If you’re a marketer in the Professional Services sector, you’re probably familiar with the challenges of marketing to a highly distributed audience set. Creating dynamic content and delivering it to the right audience throughout the customer journey is a make-or-break proposition. Fleeting attention spans and all-pervading distractions further complicate the process of lead nurturing and lead generation.

The list of your problems seems endless – How do I use customer data to segment my audience? How do I define the messaging for different audience sets? How do I nurture the leads and move them closer to the buying stage? And most importantly – Where should I start?

These are all important questions for marketing teams, since communicating your service value proposition effectively to a fragmented audience is the key to engaging and converting your prospects.

Marketing automation – if done correctly, can help you meet your goals through optimization of your marketing efforts. Most professional services businesses have already implemented marketing automation solutions and increased their digital marketing ROI. The reason why others haven’t is either due to lack of financial resources, human resource constraints, or strategic missteps. But the big question still remains – can marketing automation help you target the most relevant audiences to drive conversions and bring in the dollars? Should you really use marketing automation? Read on to find out.

Key benefits of marketing automation

Let's face it ─ marketing can seem like tons of work. Email marketing, social media, landing pages, audience segmentation, lead management ─ an average marketer is expected to do it all. Shouldn't marketers find a way to automate their routine repetitive activities and focus on what's really important? The answer lies in marketing automation. Below are some key benefits of using marketing automation.

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Personalization − Connect your value proposition with customers’ needs

Email marketing plays a pivotal role in the lead generation process. Your prospects receive hundreds of emails and marketing messages from competing organizations every day. Marketing automation tools allow you to segment and engage your potential customers based on their behaviors, choices, and individual preferences. This means you can tailor your service value proposition to perfectly fit customers’ business needs and provide a personalized customer experience. This leads to positive interactions between your brand and the customers throughout the customer lifecycle.

Consistency − Engage your customers with a consistent message

Marketing automation platforms allow you to orchestrate and deliver consistent messages so your customers get relevant content and unbroken experience across channels. This helps you engage with each one of your customers with a consistent message at every touchpoint and every stage in the customer journey.

Measurability – Know how your audiences are responding to your messages

Automating your marketing tasks makes it easier to optimize for maximum impact. In-depth performance reports with detailed graphs and statistics allow you to understand where your campaign is working and where it’s not. Based on the data, you can focus your efforts on the right audience segments and qualified leads to build customer relationships and drive higher conversions. It also streamlines complex marketing campaigns and content strategies across multiple channels. With this, you can understand how customers want to engage on each of these channels, and you can deliver the content customers expect on a specific channel.

Testing & Targeting – Know what messages work with different audience sets

Marketing automation allows you to run A/B testing at every stage of your marketing campaign. As time progresses, the incremental improvements across your marketing activity will generate a significant improvement in your conversion rates. You can even retarget some of your bouncing leads back to you by customizing the campaign. This will also help in customer retention.

Key points to consider

Is your customer database mature enough?

The quality of your database will determine the success of your marketing automation efforts. Ask yourself – is your data good enough to allow segmentation of prospects on different parameters? Audience personas in the professional services sector are complex and extremely specific. If the answer is a 'No' and if your data is unstructured, outdated, or inaccurate ― your efforts will nosedive right from the start. Data quality has a direct impact on the conversion rate, especially if you're into B2B marketing. Clean data helps you in maintaining high email deliverability which assists you in nurturing your leads in a much better way.

Is your service value proposition clearly defined?

A service value proposition is the most important factor that determines whether the customer is interested in your product or not. Test your value proposition to find out whether the potential customer has really understood your brand. Customers usually notice the value proposition when it has more content (including features and benefits) and spends a long time going through it.

There are certain questions you need to address:

• What is the value you will communicate to different audiences at different stages?
• How will you progressively evolve your service value prop to fit customers’ unique business needs?
• How will you differentiate and stand out from the crowd of competitors?

These are all questions your marketing strategy must answer as you set out to execute your campaign.

Have you defined your buyer’s journey?

It is crucial to ensure you deliver the right content at the right time to your prospects. It is also imperative to understand each of your buyer’s personas and audit the content to ensure the strategic alignment with each and every persona at every stage of the buyer’s journey.

You must address questions like:

• Have you analyzed and charted out the customer journey for different audience personas?
• Do you understand how your prospects become buyers?
• How would people go from never hearing of your company to becoming customers?

It all depends on your business, be it a big or a small business; you may have various types of customers and numerous methods of acquiring them.