The overwhelming majority of business leaders agree: collaboration between sales and marketing enables critical growth. 

This is true for teams, and for technology. When you use your CRM and marketing automation tools together, you unlock the potential to convert more leads, drive higher sales, and deliver more seamless customer experiences. 

But integrating these platforms can be a challenge for many companies. So in our recent webinar, experts in marketing, sales, customer success, and data strategy from Success Stars, Value Genie, Audalia Nexia, and Zendesk Sell sat down to explore what it actually looks like when your CRM and marketing automation platform are fully integrated. These leaders have seen firsthand that when businesses create a bidirectional, unified system of data that’s shared between marketing and sales, alignment and collaboration becomes much simpler. 

Read on for our experts’ key takeaways on how CRM and marketing automation work together to put consistent messaging, more resonant content, better targeting, and improved outcomes within your reach.

Takeaway 1: Put Customer Relationships at the Center

David Pinder, partner at Value Genie, admits to feeling jaded about the term CRMs, because they are more commonly used to facilitate customer transactions than actually build customer relationships. But he believes that in today’s fully evolved digital world, relationships are what will make all the difference.

For users on the other end of CRM communications, though, those relationships are often made up of interactions with different voices across the sales, marketing, and CX teams. And that has to change.

Takeaway 2: Talk to the Customer

David sees a gap: customers are never buying what the supplier is selling. And it’s not that the product is misaligned with the audience. It’s that the customer is searching for and buying a different outcome than what your sales team may be focusing on. 

His advice? Talk to your existing customers (or get somebody else to do it for you) to discover the real, underlying drivers in their buying decisions. Get to a point of understanding about what those important outcomes are so you can sell what your customers are buying. 

Takeaway 3: Enable Shared Data Analysis 

Nabajeet Kalita, founder of Success Stars, always advises his clients that the data sync between marketing automation and CRM platforms needs to be bidirectional. 

Marketing automation captures data on customer behavior across channels to gain insights into what messages or experiences resonate. And while it’s important to use that data to optimize campaigns, Nabajeet believes it’s equally important that this data gets passed along to the CRM and the sales team so they can act upon it when working with leads. 

And the best time to implement this data strategy? Yesterday. 

Takeaway 4: Find the Right Customer

To Justin Tyrrell, sales leader at Zendesk Sell, it all comes down to this: customers will only sign up if your product is the right product for them. So the most crucial step is finding the right customers. 

When you do so, you can personalize your outreach because you know who the business is and what they do. You can create good nurturing because you know what they want. And your sales team can integrate better with marketing to reach them with the right content, because you’re all in agreement about who the right customers are. Everything else falls into place. 

Takeaway 5: Be Open to Multiple Solutions

Justin sees companies fall into a trap of believing that they need to buy one solution that does everything. And inevitably, that means someone is making a sacrifice. 

Usually, it means one or more teams don’t get the right solution for them. Maybe the sales team gets a functionally brilliant but overly complex solution. Or maybe marketing gets a tool that doesn’t actually do everything they need. 

Instead, he advises leaders to look for solutions that can integrate with one another. Find the right tech for marketing, find the right tech for sales, find the right tech for other teams, and figure out if they can talk to each other. Multiple tools that integrate together can solve more problems than a single “solution” that doesn’t quite do it all. 

Takeaway 6: How the Puzzle Pieces Come Together

For Nabajeet, finding the right tech solution starts with understanding your specific business problems or goals. He advises clients to start by defining their key objectives, which can be different for different companies. Some teams may be focused on generating leads, while others need to provide consistent messaging across channels. Once you know your business problem, then you can find the tool that will best solve it. 

And finally, he recommends developing an implementation strategy that allows you to work on each piece of the puzzle without losing sight of your big-picture goals. Because when you integrate your CRM and marketing automation platform with an outcome-driven approach, you solve meaningful problems and provide better visibility for marketing and sales along every stage of the buyer’s journey. 

More Insights from our Expert Panel

Ready for more insights from these sales and marketing experts? Watch the full recording for actionable tips, real-life examples of how CRM and marketing automation should work together, and practical ways to get started.

Technology Company Increases Email Open Rates by 68%

Cloud-based software company SimScale had a marketing strategy that focused on leveraging Google AdWords, search engine optimization and industry conferences to generate leads. But each of these channels existed in a silo, creating inefficiencies and disconnect.

Webinars were a major source of leads, and the company often drew 500 or more attendees for each event. However, the marketing team was tasked with manually entering each lead and following up with contacts, which was a time-consuming and inefficient process. Of course, these manual processes sometimes introduced errors.

The marketing team also lacked the ability to segment diverse audiences within their email programs, making it challenging to send highly relevant and targeted messages. In addition, developers created many of the messages, which limited the time available to make ongoing product improvements.

The company knew that marketing automation could solve many of these challenges, but they also needed marketing and sales performance visibility. This required an intuitive dashboard and reporting capabilities that integrated easily with their existing Microsoft Dynamics CRM.  

SimScale selected Act-On marketing automation because it integrated seamlessly with their Microsoft Dynamics CRM. After adoption, the SimScale team quickly developed an email campaign to nurture leads automatically. As a result, email open rates increased by 68%. Plus, this freed developers to return to their core product development competency instead of being tied down to sending email messages manually. 

The next improvement was transitioning the automated lead nurturing process to Act-On to successfully deliver the right messaging to the right person at the right time. The result was a 15% improvement in marketing qualified leads (MQLs).

The silos that disconnected marketing from sales were eliminated, and marketing is now able to gather critical intelligence about email communications, web interactions and more to make smarter decisions about what communications to send and when. Improved behavioral tracking enabled marketing to create more accurate buyer personas to speak more impactfully to leads and generate higher email open rates. The integration with Dynamics CRM means sales can leverage this richer data to grow your business.

Cloud Services Company Increases Email Conversion Rates by 20%

A leading cloud technology provider, interworks.cloud, struggled to fully integrate their marketing technology stack, preventing them from segmenting marketing lists among multiple business units and several distinct target audiences. 

Without the capability to segment audiences, the marketing team struggled to deliver personalized messages and relevant content that addressed their end users’ pain points. Moreover, the existing technologies did not accurately track leads, measure programs or provide the detailed insights the sales team needed most.

A partnership with Act-On’s marketing automation solution enabled the company to migrate their existing CRM, which was built internally, to Microsoft Dynamics. Act-On then helped the company easily integrate Dynamics with the marketing automation platform. As a result, interworks.cloud can create more personalized emails for prospects and customers, and the marketing team spends far less time manually sorting through data. In addition, this frees up time to work on other improvements, such as testing and executing new marketing campaigns. interworks.cloud worked with Act-On to:

• The Act-On success team helped interworks.cloud set up complex back-end integrations and import data from the internal CRM to Microsoft Dynamics.
• The marketing team implemented Act-On’s website beacon to track website visitor behavior to understand existing marketing content performance and improve content marketing efforts.
• Act-On marketing automation enabled interworks.cloud to automate existing email programs and improve the buyer journey, capturing engagement metrics that could be leveraged for segmentation and lead scoring.

