Marketing automation technology has become an indispensable tool in the complex sale marketer’s arsenal.
Lead generation, lead nurturing, and determining the right time for routing leads to Sales would be extremely difficult without that technology. Add lead scoring and tracking through that final conversion to sale, and the task is flat out impossible without automation.
Luckily, for B2B marketers there is a wide range of marketing automation options out there, from relatively simple solutions that help streamline email marketing to full-blown packages that seem like they do everything but automate the lights and thermostat at the office.
But here’s what I’ve seen again and again: automation doesn’t fix a broken funnel. It accelerates whatever you already have. If the system underneath is solid, automation makes it better. If the system is broken, automation makes it break faster.
To help illustrate how some of your peers are using marketing automation, I’m sharing four MarketingSherpa case studies that cover everything from how automation improved lead gen to how that tech directly impacted the bottom line.
Case Study #1: How SmartBear Software Increased Leads by 200%
Marketing Automation: 200% increase in lead volume for software company after implementation
SmartBear Software, a B2B cloud mobile software company, was rapidly growing and decided to implement CRM software and marketing automation software as a single process to ensure the two technology pieces would be easily integrated.
When choosing the automation vendor, Keith Lincoln, Vice President of Marketing, SmartBear, said three main criteria were considered:
- Ease of use
- Scalability
- Integration with the new CRM system
Once an automation vendor was chosen, the team decided to bring in an outside consultant to expedite the implementation. Keith said this consultant helped speed up the learning curve through training and was able to get the automation solution up and running within a five-day workweek.
Automation in place, the team started slow with a few email campaigns, faced some internal challenges, but then quickly began to implement lead nurturing to handle a high volume of leads in different product groups. Lincoln said the automation solution was even integrated with SmartBear’s webinar platform.
Results? Lead volume grew 200%, 80% of global leads were generated with automated trial downloads, and 85% of SmartBear’s revenue was generated by the trial download leads.
The pattern here: they treated CRM and automation as one system, not two tools sitting next to each other. Integration first. That’s what made the rest work.
Case Study #2: Managed Maintenance Drives 75% More Leads
In this case study, Managed Maintenance Inc. (MMI), a provider of management services for technology assets, faced a different problem than SmartBear from the case study above.
Where SmartBear implemented automation and a CRM solution together to ensure those pieces were integrated, MMI had marketing automation and a CRM in place, but the two were siloed and weren’t synced. Marketing’s and Sales’ activities and data were completely separate.
The solution was to audit the current technology setup, and it was determined that MMI needed to replace both the automation and CRM tools together and, similar to SmartBear, implement the new software pieces together to ensure they would be integrated.
Once that occurred, Marketing at MMI was able to begin lead scoring and lead nurturing, and maybe even more importantly in terms of company culture, Sales and Marketing became more aligned because the new technology implementation allowed visibility from lead gen to conversion to sale for everyone involved in the whole pipeline.
After completely revamping marketing automation and CRM technology at MMI, lead generation was up 75% over the previous year.
For more, read Lead Generation: Revamped marketing automation and CRM technology drives 75% more leads.
The lesson in the MMI case is that alignment is not a cultural initiative. It’s an architecture problem. Two systems that don’t talk to each other will produce two versions of reality. Unify the system and visibility becomes the default, not the exception.
Case Study #3: Crain’s Business Insurance Adds $550K in New Ad Revenue
Crain’s Business Insurance is a trade publication that faced the challenge all publications are undergoing right now with declining advertising revenue, but at the same time, its industry customers began buying up-front research and content.
Because the company has reporters with more than 300 years of combined writing and editorial experience, it was positioned to take advantage of this opportunity.
In order to do so, Crain’s implemented marketing automation, revamped and integrated its databases.
The company had three databases: print subscribers, online registrants, and the newly created marketing automation database. They integrated its content creation process into the marketing automation system.
Integrating content creation into the automation solution meant creating content categories and segmenting the database into those different groups to align content creation with certain reader segments.
From there, Crain’s implemented lead scoring, and even utilized analytics coming from marketing automation to influence the ongoing marketing strategy.
This campaign led to:
- Nearly $550,000 in brand-new advertising revenue for demand generation services
- A 43% increase in registered online newsletter subscribers
- A 2% increase in paid print subscribers
- A conversion rate of 2.6% from anonymous website visitors
Check out Marketing Automation: Implementation drives $550,000 in net new revenue at Crain’s.
What Crain’s did well was close the loop. They didn’t just send content. They segmented, scored, and used the analytics to inform what they did next. That feedback loop is what turns automation from a delivery tool into a learning system.
Case Study #4: How CentricsIT Boosted Leads by 59% and Generated $1.5 Million in New Revenue
This case study combines a dramatic lift in lead gen along with an impressive impact on the bottom line after CentricsIT, a data center solutions provider, implemented marketing automation.
Mandy Hauck, Manager of Marketing Communications, CentricsIT, was the company’s first marketing employee and walked into what could be called a fairly unsophisticated marketing strategy largely consisting of email blasts.
Her background was email marketing, but early on she reached out to a marketing automation vendor based on a coworker’s connection with that vendor’s CEO.
After a call with the vendor’s sales rep, Mandy knew she wanted to implement automation at CentricsIT and conducted internal marketing to get both Sales and company leadership buy-in.
Part of this process included attending a conference on the automation solution in place and learning ways to get Sales involved in planning how automation would be used at CentricsIT.
Before automation, the company didn’t have a refined method of tracking its leads or nurturing them. Leads were thrown into Mandy’s inbox for her to manually forward to Sales.
After implementation, leads were automatically directed from landing pages to sales reps. In the first year of marketing automation at CentricsIT, lead gen increased 59% and $1.5 million in revenue was directly attributed to the new technology.
Read Marketing Automation: IT company boosts leads 59%, generates $1.5 million with system implementation.
The CentricsIT story is the one I see most often. Leads come in and someone manually forwards them. That’s not a process, that’s a person being a process. Automation fixed the handoff, and once the handoff was fixed, they could actually track what happened next.
The pattern across all four
Across all four examples, the same things show up:
Integration matters more than features. If your systems aren’t unified, your reporting is guessing.
Handoffs matter more than campaigns. Most “nurture problems” are really workflow problems. The content might be fine. The routing is where things break.
Closing the loop matters more than faith. If you don’t know what happened to a lead after you handed it off, you can’t improve anything. You’re just hoping.
Automation doesn’t fix a broken funnel. It accelerates whatever you already have. These four teams got results because they fixed the system underneath the tools first.
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