6Sense posted a great blog this week called CMOs: want to keep your job? Spend on technology – and I couldn’t agree more. Marketing departments as a whole (and especially the people leading them) have to leverage marketing technologies if they want to stay relevant and make an impact at their company. If you don’t have any marketing technologies in place then I suggest starting with two things: marketing automation and marketing analytics.
Marketing automation is a great place to start if you have a basic marketing mix in place and are looking to take your digital marketing presence to the next level. Tools like Marketo, Eloqua, Pardot, Act-On, and Silverpop are great for managing and sending out campaigns across all your marketing channels from one place, nurturing your inbound leads, etc. Having an infrastructure that helps coordinate and maximize the effectiveness of your marketing efforts is critical for generating enough leads for your sales team and contributing to revenue.
The other key technology to invest in is marketing analytics. While many marketing automation solutions also have this as part of their offering it is actually better to track your key metrics and analytics in your CRM system (like Salesforce). The sales team is tracking their metrics in Salesforce and the executive and finance teams look in Salesforce for their reports as well. So it is crucial for marketing to also measure the the results of their campaigns inside CRM to keep everyone on the same page.
All too often the numbers inside marketing automation solutions don’t match up with the numbers inside CRM, sometimes leading to distrust and misalignment between marketing and sales. Leveraging a marketing analytics solution that is native to your CRM (shameless plug like Full Circle Insights for Salesforce) to understand critical metrics like the conversion rates of the marketing-to-sales hand-off and which campaigns influence pipeline and revenue helps marketing and sales work together to maximize pipeline growth and revenue generation.
When determining ways to get the most out of your marketing mix first think about laying the groundwork with marketing automation and marketing analytics technologies to ensure that you maximize the return on your marketing budget.
So learn a little more about how marketing analytics drives revenue or how you can align sales and marketing with funnel metrics to optimize your marketing spend and be completely in sync with your sales organization.