The company increased sales qualified leads (SQLs) quality by 20% and improved email conversion rates by 20% through automation with advanced segmentation abilities.

Hospitality Franchise Boosts Email Open Rates by 60% to Support Repeat Business

Red Lion Hotels (RLH) is a hospitality brand that owns and manages a variety of economy and upscale properties. As hotel owners, RLH needed the ability to automate and improve their welcome and guest communications and brand loyalty programs. These marketing efforts are increasingly critical in the hotel space due to the need to encourage loyal customers and contribute to sustained growth.

Before Act-On RLH struggled to scale processes related to welcome, loyalty and transactional marketing programs. The company also had difficulty delivering highly targeted messages to unique brands, franchisees and customer types.

Disparate systems throughout the various brands created internal communication breakdowns and inconsistent messaging and branding. Struggles also included incomplete and inaccurate marketing and sales reporting, creating further challenges in measuring engagement and the effectiveness of marketing efforts.

Overcoming these challenges required a marketing automation platform that allowed RLH to meet complex guest messaging needs while integrating multiple systems across the company’s eight franchised hotel brands, including marketing, loyalty and reservation transactions. The company also required custom communications based on various criteria, such as franchise, brand, property type, buyer personas and more.

The company selected Act-On marketing automation because of the capability for an easy Microsoft Dynamics integration. Using Act-On, RLH was able to accomplish the following:

• Guests at 1,000 unique properties across eight unique brands received automated welcome, loyalty and transactional campaigns
• Welcome triggered emails improved open rates to 48%
• All loyalty program triggered emails improved open rates to 37%
• Transactional emails improved open rates to 43%
• The Microsoft Dynamics integration aligned sales and marketing
• Granular guest insights improved engagement, number of stays and premium experiences

The two-way integration between Act-On marketing automation and Microsoft Dynamics allowed RLH to align sales and marketing to create more targeted messaging and unique branding and customer communications.

Manufacturing and Distribution Giant Leverages Act-On to Capture 200% More Leads  

Horizon Distributors is a wholesale manufacturer and distributor specializing in landscaping, irrigation and outdoor living products and services. The company has 70 stores across 11 states, and marketing is run by a single person. Scaling programs and marketing efforts manually was not an option, and the Director of Marketing required the ability to scale marketing efforts through automation. Before Act-On, the company struggled with:

• A small marketing team that needed to uplevel the company’s marketing strategy
• A lack of ability to efficiently optimize content marketing strategy and generate more leads
• Dissatisfaction with the existing marketing automation solution, which lacked the ability to integrate with Microsoft Dynamics CRM

Horizon Distributors worked with Act-On to plan, develop and deploy different marketing campaigns more efficiently. The company also gained the ability to track engagement insights and behaviors to nurture and qualify hot leads for sales. Additionally, the company integrated Microsoft Dynamics with Act-On to create a seamless handoff between sales and marketing and further personalize discussions with prospects.

Over a single year, the company increased leads by 200% using Act-On and increased engagement rates by 57% through behavior and engagement segmentation. Additionally, Horizon Distributors created criteria for various segments, building lists through the Act-On platform, which conserved time and resources while empowering the company to deliver unique messaging to over 25,000 people each month.

B2B Company Aligns Marketing and Sales Through Powerful Integration

Pariveda Solutions is a consulting firm that struggled with challenges posed by their incomplete technology stack. For example, the company used different systems to manage sales activities, automate marketing emails, integrate landing pages, run webinars and more. As a result, alignment between marketing and sales was disjointed, limiting their ability to effectively nurture leads and customer relationships and truly understand marketing impacts.

Pariveda sales and marketing teams needed to collaborate with greater efficiency, provide content when and where it was needed, and increase integrations within the back-end technology systems. Pariveda selected Act-On because the software integrated easily with Microsoft Dynamics and made scaling marketing campaigns simple. 

Through Act-On marketing automation, the company developed a more efficient lead generation process to improve the customer journey while integrating tools to improve marketing reporting and create seamless coordination between marketing and sales teams.

Capturing a More Holistic View of the Customer Journey

As you work to connect more authentically with your leads and customers, it’s not just about connecting, but connecting with purpose. Leads who receive relevant and timely marketing messages are more likely to be receptive to sales outreach and, therefore, positively impacted by marketing and sales.

Creating sales and marketing alignment with the right tools enables you to generate higher-quality leads, supported by integrations that simplify the process. As a result, you can gain improved visibility and greater results at every step of the buyer journey.

Despite its many strengths, a CRM like Microsoft Dynamics often fails to provide the detailed marketing data that makes the whole picture work. However, when you integrate marketing automation with your existing CRM, you can create more personalized and meaningful experiences at all stages of the customer journey.

New Buyer Behavior Demands a New Marketing Approach

The way B2B buyers shop for new products and services has changed, and when marketing and sales are out of alignment, they can’t meet customers where they’re at in a consistent and meaningful way.

Buyers now take a digital approach to researching you and your competitors, and as a result, they spend more time under the care of marketing. This interaction starts the moment a prospect views a social post, a digital ad, or some other piece of marketing content, and it continues throughout the entire business relationship.

Moving the buyer through this journey with effective, timely content marketing and relevant engagement strategies is critical, demanding, and impossible to scale manually. However, CRM integration with marketing automation enables marketing teams to accomplish this and do so at scale.

For example, Interworkscloud, one of the world’s leading cloud services providers, struggled to fully integrate their martech stack, which prevented them from segmenting marketing lists among multiple business units and several distinct target audiences. Without the level of personalization that buyers demand, they couldn’t accurately address buyer pain points at the moment of relevance. Leveraging Act-On’s Microsoft Dynamics integration, the company increased SQL quality by 20% and email conversion rates by 20% using automated email programs with advanced segmentation.

Integrating Microsoft Dynamics CRM with Act-On Marketing Automation Sets the Foundation for Sales Growth

Integrating your CRM with a marketing automation tool means using the power of your data to its fullest potential. By integrating what you know about a lead from their interactions with your website, emails and content offerings, you can create a sales conversation that truly matters. 

Integrating Microsoft Dynamics with the Act-On allows you to:

• Build, automate, measure, and optimize lead generation, lead nurturing, customer retention, and customer upselling campaigns that lead to action and advocacy through precise timing and relevance.
• Track and score accounts and leads based on behavior, and then share that data seamlessly with sales. 
• Implement account-based marketing tactics allow you to coordinate more personalized lead nurturing. 
• Automatically send leads to sales once they meet or exceed your lead score threshold. 
• Manage, align, and recycle leads based on specific behaviors.
• Narrow in on hot prospects daily, and gain a greater understanding of why a lead was qualified and correctly assigned in the CRM. 

