Kimi Heskett-Fowler, Marketing Automation Specialist at Hyland Software, shares her company's customer experience using Marketo's marketing software. She discusses why your company needs marketing automation, what to consider when implementing the software, and why you should go with Marketo.
Good Afternoon everyone, my name is Kimi Fowler and I’m here today to talk to you about why marketing automation is awesome. A little about myself. I’m a full time marketing automation specialist at OnBase by Hyland in Westlake, Ohio… just outside of lovely Cleveland. I spend my days building workflows, disecting data, executing marketing programs and just being generally awesome at life.
I’m also the User Group Leader for the Ohio Marketo User Group and a Marketo certified expert. I’m also a 3 time Marketo champion and was lucky enough to be dubbed the 2013 Marketo champion of the year. It’s truly an honor to be so involved with the fine folks at Marketo. Also, my mom is really proud.
Here’s just a few fun things I’ve been lucky enough to be involved in recently – the marketing automation community is very supportive and a lot of fun!
Today we’ll zip through all awesome things marketing automation and have time for questions at the end!
So if you are here you probably have an inkling, or more than an inkling, of what marketing automation is. In a nutshell, or a wikipedia definition, marketing automation refers to software platforms and technologies designed for marketing departments and organizations to more effectively market on multiple channels online (such as email, social media, websites, etc.) and automate repetitive tasks.
Basically, it’s awesome.
So why do you need marketing automation? Well, again, because it’s awesome.
OK, I know I use the word awesome a lot. But let’s get down to business. There are some great reasons to look at a marketing automation platform.
Scalability – optimize your efficiency
Accountability – who here doesn’t care about ROI? 0 hands raised. MA give you and your team program metrics that help you create pipeline and enable you to quickly change the course of your plans as needed and know where to invest.
Alignment – help provide the right people at the right time to your sales team. They will appreciate it.
Communication – easily schedule, activate, deactivate, nurture
Coordination – run programs across multiple channels
When looking at marketing automation tools you’ll likely run into very few road blocks amongst the marketing team members and the sales team members closely aligned with marketing. Like I said before, Marketing Automation is awesome and these folks will easily recognize that.
The folks you should be worrying about are everyone else. Consider how much time IT will have to invest in the implementation and maintenance of a marketing automation system. I still to this day have to work with our IT folks on a regular basis on various pieces as they relate to our marketing automation system. The better that relationship is and the more they feel included and educated, the better off we all are.
Beyond IT think about all the other departments that will not only be affected by the rollout of this system, but that can also benefit from it. Not only sales and services groups but other outliers like customer experience, internal communications, events teams and more. Everyone can benefit from this powerful system. The more you can show them that up front, the better off you’ll be long term.
We made other groups feel included by inviting them to initial demos, providing them education up front, asking about their needs as it related to the system and what they dreamed about doing with a system like this. Sure, you probably can’t deliver all those dreams right away but they are good to discuss, document and file away for the future.
After two days of discovery with the team at Marketo, Dave Vegh, our Sales Program Manager, was sold within the first minute of the demo. “I vividly remember the demo. Marketo listened to our problems, what we wanted to accomplish and what we needed to measure. There was no question that this solution was for us.”
“With Marketo, we take our campaigns to the next level , make our employees are more efficient and we can be more attentive to our customers,” says Jerry Trudell, Demand Generation Manager.
When it comes to implementing a marketing automation system I can’t stress enough to use your resources! Implementation services are there for a reason and you have plentiful other resources to tap too. Specifically with a Marketo implementation I can talk enough about the power of the Marketo Community. The community got me to where I am today and where I met some of my favorite people in the world. Marketo also offers amazing courses, both live and on-demand and as a user group leader I definitely recommend becoming involved with your local group. Even outside of those resources look for help on your social networks. There are plenty of us marketing automation nerds out there would would love to connect with you via twitter and other outlets.
Amanda McAllister, Manager of Marketing System Operations, shares, “To have a successful and fully utilized marketing automation platform, you need integration with your CRM. That’s the only way to see the full picture from a lead through to a sale. The power of that visibility spreads to all areas of the business. Our Marketo integration with Salesforce has brought us light years ahead of where we were before.” These days there are so many great options to enable you and your team for success!
At Hyland we’ve utilized tons of the partners available to us such as the ones you see here. They’ve made our systems more powerful and efficient.
Hyland has indeed become more efficient. The last full year using the old system produced 1,208 MQLs. The Hyland team closed out their first full year using Marketo with 2,647 MQLs – nearly 120 percent growth.
Drew Chapin, VP of Marketing, leads the charge of enthusiasm. “What’s most exciting about our Marketo deployment with Salesforce isn’t the significant early return of over 100 percent year-over-year growth on booked revenue sourced from marketing. It’s that we have only scratched the surface on what’s possible.”