Tag Archives: marketing automation strategy

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The Customer Is Always Right, Especially If You Overcommunicate So They Can Never Be Wrong

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The Role of Marketing Automation for Customer Service Teams

As you know Marketing Automation plays a crucial role in the sales and marketing world, and automation in the customer service space can be a way to drive new value from your investment in a marketing automation platform like Marketo Engage. Since this business function is key to driving overall growth and developing deeper relationships with customers and other partnerships within your organization we have highlighted some areas where you can optimize your marketing  automation platform to increase customer service response and deepen engagement.

  • Consistency – As we all know it can be a challenge to constantly engage in a meaningful way with customers.  Marketing Automation facilitates an overall cohesion across all communication which increases brand trust and builds customer loyalty. 
  • Personalization – Based on how people are engaging and where their interests are, Marketing Automation can personalize content, trigger product suggestions, suggest solutions and customize an experience based on each individual’s preferences or areas of interest. 
  • Measurement – Built in reports and key measurements that tie back to the success indicators help build a story and create deeper customer engagement opportunities.
  • Responsiveness – Marketing Automation makes it easy to be more responsive so customers are not left unaddressed with their questions or changes in interests.  Triggers can be set up accordingly to respond throughout a customer’s lifecycle.  
  • Growth – As organizations grow, attention to each customer is key.  Marketing Automation can scale with your growth and become increasingly adaptive to the changes your customers experience with their unique needs.  

Have any questions about how to leverage Marketing Automation to drive Customer Service and take your success to the next level? Contact us.

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The Marketing Automation Progression Model: Phase 0 – Experimental

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In our last blog post we covered the Marketing Automation Progression Model, detailing the phases advancing marketing teams go through when leveling up their marketing strategy. 

For this post, we’ll dive into Phase 0, which often starts before any automation even comes into play: Experimental. 

Often organizations come to us with a vision and a reality check. The vision is marketing dominance, with a clear dotted line showing the influence of a specific marketing campaign to closed business. The reality? Something far murkier. 

Sometimes it’s misaligned sales and marketing teams getting in the way. Other times it’s processes that do not tie into systems across the full MarTech stack. Sometimes it’s simply a lack of clarity around strategic direction or a lack of understanding of the tools and tactics to get you there. 

Whatever the challenge, in order to progress to advanced marketing automation, you need to get your teams aligned under a more efficient, strategic approach. That means your marketing leadership needs to commit to moving beyond batch and blast campaigns, aligning goals with sales leadership, and investing in the technology you need to drive demand.

Once that commitment is there, you’re ready to get started with the experimental phase of the model. You’ll start by outlining 6 items:

              1. Goals
                Your team needs to align, across marketing and sales, with what success looks like for your marketing automation campaigns.
              2. Belief in the Possibilities of Automation
                Automation is going to power your more advanced marketing campaigns, so you’ll need to make sure you have the internal commitment (in budget, time and resources) to get the foundations built.
              3. Team with Technically Curious Marketers
                The people behind the process and technology are arguably the most important piece to successful marketing automation. Without the expertise and muscle to drive your strategy and tactics, you won’t be able to bring advanced marketing campaigns to life.

              4. Campaign Initiatives
                Start with an idea of what you want to achieve in your marketing programs on a campaign level for more detailed campaign KPIs.
              5. Content Strategy
                In order to fuel the success of these campaigns, you’ll need to map out content that aligns to your sales funnel and overall goals.

              6. CRM Database and/or Target Accounts and Customer Lists
                Without an audience to target, you’ll have no one to send your campaigns to, so a clean CRM database and/or target accounts list is key.


If you are new to marketing automation or lack marketing automation experience on your team, make sure to secure a partner to navigate through the experimental phase so you can lay a strong foundation for the rest of your marketing automation journey.

In Leadous’ Marketing Automation Progression Model, we support your team through this phase with key services including Campaigns On-Demand and Automation Evaluations to give you the strong foundational components and data driven metrics to build a strong case for the investment in automation that will measure the success of your demand generation efforts and create ROI. 

For more information on our Marketing Automation Progression Model, contact Leadous! 

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The Marketing Automation Progression Model: Going from 0 to 100 Digital Marketing Execution

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Every business needs to start their digital marketing journey somewhere. Maybe you’re just dipping your toe into marketing automation by procuring a tool like Marketo. Or maybe you’re on the opposite end, with too many tools, and too much complexity across marketing systems. 

No matter where you are on your journey, Leadous has put together a Progression Model to help you increase efficiencies and drive opportunities in your pipeline.

Successful businesses know that in order to execute with focus and effectiveness, you need to know two key things about your marketing journey:

  • Your base level marketing performance (where you’re coming from).
  • Your strategic marketing and sales goals (where you’re going).

By establishing these two things, you’re well on your way to more strategic, efficient marketing campaigns. We call this journey the marketing automation progression model, and here’s more about what that looks like. 

The Leadous Marketing Automation Progression Model

PHASE 0 – Experimental – Prior to Adoption

The journey to leveraging the power of marketing automation always starts here. Have you been only doing batch and blast emails to one huge email list? This is the place for you.  Make your budget dollars go further by driving efficiencies across programs. You’ll need to start by laying the groundwork for automation with your technology stack, scheduling out time to measure and adjust regularly based on the findings, and outlining a strategy for your long-term marketing goals and processes. 

PHASE 1 – Foundational – Single-Point Engagement

The next key foundation of your marketing automation progression is integrations. If your CRM and marketing automation tech stack aren’t talking to each other – you’re still relying on manual processes and the whole “automation” piece of marketing automation will fall flat on its face. By building out your foundational CRM integrations, you can then start to build out repeatable basic programs and campaigns leveraging more comprehensive automation technology.  

PHASE 2 – Expanded – Multi-Touch Nurture

Once you’ve got the automation machine humming, it’s time to solidify marketing and sales alignment to make sure you’re all marching toward the same goals. Once you’re speaking the same language you can get to work planning, building, executing and managing complex multi-channel campaigns to increase revenue and marketing results. 

PHASE 3 – Advanced – Predictive Engagement

After your multi-channel campaigns are in place, you can start to use that information for more advanced, predictive campaigns. Advanced automation takes time and patience to reach. You need to have a solid marketing and sales funnel with data you can trust in order to make actionable decisions. From there, you can optimize your revenue acceleration model using advanced reporting and predictive data to fuel advanced strategies like ABM and predictive web and email content. 

PHASE 4 – Global – Omni-Channel

Finally, truly omni-channel marketing programs tie marketing spend to revenue to show the full lifecycle of marketing attribution in your funnel. This phase enables you to use predictive modeling to forecast marketing-influenced pipeline, and better adjust and track marketing KPIs globally across all multi-touch and predictive campaigns. 

Next Steps 

So how do you go from phase 0 (or maybe even phase -1) to phase 4 in your marketing automation programs? Well, it takes people, process, technology and patience. 

  • People – The right staff with the right mixture of competencies to support the technology and process.
  • Process – A clearly outlined process for the handoff between your MarTech stack systems and the different teams that support those systems.
  • Technology – The right technology to support your company’s ever-expanding needs.

At Leadous, we take care of the people, process, and even the automation technology to get you all the way to marketing automation dominance. Contact us for more information on how we can help your organization level up through our marketing automation progression model.