One example of the possible results when your CRM and marketing automation platform are working together comes from an Act-On customer, Red Lion Hotels. The hospitality brand leveraged the native integration between Act-On and Microsoft Dynamics to align sales and marketing and enable targeted sales conversations. On the marketing side, the results included a 60% above-average email open rate on automated guest reservations, as well as 20 hours saved per month in manual design work on branded communications.

Quality Data Helps Identify Quality Leads 

The foundation for getting better leads into your CRM and working them more efficiently is infusing marketing automation data into the sales conversation. Integrating your Microsoft Dynamics CRM with Act-On marketing automation enables you to leverage accurate data. This makes it easier to define and identify sales-ready leads.

In most cases, it’s best to look for a marketing automation tool that integrates natively with your existing CRM. With a two-way sync, supported by an official partnership between the tools, you can make more informed decisions about when and how to engage with prospects and customers across their entire journey with your business. 

Connect the Dots of Engagement with CRM + Marketing Automation Integration

Act-On collects an activity history for every lead and customer, then delivers a list of Hot Prospects into Dynamics CRM based on your customized lead scoring configuration. For each prospect, your sales team will know exactly:

• The eBooks, infographics, podcasts, videos, and other content resources the lead spent time with.
• The emails they clicked on.
• The webinars they attended and how long they stayed.
• Any specific product interests, and how much time they are spending on specific website pages.  

With this data in hand, salespeople can connect the dots of prospect engagement to better understand the prospect’s interests and where they’re at in the buying journey. This helps the rep avoid missing obvious topics of interest and brings them much closer to understanding pain points and making relevant connections.

For example, SimScale, the world’s first product-ready SaaS application of engineering simulation, struggled with manual tasks. The marketing team had to manually enter and follow up with all contacts following webinars. This is definitely a time-consuming process that hurt productivity and introduced the risk of manual errors at SimScale. The company leveraged Act-On’s capabilities and integrations with the Microsoft Dynamics system to automate webinars and workflows. The results included an increase of 68% for email open rates and a jump of more than 15% in MQL conversions from email onboarding.

Selecting the Right Marketing Automation Partner

Choosing the right marketing automation platform is about more than completing a checklist. Your business has processes, resources, goals, and a budget that inform your marketing automation choice. Importantly, the tool must also integrate seamlessly with your Microsoft Dynamics software while meeting your ongoing needs and challenges. A few questions to consider include:

• Does the platform have native integrations with Microsoft Dynamics CRM?
• How quickly can you move from implementation to value?
• Is the platform intuitive and easy to use?
• Does the data sync between the two systems automatically?
• Does the vendor’s onboarding program appear sufficient?
• Does the platform include account profiles that roll up all contact-level engagement data?

With these questions in mind, you can find a solution that brings marketing and sales into closer alignment and supports prospects and customers with greater understanding and personalized and relevant communications.

Raising Your Bottom Line With the Right Tech Stack

Connecting marketing automation with Microsoft Dynamics CRM creates a command center that allows you to create, manage and track campaigns across multiple channels throughout the entire lifecycle.

This connection provides intelligence that cannot be gathered in any other way, enabling marketing and sales to work together, helping them make smarter decisions with greater efficiency, and creating a company culture and activities that are centered on what matters most: the customer experience.

Interested in learning more about marketing automation and how it can help expand your Microsoft Dynamics capabilities? Connect with us today to begin your path toward better marketing processes and better results.

Seamless integration between your marketing automation and customer relationship management (CRM) has the potential to multiply your results, convert more marketing qualified leads (MQLs) to sales qualified leads (SQLs), and drive higher sales.

To reach your target market, you need the right tools behind you. After all, you want to grow by communicating the right messaging to the right people at the right time. A critical part of making those tools work harder for you is understanding how they can integrate to add up to better sales results.

Why Integrate Marketing Automation with Your CRM?

Effectively integrating your marketing automation with your CRM allows you to maximize the power of each tool’s capabilities and transform how you engage and communicate with customers. A few examples include:

• Organizing and streamlining your company’s prospecting and customer retention activities by consolidating vital activities and information.
• Capturing more advanced insights into the customer journey, which sales and marketing can leverage to prioritize efforts.
• Avoiding lost productivity and waste of critical resources on poor leads.

Often, sales and marketing communicate with prospects and customers using different verbiage or attempting to appeal to different pain points. Integrating marketing automation with CRM increases visibility, ensuring uniform and targeted messaging to various audiences and individuals. If you ever update or change communications, both teams can view the changes and adjust accordingly.

Guide Users Through the Customer Journey

A large goal of integrating your marketing automation platform with your CRM is to allow marketing and sales teams to attract more leads and guide more prospects through the purchasing cycle to increase revenue.

When marketing automation and CRM are in sync, your team can review the available data to better understand how the prospect or customer is engaging with your company’s website, products and services. As a result, you can serve them valuable content that informs buying decisions and promotes conversions based on where they’re at in the customer journey.

Marketing and CRM Software Integrations Improve Data Hygiene

Whatever you hope to achieve through sales and marketing hinges on the health of your email list, but unfortunately, many companies struggle with data hygiene.

Research shows that between 10% and 25% of business-to-business (B2B) marketing database contacts contain critical errors. As a result, many marketers are sending emails to unverified recipients who are uninterested (or no longer interested) in receiving those communications. Those unwanted emails are then reported as “spam,” which damages deliverability and open rates while decimating your email reputation.

However, if you’re using a unified system to input and monitor your data, you’re far more likely to maintain a high level of data hygiene – and ensure that your messages are being received and opened.

Integrating your CRM and marketing automation platforms has many advantages, but the main point is that when you align these systems, you align everything else that your sales and marketing teams are working on to achieve synchronicity between the two departments. Still, it’s one thing to talk about the advantages of integration, but actually bringing those benefits to life is another topic altogether. Let’s get to it.

Follow These Tips to Maximize the Automation Integration Relationship

Do your marketing automation software platform and CRM systems integrate? If so, that’s a great start. However, just because they integrate doesn’t mean they align. Or rather, it doesn’t mean that your marketing and sales teams are working together to ensure that alignment. Here are five best practices to make sure that you’re getting the most from your CRM and marketing automation integration efforts.

1) Leverage Marketing and Sales Personalization

The true beauty of integrated marketing automation is that it empowers marketers to personalize their campaigns to appeal to their target audiences at the company and individual levels. When you properly integrate an effective CRM, you can improve that level of personalization even further.

For instance, your CRM should be able to transfer important information (company size, deal stage, deal size, deal status) automatically to your marketing automation tool, eliminating a lot of tedious work along the way. Your marketing team can then use this information to make their key deliverables more targeted and direct, especially as they support your sales team with content to help late-stage buyers convert. 

