It’s no secret that marketing automation brings can big benefits to your marketing and sales efforts. It has been proven time and time again to bring efficiency gains in marketing, and to improve marketing and sales alignment, resulting in more conversions overall. But, if you’re looking to implement marketing automation, or improve your current programs, you might be wondering how to build your marketing automation team structure for best results.
Building your marketing automation team structure can be much simpler and more cost-effective than you may think. Chances are, you already have many of these roles in place within your organization. The key is to get the right structure in place to use your team’s unique mix of skills and personalities to your best advantage. Let’s explore the main functions that set your marketing automation team up for success.
Ensure Someone is Managing Demand Generation
A business can’t run, and you’re not doing your job as a marketer, if you don’t generate interest and have leads coming in through the sales funnel. Luckily, marketing automation takes out much of the hassle of implementing campaigns and programs to help you do that. But whether it’s building landing pages, running paid social media campaigns or promoting webinars, you need to have a point person to manage all or some of those initiatives. However, if you have multiple people managing aspects of your demand generation, we recommend having a cohesive strategy so all your efforts complement each other.
Get a Great Content Creator
Did you know that 60% of marketers create a new piece of content each and every day? And, the average B2B buyer consumes 11.4 pieces of content before talking to sales. So, whether your focus is inbound or outbound marketing, hopefully both, engaging content is essential to attracting and reeling in your audience. And, the great thing about marketing automation is that it helps content gets seen in the first place, resulting in a greater ROI.
So, if you don’t already, consider having a person on your team dedicated to creating content and guiding your content strategy. Don’t think of this role as simply serving as a content writer. You’ll want to have a variety of content for each stage of the sales funnel. Try writing blog posts on key pillar topics to attract traffic to your website, creating videos that you can promote on social media, and eBooks that you can use as gated content for your demand generation programs.
To ensure your content is effective, make sure your content people collaborate with demand gen, so everybody at your organization has an understanding of your audience.
Make Sure to Involve Sales
At the end of the day, your job as a marketer is to get your leads to convert into customers. And stats show that having strong marketing/sales alignment results in a 38% higher sales win rate. Therefore, it’s a no-brainer for your sales team to play a role in implementation and success of your marketing automation program.
A great way to keep your sales managers in the loop and activate them when the time comes to seal the deal is by integrating your marketing automation platform with your CRM. This will provide your sales team with the insights they need to schedule a phone call or demo, and convert your lead.
Have Somebody to Track and Measure Your Progress
A key part of running a successful marketing automation program is checking in from time to time to see how your efforts are performing and whether you’re seeing the results you want. Luckily, having the right data and analytics tools will take out some of the guesswork. And, with the right marketing automation tool, you’ll be able to compile insights easily and seamlessly.
Of course, you need somebody on your team that can help you compile this information, analyze it and make recommendations for changes and new initiatives based on the results. If you don’t have the budget or need to have a single individual dedicated to this role, you can assign it to various member of your team. Just make sure they all consolidate their findings, and gather from time to time to ensure that any new initiatives align.
We hope these tips help you build your marketing automation team structure and put you on the path toward marketing success! Of course, there is an array of things you can do as a marketer with marketing automation that you haven’t done before. And, as your marketing automation platform allows you to get better results and grow your team, you may want to consider adding a few more roles to your team. But these essential roles should help your team get started.