Marketers are creative, constantly looking for new ways to reach their target market and get results. But we’d argue that small marketing teams like yours must be even more creative … because you don’t have a huge internal team to back you up.
Yep, you’re doing more with less. But expectations for results don’t really reflect that, do they?
Nope.
But hey, every challenge also has a solution, right? One of the best solutions for small teams is leveraging tools specifically designed to scale marketing. We’ve compiled our favorite hacks for scaling marketing so you can get results without driving your internal team to burnout.
How Small Marketing Teams Can Drive Engagement at Scale
Superfans. Everybody wants them, right? An audience that opens your emails, comments on your blogs, downloads your eBooks — or whatever. But to reach that level of engagement, you need a solid game plan. And furthermore, you need the internal resources to implement it.
So, where do you start?
We recommend focusing on three pillars for efficient, effective, and sustainable scalability.
Scale Marketing: Identify Simple MarTech Solutions to Key Challenges
Growing businesses need the right marketing technology to continue expanding at scale. For most organizations, this includes a customer relationship management (CRM) system or business intelligence (BI) tool as the foundation of their sales efforts.
But to execute strong inbound and outbound marketing campaigns, you need to integrate these sales tools with a marketing automation platform, which is the functional layer of successful companies.
Marketing automation makes it much easier to manage, measure, customize, and optimize the customer experience across multiple online channels (e.g., email, web, social, events) and through all stages of the sales funnel. When you move from a cobbled-together set of disparate tools to one cohesive platform, you make marketing more effective and set the stage for anticipated, sustained, and scalable business growth.
According to Kevin Butler (VP of strategy at Goose Digital, one of the fastest-growing marketing agencies in Canada), “The system of record is the CRM platform. The system of execution is the marketing automation platform. So when these two solutions are integrated and working well together, you’re off to the races.”
In addition to CRM systems and marketing automation platforms, there are literally thousands of solutions you can integrate into your MarTech stack. These plug-ins help you plan, manage, and execute webinars, track and transfer data, import and export behavioral data, and even coordinate additional outbound campaigns. (At Act-On, we offer hundreds of simple and seamless MarTech integrations through Zapier.)
Scale Marketing: Develop Repeatable Marketing Workflows
The key to scalability is efficiency. By meeting increased demand with the same or fewer resources, your business becomes more profitable and can identify new areas for potential growth and diversification. But efficiencies don’t just appear overnight of their own accord.
You and your team have to build them through smarter strategies and helpful technology. Done properly, you can develop repeatable marketing workflows that help with acquisition, nurturing, qualification, and sales.
Lead Acquisition
Attract and acquire new leads by managing all inbound and outbound marketing programs from a single platform. With marketing automation, you can improve SEO to drive high-intent traffic, build and optimize landing pages and web forms to generate conversions, and manage all your social media campaigns to increase awareness and share of voice in your industry.
For example, Goose Digital leveraged marketing automation to capture all the data intelligence required to execute its lead strategy and grow results.
“What I love most about Act-On is the flexibility of the platform. Creating segments and building out the automation with conditional logic is easy and intuitive,” says Butler.
Lead Nurturing
Once you’ve acquired the lead, it’s time to guide them through the funnel along a fun and educational experience. By developing accurate, actionable lead and customer scoring programs based on demographics, “firmographics,” and behaviors, you can better understand each contact’s position in the buying journey. Then, you can put segmentation on auto-pilot, serve each person up relevant messaging and content, and watch your results improve.
Do you want to see how this plays out in real life with marketing automation examples? Here’s one to consider. Avery Dennison leveraged automated programs to strengthen their lead nurturing, saving countless hours and tripling email open rates. The company’s biggest problem now, according to James Moat, director of global digital corporate communications, is putting enough staff in place to follow up with the increased leads!
Lead Qualification and Sales Enablement
With a good scoring system in place, marketers can automate the lead qualification process to both improve existing nurturing and provide your sales team with transparent and comprehensive insights into contact-specific journeys.
Act-On allows you to build custom dashboards (here’s a great example from our partner The Marketing Guys) to integrate granular and aggregate data into single views. Doing so allows you to track engagement, opportunities, and ROI — from initial campaigns to annual recurring revenue. The Marketing Guys, for example, have generated 25% in annual revenue growth.
Scale Marketing: Scale Smarter, Not Harder
The best part about scaling marketing is that there’s always room for improvement. Sure, your campaigns are automated, but you can regularly tweak these programs to drive more engagement and revenue. This is critical because, as you continue to grow, your objectives will evolve. Marketing automation allows you to scale in proportion to that growth.
The magic elixir here is testing. Be sure to run your automated marketing campaigns long enough that you’ll have ample datasets to work with. A/B test everything, from email subject lines to paid search headlines and then closely monitor the results. The clear insights into performance afforded to you by marketing automation will help you understand what’s working, what isn’t, and how and where you can improve.
Most importantly, don’t adjust your efforts simply for the sake of doing so. When you have reliable data, there’s no need to react haphazardly. Every single action should improve efficiency and efficacy, so make sure your entire team is on the same page and that you meet regularly to adjust your short-term plan of attack and long-term goals and objectives.
Scaling Marketing: Helping Small Marketing Teams Grow
Regardless of the size, shape, or makeup of your marketing team, Act-On’s marketing automation platform can help you execute all the tasks above for scalable, sustainable business growth. Our solution helps all marketers improve every aspect of the customer life cycle, including demand generation, lead nurturing, data management, customer loyalty programs, and even sales enablement.
Want to learn more about how marketing automation helps with scaling marketing? Check out our on-demand webinar as Act-On’s SVP of marketing, Jeff Day, and solutions consultant, Mike Felix, run through how to fine-tune your marketing automation platform for pure performance and build the pipeline you need to drive your business.