Another way to leverage marketing and sales personalization through aligning your CRM with your marketing automation platform is by ensuring emails to prospects appear to be coming from their assigned sales reps. This means your marketing automation tool should have the capability to pull critical information from the CRM directly and then update key email identifiers, such as “From” name, address, and even the sender’s email signature.

2) Establish Accurate Lead Scoring

The faster you respond to a lead, the more likely that lead will become a customer. Studies show that businesses that respond to leads within five minutes are 100x more likely to connect and convert opportunities. However, on average, it takes B2B sales teams 42 hours to respond to a new lead, and 38% of those leads never reply. After 30 days, 90% of those leads go completely inactive.

An effective strategy to automatically determine which leads are ready to pass to sales is lead scoring. Identify your personas, determine which user interactions and characteristics are most important to your company, and then assign point values to each interaction. Key interactions will vary from organization to organization, but opening an email, downloading an eBook, and visiting a pricing page are all common lead scoring actions. Make sure to get input from relevant sales, marketing, and executive stakeholders, and then put your scoring plan into action.

3) Maintain Visibility Into Post-SQL Activity

A lead isn’t going to suddenly change how they interact with your company just because they’ve transitioned internally from an MQL to an SQL. Furthermore, the actions they take and the way they engage with you online will directly influence how your sales team decides to communicate with them. Therefore, those same sales reps need to have a clear line of sight into those activities.

Most CRMs can deliver up-to-today and even real-time information on these post-SQL activities to help ensure that sales reps can react appropriately based on lead behavior. However, once a lead is passed to sales, reps should only receive highly relevant information.

Set up triggers for bottom-of-the-funnel activities like downloading a product comparison checklist or buyer’s guide. This will alert your sales team whenever it’s time to alter or accelerate their approach with the lead or customer.

4) Eliminate Duplicate Instances

One of the primary benefits of integrating your marketing automation platform with your CRM is the ability to unify your data through automated communication between the two systems. Unfortunately, prospects don’t always reach out in the same way, leading to duplicate instances in your records.

For example, if a prospect downloads an eBook, then also calls your company and is put in touch with a sales rep, the sales rep’s first inclination might be to enter the prospect into the CRM. Naturally, this could lead to duplication if the prospect had already been registered in your marketing automation tool.

Duplication is especially hazardous because it leads to false reporting, compliance issues (which adversely affect deliverability) and, potentially, mixed messaging in your outbound communications. So, to avoid having multiple instances of a single platform in your software, you need to be sure that both your sales and marketing teams are regularly reviewing their accounts for duplicate records and then deleting them. However, you should also create a note in the individual’s CRM record that they reached out multiple times, but you made sure to eliminate the duplicate entry.

5) Integrate with Agility

The first month or so of your new CRM and marketing automation integration will feel amazing. Your sales and marketing teams will be connected in ways they never realized were possible, and you’ll likely see a pronounced increase in productivity and performance.

Maintaining this edge requires you to adjust at regular intervals over the lifetime of your integration – likely to both the CRM and your chosen marketing automation tool. Furthermore, you’ll likely need to adjust on the fly to avoid downtime. This means that your integration needs to be configured in a way that doesn’t require any heavy coding knowledge. 

Ready for Results? Integrate Your CRM with Act-On Marketing Automation Software

Many marketing automation platforms require complex, lengthy CRM integrations or make it difficult to migrate your data if you terminate your relationship with the vendor. Choose a platform that integrates natively with the most popular and powerful CRMs – such as Salesforce, Dynamics 365, SugarCRM, and Zendesk Sell. Your technology stack should integrate seamlessly and create a real-time data sync that drives greater insights around customer interests and behaviors and propels business growth forward. Talk to us about how your current CRM can work with Act-On to bring the sales results you’ve been looking for.

Using marketing automation data in conjunction with a clean and efficient CRM will help your company better meet the needs of your prospects and customers, and streamline the sales process. Let’s get into detail about marketing automation and CRM integration as a key part of your marketing and sales growth.

What is Marketing Automation Data?  

Marketing automation, as you know, is a set of marketing actions that are interconnected, automated, and tracked. Common components of automated marketing programs include:

• Landing pages 
• Forms (connected to both automation platform and CRM)
• Emails & SMS messages
• Social media posts
• Advertising
• Gated content

By observing and tracking interactions with these and other marketing elements, we build a better understanding of the people we’re trying to sell to. In a B2B environment, we can get a clearer vision into buyer intentions, and even aggregate details at the company level, when several people are involved in the search for a product or service for the same business. The types of information that are important to track in marketing automation include: 

• Behaviors on the website
  • Content the user interacted with
  • Forms they filled out
  • How long they viewed certain important pages
  • Downloaded assets
  • Event registrations
  • Even (aggregate) heat maps to show page interaction
• Purchases
• Email behaviors (opens, click throughs, responses)
• Social media behaviors
• Ad interactions
• App activity 

Marketing automation data can be accessed, displayed, and shared in different ways, depending on your MarTech stack. The key to success is making sure sales and marketing are aligned in purpose and process, that your tools are the right fit for your needs, and that they are configured properly. Your marketing is not really automated if you must manually pull and share crucial data that helps your sales team stay on point. 

How Marketing Data Helps Sales Identify the Area of Interest

Marketing automation data can help you determine areas of interest to focus on in the sales process. Whether that’s a particular industry vertical, key features of your product, or other details you can gather from the user’s interaction with your website and content, determining an area of interest should be relatively easy with the right integration of marketing automation data into the sales process.

Marketing data can help you to determine areas of interest, including:

• Industry verticals
• Product features or service type
• Methodologies / strategies
• Marketing channels (SMS, Social Media, Website, Email)

Rather than a generic pitch, the data allows your automated marketing workflows to send the right message to the right buyer at the right time to nurture the relationship. Plus,salespeople can use the same data and insights to have better informed, more relevant conversations with buyers, and business development professionals can tailor the conversation to the area of interest right from the start. It’s a great way to focus a sales call, especially when it’s a first conversation with a live representative after having combed through content and research. Done right, the prospect will feel seen without getting the heebie jeebies. 

It’s important to be subtle when gearing a sales conversation toward a specific area of interest apparent in the marketing automation data. It’s not a good idea to say “I see that you’ve interacted with this particular content,” for example. Rather, try: “XYZ incorporated, looks like you’re working in ABC industry, right? Have you started looking into channel X? Our other customers doing ABC have noticed a huge uptick in leads by focusing on X.”

Determine Prospect Readiness 

Marketing automation data can determine which phase of the buyer’s journey the prospect is in, and how quickly a sale might be possible. The best salespeople will tell you, there’s no quicker way to kill momentum than to push too hard when the lead is not ready. And, second worst probably is not being aggressive enough when the lead is ready to buy. 

Use key indicators of prospect readiness to build a lead scoring system in your marketing automation platform, and make sure that lead score can be seen and used within (or in conjunction with) your CRM. 

