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 the right content and delivering it to the right audience at the right time is a make or break the proposition. Fleeting attention spans and all-pervading distractions further complicate the challenge of attracting and engaging audiences.

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

These are all-important questions, 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 by optimizing your marketing efforts through a targeted approach. Most professional services businesses have already implemented Marketing Automation and it has increased their ROI. The reason why others haven’t, is either due to lack of financial resource, human resource constraints, or strategic missteps. But the big question still remains – can Marketing Automation help you target and engage the most relevant audiences to drive conversions and bring in the dollars? Read on to find out.

KEY BENEFITS OF MARKETING AUTOMATION

Personalization − Connect your value proposition with customers’ needs

Your prospects receive hundreds of emails and marketing messages from competing organizations every day. Marketing Automation allows you to segment and engage your customers based on their behaviors, choices, and individual preferences. This means you can tailor your service value proposition to perfectly fit customers’ business needs with targeted messages. 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 allows you to orchestrate and deliver consistent messages so each of your customers gets a relevant and unbroken experience across channels. The email quality is highly optimized, which helps to decrease the effort required and improves overall effectiveness. This helps you engage with each one of your customers with a consistent message at every touchpoint and every stage in the engagement journey.

Measurability – Know how your audiences are responding to your messages

Marketing Automation makes it easy to analyze and optimize your campaigns 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 to drive higher engagement and better conversions. It also enables and manages complex marketing campaigns 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 A/B test your campaign 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 bouncings leads back to you by customizing the campaign.

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, right from the lead to the customer. A clean data helps you in maintaining a 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 customer has really understood your brand. Customers usually notice the value proposition when it has more content (including features and benefits) and spend a long time in going through it.

There are certain questions you need to address:

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

These are all questions your content strategy must as you set out to execute your Marketing Automation 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 engagement 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, you may have various types of customers and numerous methods of acquiring them.

HOW TA DIGITAL CAN HELP YOU SUCCEED WITH MARKETING AUTOMATION

At TA Digital, we help businesses select and implement the right Marketing Automation tool to drive success in their marketing efforts. Our Digital Marketing practice will work with you to assess your needs and recommend the best solution for your organization. We also provide support services, and affordably deliver campaigns, custom templates, analytics services to support marketing automation use cases.

Case Studies About the Professional Services Sector

Marketo Case Studies

How Mintigo Drives Greater Pipeline Performance with Marketo ABM

Sizmek reinvented marketing automation to deliver big wins in just 3 months

Oracle Eloqua Case Studies

How NGA Human Resources Transformed Enterprise Engagement with Responsive Content

How Cetera Financial Group Nurtures Prospects Through Personalized Content Experiences

Pardot Case Studies

How IAG Consulting Streamlines Online Marketing Programs with Pardot

How IPM Increased Marketing-Qualified Leads by 1200% with Pardot

Explore Additional Resources

We have a team of experts to help you select the right Digital Marketing platform for your business.

Our team specializes in Marketo audits that help our clients identify performance problems with their integrated Marketo platforms.

Our Consulting team specializes in providing Eloqua health checks to help you identify performance and process gaps in your Oracle Marketing Cloud.

Our Pardot consulting team specializes in Pardot audits that help you identify performance problems with your integrated Pardot platforms.

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