You’ve reveled in the magic of automating your agency’s marketing strategies and campaigns because it’s made a world of difference in how you conduct campaigns and measure results, not to mention the fact that you’re continually increasing revenue for your agency.
But how in the world do you convince your old-school customers that it’s in their best interest to adopt this newfangled marketing automation (MA) for their organizations? In other words, how do you get them to join the party?
Agencies share the same major obstacle when it comes to convincing existing clients to opt into MA: helping clients understand how much faster and more efficient MA is. Why? Because they aren’t doing the marketing work – that’s why they hired you, right? Yet, in order for you to be able to do the best possible job in the marketing arena on their behalf, it’s now essential for you to operate on the same playing field as their competitors.
You know they need it, but how do you get them to realize it?
Let’s look at a variety of angles you might consider when helping your customers see the benefits of choosing marketing automation as their primary, top-shelf marketing strategy:
Everybody’s Doing It
Use humor to ask them, “In the age of digital technology, do you really want to be the last person using a TV with a rabbit-ear antenna?” Jokes aside, though, they simply can’t afford to lag behind. If their competitors are using MA, it’s a necessity for them to adopt it too, or risk being left in the dust.
Marketing Automation is All About Attracting, Converting, and Keeping Customers
Share articles and studies about how today’s top businesses are adopting digital strategies and tools in a big way. Using an automated marketing platform is a major part of that movement and it irrefutably increases efficiency in important ways:
- Saves Time: Using templates, media library contents and automated campaigns allows your agency to attract customers more easily for your client, and spend more time strategizing on your client’s behalf.
- Hits Targets: Combining computerized algorithms, list segmentation, and a number of other tools allows you to connect prospects with content that’s meaningful to them and encourages them to pursue further engagement.
- Multiplies Leads: Sending the right message to the right people at the right time by delivering specific emails and content via automated campaigns nudges prospects to opt in to continue receiving information that’s relevant to them. Here’s where you capture contact information voluntarily given by potential customers.
- Improves Lead Qualifications: Once people have engaged and demonstrated their interest, you have the opportunity to nurture these leads on behalf of your client, getting prospects warmed up and propelling them closer to the decision to buy.
- Boosts Lead Conversions: Lead scores start to soar and prospects are getting hot, so it’s time for marketing to pass the lead off to sales to convert them to bona fide customers, and voilà, revenue is up. In addition, the higher lead conversion rates demonstrate better alignment between marketing and sales. Everybody likes that.
- Encourages Customer Satisfaction: It’s hard work to win customers, so it makes sense to want to hold on to them once they’re on-board. This provides a great opportunity to expand the customer relationship in this often-overlooked stage. By automating social media and content-sharing campaigns, creating upsell opportunities by sharing news and product updates, and by running customer loyalty programs, your clients have the chance to keep their buyers happy and coming back for more.
- Enables Reporting: MA allows sophisticated data-capturing and measuring, which enables you to keep your clients in the loop with customized reports without them having to be marketing experts.
Fast Payback for Your Client
Your clients don’t have to integrate marketing automation and learn how to use it by trial and error. They’ve got you, and you’ve already done that, so they’re joining a team that already knows how to win. So – best of all – you can show them a quick return on their investment in MA. Just try to resist saying “I toldja so.” Nobody likes that.
By taking your clients through each stage of the customer lifecycle and showing how you can help them throughout the entire buyer’s journey, the odds are good that they’ll understand how using a marketing automation platform is increasingly becoming the best way to compete in today’s digitized marketplace.
Offer Solutions to Their Pain
Ask
Resistance is futile. Even if your clients say they’re not ready, that can be a springboard for an intelligent conversation. Once they start sharing their struggles and challenges with you, start thinking about where those problems fall within the customer lifecycle. Chances are, MA can provide some solid solutions for them in every stage of the buyer’s journey.
Listen
The key lies in really hearing what they tell you. Once they’ve related where their interests lie, speak to those particular points. Use common sense – if they’re talking about wanting to focus on the lead-conversion stage at the bottom of the buyer’s funnel, you’ll know that maybe that’s not the best time to talk about top-of-funnel strategies like attracting customers with a new social media campaign.
Guide
Let their concerns about sales and marketing drive the conversation. Discuss the solutions in the section above in relation to their pain points and help them see how you can help alleviate those concerns by automating their marketing campaigns in those and many additional areas – when they’re ready. In the end, it’s really about being more efficient and increasing revenue, and everybody understands the importance of that.
Share Success Stories from Existing Customers
Studies show that testimonials from industry peers and existing customers can be a huge boost for sales. Your own business wouldn’t be successful today if you weren’t using MA in a powerful way on behalf of your own clients, so let them share their love for you.
Work with your customer-fans to elicit honest, specific blurbs or short stories about how you’ve contributed to their sales and marketing success and helped to grow their businesses. Develop a number of them. Industry-specific ones are great to have on hand because they enable people in similar fields to relate to and envision similar success for themselves.
Talk to Them About Your Agency’s Positive Results from Using Marketing Automation
Whose better story to tell than your own? You use MA every day for a wide variety of goals in order to nurture your precious customers along every step of their journey.
- Share details about how you take responsibility for the customer relationship all down the line
- Talk about the importance to you of keeping customers, becoming trusted advisors that continue to help them grow their businesses and by executing partner and customer loyalty programs that help with retention and satisfaction of existing clients so they want to stay
- Show them how you can do the same for them
In the end, it’s hard to quibble with a well-laid-out argument about how smart it is to adopt MA strategies and technology. But if the client still refuses to see the benefits of creating automated workflows and aligning with sales to boost revenue quickly, give them time. They’ll trade in that old rabbit-eared antenna eventually.
To learn more about how to choose the right marketing automation platform, take a look at our free guide, “3 Steps for Choosing the Right Marketing Automation Solution for Your Agency“. In this short and simple walkthrough, you will learn exactly how to determine what the best solution is for your business.