Key indicators of prospect readiness that you can see in marketing data:

• Visited pricing page
• Watched an on-demand product demo
• Opened lots of emails
• Re-opened or replied to emails
• Downloaded bottom-of-the-funnel content

Sales professionals can use this type of data to assign the right resources and intensity to every lead. When it’s accessible directly from your CRM, the whole process works even better.  

Uncover the Best Offer or Conversation Track for the Sales Call

Using marketing automation data to guide the way, your team can be even more laser focused in the B2B sales conversation. You can use information about industry, area of interest and readiness to really tailor the call. Marketing automation data can help you:

• Uncover the best offer
• Determine your best sales technique
• Figure out what pain points might still exist
• Ask the right questions

Close More Deals with Seamless CRM and Marketing Automation Integration 

The bottom line is, your business will be able to grow even faster with the right approach to using marketing data in the sales conversation. Having the right marketing automation platform, properly integrated with the right CRM allows your marketing and sales teams to accomplish so much more. Streamlined sales conversations lead to a clearer conversion path, shortened sales cycles, and more deals closed. 

No matter which CRM your team uses, marketing automation, and the ongoing flow of data it provides, is a crucial resource. If you’d like to read in more detail about a marketing automation and CRM integration, we recently wrote about Act-On’s partnership with Zendesk Sell here. It’s a perfect example of how marketing data can enhance the sales conversation in real time, and includes specifics of how to use different types of data. 

Access Marketing Automation Data Inside Your CRM to Enhance Sales Success

The exact methods and capabilities of accessing marketing automation data inside your CRM will depend on what systems your team uses, and how they are configured and connected. The best scenario, of course, is a native integration, but there are many ways to connect, depending on whether your systems have an open API, or not. 

Here are some examples of how Act-On connects with four different CRMs:

Zendesk Sell + Act-On

One of the most powerful marketing automation and CRM integration out there today is the native integration between Act-On and Zendesk Sell. With this connection, Act-On Software empowers Zendesk customers to seamlessly access a variety of behavioral data, templates and automated outreach tools (like SMS and email). Plus, the connection allows Zendesk Sell users to use Act-On to create, qualify, and nurture leads.

Salesforce + Act-On

Sales teams using Salesforce CRM can gain visibility, and identify the hottest prospects with the connection between Act-On marketing automation and Salesforce. This allows sales people to focus on the right leads at the right time, using marketing automation data to fill out the picture, and guide the conversation while maximizing customer lifetime value with funnel reports. 

Microsoft Dynamics + Act-On

The integration between Microsoft Dynamics and Act-On creates the opportunity for total transparency into the customer profile, journey, and behaviors. Sales people use this connection to create a central command center for creating, managing, and tracking campaigns across multiple channels throughout the customer lifecycle.

SugarCRM + Act-On

Marketing and sales teams using the SugarCRM and Act-On integration to track and share performance across departments have told us this type of integrated data provides the platform from which they can analyze, pivot and grow.  

Boost Sales Call Success with Marketing Automation Data

No matter what MarTech stack is in place for your sales and marketing teams, it is important to connect them. If that connection can be a deep, two-way, real-time sync, that’s best. Any data on your potential customer’s interests and behavior will be helpful for the sales conversation, because it allows the conversation to be uniquely tailored. Using marketing automation data in the sales process is one essential step toward business growth.

A Natural Union Between Marketing and Sales

As a digital marketer, you depend on a range of technologies that streamline the marketing value chain, including software for planning, creating compelling design and content, and delivering ready-to-buy leads to your business. 

Marketing automation platforms, like Act-On, simplify that entire process, through capturing, scoring, and segmenting contacts to empower effective marketing. Act-On helps you do that through creative and replicable program development, nurture programs, and data that allows for reporting, program improvement, and identifying which buyers to send to sales. Your marketing automation solution is your system of action, through which you best engage with your buyers.

While your sales colleagues may also access your marketing automation solution, they’re typically looking for key information about how a particular prospect or customer interacted with your marketing activities and assets prior to their sales outreach. Armed with this contextual information, the sales person can gain a better understanding of the individual buyer’s journey, urgency, intent, and interests, and adapt their outreach to ensure both they and the buyer have the most productive conversation. It’s a win-win across the board.

Even though the information from your marketing automation platform is important for such conversations, your sales team is much more likely to live in a customer relationship management (CRM) system. In the CRM, they can manage a sales opportunity through sales cycles, track the deal, and accelerate closing. The CRM is an indispensable system of record for understanding and taking action on sales stages. The Act-On and Zendesk Sell integration delivers the best of all worlds to both marketing and sales users, looking for a seamless and collaborative experience.

Act-On + Zendesk Sell =  

This is why Act-On is excited to announce an integration with Zendesk Sell. Customers that wish to improve marketing and sales collaboration, as well as performance, can use both solutions as a single experience, getting the best of both worlds.

Particularly, as a Zendesk Sell sales user, the ease of access to Act-On reporting and marketing activities is built into their experience. Not only can Sell users see aggregate marketing activity scores for each prospective buyer, they can effortlessly link to score sheets in Act-On that grant them visibility into the specific actions and engagements that drew in and have nurtured the buyer relationship. These data points include website visits, landing page and form fills, email and SMS interactions, events and social media activity – everything the prospect did along their buying journey. All of this helps marketing and sales teams better understand what campaigns, promotions, events and other activities attracted the buyer, and what has moved them into the funnel.

Beyond the score sheet, Zendesk Sell users can access and view the timeline of activities along the buyer’s journey, which allows them to evaluate urgency, pace, intent, and favored interactions. All of this helps marketing and sales users to better understand the buyer and personalize their own interactions with them. From within Zendesk Sell, users can prioritize buyers based on defined criteria, as well as initiate outreach, build emails through their own branded content in the Act-On platform, and be sure that all activities are tracked and scored.

Ultimately, marketing and sales people can enter engagements with buyers with the wind at their backs. The behavioral data, insights, and reporting allow for smarter, more timely, and more productive conversations between salespeople and buyers. And both can appreciate that their engagements are personalized, on topic, and accelerate the sales cycle. What’s not to like for the buyer and the seller?

Act-On continues to build our marketing automation platform and our work with key technology vendors like Zendesk to deliver increasingly powerful, scalable, and adaptable solutions to our customers. The Zendesk Sell integration with Act-On is a win-win for Act-On, Zendesk, and our customers and market. Empowering marketing and sales teams to perform and succeed is in our combined DNA.

Talk with us about the opportunities this integration opens for you.

Every day, we hear from marketers who are frustrated with the lack of lead generation, nurturing, and tracking functionality within webinar platforms and how this causes major headaches around manual data transfer and inaccurate data collection. Worse yet, these dated data processes limit prospect and customer scoring, segmentation, and personalization.

With this in mind, Act-On has teamed with Zoom to deploy a best-in-class, fully embedded Zoom Video Webinar integration — making it easier than ever to develop holistic webinar workflows, seamlessly capture and transfer actionable data, and track the entire virtual experience from planning to presentation to follow-up… and beyond! 

