more targeted the lists across area of interest (solutions or products) and channels the better.
   Step 3. Leverage top channels (including paid social) to retarget (remarketing) those list. There are two ways to enable individual tracking, either having same gating content strategy to align leads from your paid efforts, or enabling a more sophisticated approach and having personal tracking (automatically generated) from the advertising sources.

1. Expanding your email channel into your Social Communities.

   Another great area where B2B marketers lack behind is leveraging their social presence and integrating this into their current mix. By enriching your segments and audiences (by data enrichment tools e.g. FullContact or Clearbit) you can better understand how to build a 1:1 relationship with your key prospect and bring that information to your automation world for both scoring and profiling reasons (e.g. social presence, interest, technology used and a long etc).

   Key enablers of social channels within your automation world.

   1. Integrate your social listening tool with your Marketing Automation. This will give you the power of listening specific keywords and adding this insights to your prospects profiles (via scoring).

   2. Enrich your prospects database to better understand what are the key channels they are in and how to better communicate with them. Sometimes email is not their preferred channel so you need to find where else can you engage with them.

   3. Leverage social paid retargeting capabilities to laser target individuals with specific messaging (e.g. area of interest or stage in the buying cycle). Once you know which channel is better for an individual, most automation tools have connectors to your social paid native tools (or SRPs). You can easily automate some lists, following same steps in the previous area which will allow you to expose prospects with the right message in the right channel.

   4. Tap into your owned and earned social audiences to leverage key insights learnt from your email efforts. Build a bridge between both and share learnings (in areas such as topics, content types, messaging) specially in early stages of the buying cycles where education and trust building are your primary goals.

These two are just two key areas we’ve been working on lately but there is a lot more to explore within your Marketing Automation cosmos.