In our last blog post, we walked through the foundational building marketing teams need to execute in the Foundational phase of the Marketing Automation Progression Model in order to set the stage for advanced marketing automation programs.
For this post, we’ll dive into Phase 2, the expanded phase of the model, which starts to take your marketing into the more complex world of optimization.
If you’re following the steps of Leadous’ marketing automation progression model, by now you have implemented a marketing automation tool, you’ve worked through your integrations and set up some initial basic campaigns, and now you’re ready to dig into more complex multi-touch campaigns.
For our customers, this often means implementing new strategies for tracking and improving lead quality, implementing more advanced conversational marketing tools, and achieving true sales and marketing alignment.
During the expanded phase of the model, you’ll start planning, building, executing and managing complex campaigns in platform to ultimately impact these 4 areas:
Lead Quality Management
Once you dive into more complex marketing automation programs, the goal becomes less about the quantity of leads (how many MQLs did we drive this quarter?) and more about the quality of leads (how many MQLs did we convert into SQLs this quarter?). By optimizing your campaigns across channels for conversion rates, we can better drive the right kind of leads over to your sales team.
Behavior and Demographics-Based Lead Scoring
A key component of more quality-driven demand generation is passing over the right kind of leads to your sales team. This means prospects who are a good fit for your business and ready to commit to a purchase. Marketers use behavior and demographic lead scoring to signal to sales when leads are sales-ready. Developing a comprehensive scoring model that highlights for sales when a buyer fits your ideal profile and is an active research or demo-ready phase ensures you’re passing higher quality leads over the fence.
Streamline Lead Management and Sales Alignment
Lead quality management and lead scoring tie back to our overall goal of true marketing and sales alignment. Knowing the actions a prospect takes before they book a demo may be a marketing’s responsibility, but knowing the ideal buyer and buying committee is definitely sale’s responsibility. By staying in lock step alignment, marketing is able to better build a program that will cater to sales’ needs, delivering higher quality, better converting leads.
More Advanced Technology Integrations
Finally, with more complex marketing programs comes more complex technology implementations. In this phase of marketing automation progression many of our customers come to us looking for a chatbot to implement, personalized email and web content, or maybe the beginning phases of evaluating an ABM tool. Integrating advanced tools into the tech stack takes time and a comprehensive, strategic approach to make sure you’re getting your money’s worth out of the tool.
The expanded phase of the marketing automation progression model is an important phase that often takes a year or two to fully achieve by methodically building out increasingly complex campaign structures on top of the foundations you’ve built in the previous phases of the model.
Often our customers come to us during this phase to “take their marketing up a notch.” They know they’ve got the basics down, but they need the strategy and training for their marketing automation teams to implement more advanced tools or techniques to take their demand generation to the next level.
Leadous provides key services including Custom Training and Lead Scoring to support organizations in this expanded stage of the Leadous’ Marketing Automation Progression Model to accelerate marketing advancement and improve lead conversion rates.
For more information on our Marketing Automation Progression Model, contact Leadous!