What’s Unique About Zoom Video Webinars?

Zoom Video Webinars is the top webinar provider in the world and has been an exceptionally reliable and effective platform for millions throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. Zoom Video Webinars is easy to use, provides a phenomenal user experience, and is both accessible and affordable for companies of all shapes and sizes. Beyond that, Zoom empowers marketers to gather registration and attendee records and share in-webinar content, surveys, and calls-to-action. 

With Zoom Video Webinars, you can:

• Share your story with as many as 100 interactive participants and over 10,000 participants with automatic recording.
• Identify quality leads through analytics and reporting, and then import those contacts into Act-On. 
• Simplify the registration process with branded forms and emails that integrate directly with Act-On.

Zoom Video Webinars also provides options for HD video and audio, live social media broadcasts, and integrations with the top CRMs — such as Salesforce. And last but not least, Zoom provides best-in-class event assistance to help you plan, rehearse, and produce exceptional webinars that deliver fantastic engagement.

What Are the Benefits of Act-On’s Embedded Zoom Webinar Integration?

Simply put, Act-On’s Zoom Video Webinar integration automates the virtual experience like never before. It allows Act-On customers to embed all workflows for seamless data transfers and consistent customer experiences while also providing full visibility across all aspects of their online events. These components are unmatched by any other marketing automation platform and continue our tradition of delivering best-in-class product features, innovations, and integrations.

Act-On’s native integration with the Zoom Video Webinar platform empowers marketers to:

• Build strategic webinar campaigns that enable targeted messaging to specific audience segments
• Identify and invite individual contacts based on their behaviors, scores, and segments — particularly as they relate to interests, intent, and stage within the lifecycle
• Automatically export all specified and relevant contact records from Act-On or your preferred CRM system (Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics, Sugar CRM, etc.)

By doing so, you can shape the content of your webinars toward individual buyer or customer segments — driving further interest and engagement.

In addition, this new integration offers:

• Automated data synchronization between Act-On and Zoom Video Webinars
• Increased efficiency due to decreased manual application
• Drastic reduction in data loss and inaccuracies
• Consistent branding across your webinar invitations, emails, forms, landing pages, and follow-up
• Holistic webinar contact behavior and engagement tracking
• Dynamic email templates with intuitive webinar information to ensure relevant sends to the proper audience at the perfect time
• Comprehensive and granular reporting across the webinar program lifecycle
• Intuitive and embedded scoring and segmentation based on behaviors and engagement

What Is the Business Value Behind Act-On’s Intuitive Integration With Zoom Video Webinars?

Today, most marketers are forced to execute their webinar workflows and presentations separately from their core marketing automation system. This creates significant problems related to data collection, transfer, and interpretation. But by integrating these technologies, you can minimize or even eliminate these issues.

When Zoom Webinars are integrated into Act-On’s growth marketing automation platform, this connection creates a singular experience that streamlines workflows and automatically collects, tracks, and transfers critical engagement data. And by delivering more immersive experiences, you can drive the sort of participation that bonds your audience to your products, services, and message. 

But webinars go far beyond the brief time you have with your viewers. 

Act-On’s embedded Zoom Webinar integration allows you to measure individual behaviors to better understand their impact at the contact level. This way you can accurately and automatically score your webinar participants’ actions (opens, clicks, registrations, attendance, poll responses, and follow-up behaviors) and properly assign revenue attribution to each and every webinar you produce. This is exactly the sort of actionable data collection marketers need to deliver exceptional customer experiences and continue to improve the customer lifecycle at every touchpoint. And by analyzing the overall progress of your virtual events, you can define success and adjust your strategies moving forward.

Reach Out to Speak With One of Our Marketing Automation Experts

If you’re interested in learning how Act-On’s webinar integrations can generate more leads and sales while improving efficiencies and driving awareness and engagement, please click here to schedule a free 20-minute demo with one of our marketing automation experts.

Not quite ready to have that conversation? No worries. Take our interactive tour to learn more about the features, benefits, and use case of our proven growth marketing automation platform.

Or, to learn more about best practices and innovative techniques related to planning and executing webinar strategies through marketing automation, download your free eBook, “How to Use Online Events to Build Lasting Relationships.”

Zapier provides easy martech integrations that simplify digital marketing workflows and campaigns for greater efficiency and better outcomes. Act-On’s Zapier Silver Status allows us to provide marketers with the connections they need to get the job done.

Keep reading to learn more about how you can leverage Zapier integrations through the Act-On growth marketing platform.

Why Are Deep and Effective Digital Marketing Integrations So Important?

According to Bain and Company, North American marketing leaders at top-performing companies are 1.6 times more likely to prioritize strong digital integrations than their counterparts at poor-performing companies (1). 

There are three main reasons why these elite marketers are focused on leveraging these deep and effective digital marketing connections.

• Data Consolidation: By centralizing data collected from numerous channels and touchpoints along the customer journey, marketers are able to glean actionable insights from this information and deliver more relevant brand experiences. Providing more personalized messaging, content, and campaigns results in more engagement, more productive sales discussions, and improved ROI.

• Funnel and Lifecycle Optimization: Integrating third-party applications into your marketing automation platforms allows you to understand what’s driving customers toward a potential purchase and where they’re either accelerating their journey or falling off the experience altogether. Connecting the APIs that are critical to your business helps you create cross-channel profiles to gain a better understanding of your buyer personas, their previous purchases, and their primary pain points and interests.

• Brand Consistency: In many companies, multiple departments often send disconnected messages to the same prospects and customers — making for a disjointed and counterproductive customer experience. When all of your martech is connected and executed through a powerful marketing automation/CRM combination, you can ensure brand consistency throughout every unique customer experience while also leveraging shared templates for repeatable and efficient campaigns.

How Marketing Automation and Zapier Work Together

Zapier is a web application integration platform designed for non-technical users to connect their favorite apps for more efficient marketing and sales operations and data collection and transfer. Every Zapier app can connect with every other Zap on the platform, which creates a nearly unlimited number of potential uses and customizations.

Zapier powers easier automation through Zaps, which are integrations using “if-then” logic to coordinate between two applications consisting of a trigger and an action.

• Trigger: An event that occurs in the initiating application, such as an event registration with EventBrite.

• Action: The opportunity to create an action in the target application based on the trigger, such as a thank you message for registering for a webinar.

Within Act-On, common triggers include:

• Form Submissions: Following a form submission, a trigger occurs that transfers information from the form to another application.

• Automated Program API Blocks: When a contact in an automated program hits an API block step, contact fields from specific users within a list can be transferred to another application.

Within Act-On, common actions include:

• Contact Creation and Updates: Create new contacts or update existing contact information within Act-On based on the contact email address and corresponding list ID.

• Form Submissions: The form submission trigger from a third-party will create a form submission in Act-On.

• Adding Contacts to Specific Lists: Add new contacts to your master list or segmented lists for more targeted communications.

Follow these simple steps to create workflows using Act-On and Zapier within minutes:

1. Select the initiating app
2. Authenticate that app
3. Select a trigger
4. Select a target app
5. Select an action
6. Map the data transfer from trigger to action
7. Save and initiate the Zap  

The primary benefit of Zapier integrations is that no coding is required, saving non-technical employees time and allowing them to focus their resources and creativity on strategizing the best possible marketing campaigns. 

The Most Common Marketing Automation and Zapier Use Cases

We’ve spoken with hundreds of Act-On customers about how they’re leveraging Zapier integrations within our growth marketing automation platform and found that there are several distinct use cases that are the most common and effective.

• Webinar and Event Registrations: Whenever a user registers for a webinar or event through applications like Zoom or EventBrite, you can automatically add their email and first and last name to a list within Act-On.

• Third-Party Form Submission Data Transfer: Whenever a user submits a form through a third-party application like Unbounce or LinkedIn (paid subscription required for the latter), you can automatically add their contact information to a list within Act-On.

• Act-On Form Submission Data Transfer to Google Sheets: Whenever a user submits an Act-On form, you can automatically add their contact information to a Google Sheet.

• Execute a Communications Send: You can leverage integrations with third-party applications like SendGrid or OneSignal to deliver messaging and push notifications through multiple channels. 

Reach Out Today to Learn More About Act-On Marketing Integrations With Zapier

The robust Zapier integration possibilities within Act-On make marketers faster, more flexible, and more effective. Hundreds of Act-On customers leverage Zapier to create efficient workflows between multiple applications without having to know or write any code.

To learn more about how you can improve your marketing campaigns and outcomes using Zapier integrations within Act-On, please click here to schedule a 20-minute demo with one of our marketing automation experts.
If you’re not quite ready to have that conversation just yet, you can download this eBook to learn more about the benefits of integrating Act-On’s growth marketing automation platform with the most popular CRMs on the market.

This gap in providing expert messaging and content to an eager audience is just one example of why financial advisors need to improve their marketing, deliver better customer experiences, and focus on delivering relevant educational messaging and content to prospective and existing investors.

The good news is that roughly 80% of firms are expected to increase their online marketing budgets moving forward, so clearly most financial advisories recognize the need to step up their game. Now, the challenge for many of these wealth managers becomes determining how and where to spend those marketing dollars to expand their assets under management and grow their respective firms.

The reality is that it’s nearly impossible to plan, develop, distribute, track, and optimize a holistic series of marketing campaigns across all pertinent channels manually. Even those financial marketers who are able to miraculously launch their campaigns without a coordinated technological approach are almost certainly delivering mismatched and uninspired programs — and also failing to collect accurate and actionable data to understand their audience and deliver what they truly need to advance along their investment journey. 

Simply put, disjointed tactics executed manually are guaranteed to deliver customer experiences that are confusing at best — which means fewer clients, fewer assets under management, and less revenue for your firm. 

So if you’re part of the 80% mentioned above, you should be thinking about how you can build a marketing technology (MarTech) stack that empowers your financial advisory firm to scale your marketing efforts and capitalize on the most lucrative areas for growth.

What Is a Marketing Technology Stack?

A marketing technology stack is the collection of all the different marketing-related software that an organization uses to plan, develop, execute, track, and optimize their marketing efforts. Due to the wide array of marketing technology solutions available, MarTech stacks vary significantly among different industries and even from company to company within those industries. 

In fact, the playing field is so diverse that Scott Brinker of Chief Martec has been creating a digital representation of all of the MarTech vendors every year since 2011 to try to make sense of it all.

Here’s what the “Marketing Technology Landscape Supergraphic” looked like in 2011…

And here it is again in 2019…

In just eight years, the MarTech space exploded from a measly 150 vendors to more than 7,000! And while the 2019 edition grew by only 3% over the last year, that still leaves an overwhelming amount of choice for financial marketers who are just beginning to develop their MarTech stack.

What Marketing Pain Points Is Your Financial Advisory Firm Trying to Solve?

It would seem that the next logical question would be, “What marketing technologies does my firm need to thrive?” Well, before you can properly answer that question, you need to assess your primary pain points honestly and accurately.

The first step toward understanding what you need is understanding where you’re struggling. That is, you need to identify your primary pain points before you begin researching potential MarTech solutions.

Of course, you’re probably looking to gain more clients and grow your assets under management, but you need to look deeper to uncover where the root of the problem lies.

Are you looking to build better awareness of your firm? Is it difficult to gather actionable demographic and behavioral data? Maybe you’re trying to drive more leads? Perhaps you’ve got plenty of leads, but you’re not creating the type of experiences your investors are yearning for. 

Whatever the case might be, you need to take a hard look at your current marketing efforts (or the lack thereof) and work from there. If not, you could wind up investing in the wrong MarTech solutions that don’t work well together and don’t fix the problems you’re so eager to solve.

Here are a few questions you should answer as you go about this process:

• What marketing technologies are we currently using, and are they essential to our strategy?
• Is my team comfortable using each of these solutions to their maximum capabilities?
• Am I able to gather the information I need to understand my clients and speak to their interests and pain points?
• How am I aggregating and integrating my existing marketing campaigns? Are they synced or disconnected?
• Which marketing tactics am I able to automate, repeat, and optimize with minimum manual work?
• Am I able to coordinate my marketing efforts with my sales efforts to generate more customer opportunities?

The point of having a stable and powerful MarTech stack is to increase efficiencies, deliver better marketing campaigns, and measure your efforts for marked improvement over time. So if your current situation is preventing you from answering “YES!” to any of the questions above, it’s time to set a baseline of essential MarTech elements for your financial advisory firm.

What Are the Essential MarTech Elements for Financial Advisors?

Once you’ve performed a thorough audit of what you’re lacking and what you currently have in place, it’s finally time to start building a blueprint of which MarTech solutions will help propel your firm toward more efficient and successful marketing. 

The ideal MarTech stack will consist of consolidated solutions that allow you to perform a wide range of marketing and sales-related activities from just a few deeply connected platforms.

Let’s examine your potential needs and which software elements would be the best fit.

Content Marketing: If content creation is the heart of good marketing, content distribution is the entire cardiovascular system. Delivering informative and entertaining content can serve as your foot in the door for new customers and also improve existing customer relationships for upsell and cross-sell opportunities, as well as customer retention and evangelism.

The thing is, though, manually delivering content to each of your audience segments is extremely challenging, so your firm needs to look for tools that help you automate your content delivery strategies. More specifically, you need a single platform where you can store your content, create landing pages and forms to gate the content and drive conversions, and then disseminate the content to segmented audiences through personalized outreach.

Most marketing automation platforms will allow you to do all of the above, but some are easier to use, more efficient, and more effective than others. Look for a tool that allows you to build and share templates easily so that you can automate these processes while ensuring brand consistency and neatly gather and segment your leads based on the content your audience is consuming. 

Social Media Marketing: Tools like Hootsuite, Sprout, and Buffer are all excellent platforms that allow you to do far more than just schedule and post your social content. However, since one of the main goals in building out your MarTech stack is to keep things lean wherever possible, you might want to avoid these tools, as they’re not known for easily integrating with a larger stack.

Instead, you should look for a marketing automation platform that has a built-in social media marketing feature that allows you to:

• Curate, schedule, and post content in advance across every major social site 
• Track your company and industry trends through social listening and competitive insights
• Attribute, segment, and score behaviors across all channels
• Leverage social engagement insights for targeted lead nurturing programs
• Empower team members through organizational advocacy (extra points if the solution can gamify your efforts to encourage even more sharing and engagement)
• Measure engagement, conversions, advocacy, and acquisitions through a single social analytics dashboard

Most platforms won’t allow you to do each of the tasks listed above, but Act-On’s Advanced Social Media module has all of this and more!

Website Creation and Maintenance: For most financial advisory firms, regardless of size or assets under management, a content management system (CMS) will be your best bet to get an engaging and user-friendly website off the ground. Without a CMS, you would need to learn fluent HTML, JavaScript, and CSS programming to build a customer website. Thankfully, systems like WordPress, Drupal, and Joomla! allow even novice marketers to build high-performing websites without having to know any coding languages.

Yet, while the CMS mentioned above offer great functionality with easy-to-build features, you’ll still need to populate your website with content and optimize it for SEO, as well as maintain the proper technical functionality you need to ensure a seamless and intuitive user experience. Chiefly, you need a CMS that allows for a myriad of extensions and add-on integrations so that you can beef up your site for increased capabilities. Additionally, you’ll need to be able to routinely audit your site for SEO, so you should look for marketing automation with a built-in SEO checker that allows you to optimize for search engines and achieve high rankings for your target keywords.

Lead Generation: There are so many facets involved in an effective lead generation strategy, and we’ve already mentioned a few — such as content marketing and social media marketing. But the most important features you need to drive new leads are engaging landing pages and intuitive lead forms.

There are a lot of tools out there that can help you build your pages and forms (Unbounce, Leadpages, and Squarespace lead the pack), but again, integration with your CMS and marketing automation platform can get tricky when relying on third-party software. So, your best bet is to look for a marketing automation platform that allows you to create, replicate, and share your landing pages and forms easily across your organization.

Email Marketing: Email marketing remains one of the most commonly used and effective digital marketing channels. In fact, 93% of B2B marketers use email to distribute content (1), and 59% of B2B marketers say that email is their most effective revenue-generating channel (2). And since modern consumers are eager to educate themselves around their investment options, distributing helpful content with empathetic messaging is imperative to your success as a financial advisor.

With that in mind, you need to be thinking beyond traditional batch-and-blast email drip campaigns. This method doesn’t deliver the sort of targeted approach you need to speak directly to your prospective and existing investors — and it shows.

So as you begin researching potential vendors, you need to look past email service providers, which don’t give you the tools you need to deliver the right message to the right audience at the right time. Instead, you should be researching easy-to-use marketing automation vendors that only charge based on your active contact list and provide the advanced segmentation, conditional logic, and dynamic content functionality you need to provide more engaging and personalized customer journeys. 

Events Marketing: In-person and online events are essential for most financial advisors. They give you the chance to promote your brand, create relationships, and drive solid leads. But it’s not always as simple as showing up to a conference in Las Vegas and hobnobbing with a few investors over cocktails or casually tuning into a webinar while you check your emails at the end of the day. 

The true path to top-notch events marketing is by actually hosting and promoting your own events, which can be pretty challenging without the right tools.

If you’re looking to host an in-person event to promote your financial advisory firm, you’ll need to get the word out. As usual, the best way to do that is through a marketing automation platform. Using marketing automation, you can use organic and paid strategies to drive traffic to dedicated landing pages and forms that encourage conversions and drive RSVPs. From there, you can create nurture campaigns that deliver high-value content related to the topic(s) you’re going to cover at your event. By proving your knowledge, you increase your credibility. And leads who trust what you have to say are more likely to actually attend your event.

The same tactics listed above apply to online events such as webinars, but you need to make sure that you choose a marketing automation tool that includes a native integration with a reputable and reliable webinar hosting platform. For example, the Act-On marketing automation platform has built-in integrations with both Citrix GoToWebinar and Cisco WebEx. This makes it easy to integrate and coordinate the entire events process from start to finish through a single platform. From registration to follow-up surveys, everything you need to host a great webinar can be found within Act-On.

Analytics and Reporting: Google Analytics is the tried and true (not to mention, free) source for digital analytics and reporting. It also helps you understand how many people are visiting your digital properties, when they’re visiting, which pages are the most popular, and where your traffic is coming from.

But it has its limitations. 

Chief among these constraints is that Google Analytics doesn’t tell you exactly who is visiting your site. Therefore, you should look for a marketing automation platform with a native tool that allows you to turn anonymous digital visitors into known prospects. The Website Prospector feature in Act-On empowers marketers to do just that!

And to get even more advanced information, a native analytics tool within a marketing automation platform (such as Act-On’s Data Studio) can help financial marketers collect and report on valuable behavioral and engagement data (email opens, content downloads, webpage views, etc.) so that you can understand the true impact of your marketing efforts and update as needed.

Note that marketing automation platforms can provide all the tools you need to execute (or at least complement) each of the marketing tactics listed above. This is because marketing automation is specifically designed as the foundational element of any high-functioning, high-performance MarTech stack for financial advisory firms of all shapes and sizes. Regardless of what you’re trying to accomplish, chances are that a quality marketing automation platform will have the tools you need to get the job done.

Learn How Act-On Can Serve as the Centerpiece of Your Financial Advisory MarTech Stack

Financial advisors need to invest in the proper MarTech stack as a powerful springboard toward more effective and efficient marketing — not to mention more clients, assets under management, and revenue. 

Unfortunately, a lot of marketers (even those working in highly evolved industries) overspend on shiny tools that are disconnected and fail to actually move the needle. Instead of going that route, we believe you should implement Act-On’s practical, powerful marketing automation platform as the core of your financial advisory firm’s MarTech stack. 

If you’re interested in learning more about our easy-to-use solution and how it can help you deliver amazing customer experiences that drive new investors, increase the number and volume of assets under management, and grow your firm at scale, please click here to schedule some time to speak with one of our experienced marketing automation experts. 

Or, if you’re not quite ready to have that conversation, I think you might enjoy our latest eBook, The 4 Main Challenges Facing Wealth Managers. It’s full of helpful and straightforward information about how marketing automation can help overcome financial advisors’ major marketing obstacles, as well as best practices for marketing automation success and key stats and definitions related to marketing automation. 

Click below to download your free eBook today!