By bbr

Atlanta Business Radio welcomed Sarah Assalti of Sage Software on October 4, in an episode hosted by Stone Payton and our own Bonnie. Sarah’s broad marketing experience runs the gamut from non-profit giants to small startups and includes Fortune 500 companies. As Manager for Marketing Automation at Sage, she focuses on creating processes where none existed and removing roadblocks so strategies can move forward more effectively.

What is marketing automation?

Sarah explained that marketing automation assesses reporting, sales and other elements and then ensures that each element is following a productive path to enhance overall marketing. “Whether that be a nurture program, whether that be a communication strategy with a white glove touch, you’re taking those aspects of your marketing strategies and applying them in a systematic and effective way.”

While it’s easy to imagine large companies benefiting from this, there are a huge number of marketing automation systems available and many of them are appropriate for smaller businesses as well. The key to finding the right system, according to Sarah, is examining your goals. “Do you want to accomplish a hands-off kind of marketing experience for your leads or your customers? Do you want to talk to a specific persona? Do you want to be in the weeds in the marketing experience? Marketing automation is taking big data and synthesizing it in a way that’s actually useful for your company.”

How is it used?

Segmenting your audiences to deliver tailored messages is one way a small business might use marketing automation. Sarah says, “A great example is your prospects versus your customers. You want to talk to those audiences very differently, and you could, with a marketing automation system, have them take a separate path. If you’re sending out a monthly newsletter, you can actually divide that into two separate segments, with two different messages for those audiences.”

Bonnie: And after having different messages deliver to each audience you should look at your reporting to see who’s reading what? Who is clicking on the article that’s about this new service that you’re offering so that you can then follow up with your other messages to them as well.

Sarah: Mm-hmm, and it can go even deeper than that. Let’s say that you have three or four messages within a newsletter, you could even see what messages are resonating with that particular audience and look at that persona overall. And then you could further segment…we’re going down into the weeds here. You could further segment and say, “You know what? All of my C-levels are really interested in ROI, but all my marketing people are really interested in execution.” You could then further segment your efforts and say, “Okay, for my prospect newsletter, I’m now going to send out two separate newsletters.” You can go down exponentially and get more and more sophisticated as you go. Marketing automation allows for that without necessarily breaking the bank or requiring a huge staff. All you have to have is a good plan.

Common marketing automation mistakes

Stone wondered about the typical pitfalls Sarah sees businesses falling into when they look into marketing automation. “The first one is not going in with a plan,” she says. “Not really understanding what you want this tool to do for you. Do you want it to be a mainly sales-driven tool where you’re driving leads? Do you want it to be an avenue for a better customer service experience? What do you really want to get out of this marketing automation experience? The other thing is not choosing the right solution for you and your business. I’ve seen people often say, ‘Well I need the biggest and the best and the most complicated for my two-person business.’ And you want to make sure, once again, that the systems that you’re using are not using you. You know, you’re using the systems and they’re not too complicated for you, you can fit them within your workflow, within your budget and within your goals.

“What I recommend for a small business is dip your toe in the water. Do some research on some of these smaller and less-complicated, more easily implemented services. The cost of marketing automation is one of the barriers, and not only looking at the expense of the software, but also looking at the time expense in terms of what it’s going to take to implement for your business. If you are a smaller business, perhaps you want to consider using one of the smaller ones that you can manage yourself before jumping into a larger one.

“Once again, it all goes back to your goals. What are you trying to achieve? Are you trying to grow your business in a sophisticated manner? Are you trying to look for ways to get off Excel spreadsheets into a more sophisticated system? One of the things that you need to consider when you look at new technologies is how it’s going to integrate with your business, how it’s going to move your business forward, and that’s one thing that I think is the most important when you’re looking at a marketing automation system.”

Marketing automation and sales

Sarah pointed out that marketing and sales have a complicated relationship, including, “let’s say spirited debate, in terms of what they need. One of the things that marketing automation does is really make sure that marriage is getting them on the right path. A lot of these systems have the ability for sales to actually see all of that information [like lead scoring] so they can see where somebody has gone and what somebody has opened and what somebody has engaged with, as well as great in-house tools where the sales team can send out a single email or a single invitation to a webinar or something like that on their own.”

Marketing automation arms both sales and marketing with detailed information about client and prospect behavior, says Sarah, “So the next conversation they have with that particular constituent can be an effective one.” Using her own company as an example of marketing automation in action, she continues, “They can see, ‘You know what? They downloaded something about integrating with Salesforce.’ Well, the Sage Live team is going to say, ‘Hey, you know what? We really know how to do this in a very well-orchestrated way. Let us help you.’ And so their conversations become more meaningful when they use the marketing automation information that’s presented to them.”

“And every business has struggles, somewhere where they can improve, where they can move forward in improving their business and being more effective. And one of the things that marketing automation can do is provide you that information so you can start to have that conversation. It can also identify areas that maybe you hadn’t considered. If you all of a sudden…let’s say that you throw something in a communication that is just like a one off. “Isn’t this kind of funny?” And if that ends up being your biggest hit ever, well, maybe you should start talking about that more. Maybe you should start talking about that in a real way, in a significant way and talk about that with your business even more.”

Marketing automation to communicate your firm’s personality

Many businesses, including bbr marketing, have noticed that it isn’t necessarily their topical information that gets the biggest response. Bonnie shared, “We’ve put out all kinds of great content, but when we talk about the office dogs, or if Kelly brings in a kid or something like that, that’s what gets the most interaction.” Sarah agreed, encouraging business owners to show individual personality in addition to solid business-focused content. “Don’t be afraid to really step out of what you think your company should be.”

With a more thoroughly interconnected business community, thanks to social media, the relationship between customers and company becomes more important than ever. “Who your company is, and the customer experience that you offer is almost becoming more important than your product,” says Sarah. “There is so much competition out there these days that you need to be on top of your game in terms of your products but also the experience your company is giving to your customers and who you are. I think that more and more people are going to care about that as we move forward.”

Bonnie: I think so too, as millennials become more leaders in companies one of the things that comes from those millennials is that they want to make the world a better place. They will make decisions that aren’t necessarily based on money.

Sarah: That’s where your personality comes through in your business and that’s how marketing automation can help it, because if you can deliver on what your personality is for your business in a real way, not in an artificial way even though you’re using this really high-end technology, you can deliver the dogs and the kids and the rabbits and the…

Bonnie: We haven’t gotten to rabbits yet, but you never know. The day is young.

Risks of not using marketing automation
Sarah: Here is the challenge. We are seeing technology move at a rapid clip. We keep seeing it increase. If you don’t use it, you are going to be losing out to other organizations that are using it in an effective way. It’s kind of like “Keeping Up with the Joneses” unfortunately, but you also are not providing your customer or your prospects with the best experience that they can possibly have.

But more and more, we’re going to see that small businesses are using some sort of marketing automation. And [if you do not] you’re going to be left behind by your competitors and you’re also not going to give your customers specifically the best experience that they can get.

Stone: I can validate what she’s saying. I just ordered checks. I was able to go online to order the checks, and I got an email yesterday from the check company that says, “Your order is on the way,” and I found that very comforting. But my point is it’s not just the sexy, cutting-edge tech firms that are doing this. Real businesses, big businesses are doing this and if we don’t get on board, we’re going to lose out, I think.

Sarah: Exactly. And there’s a lot of things that the marketing automation systems can do that we haven’t even touched on today. If you are looking for a paid search or a paid social in any kind of real way, you can integrate it with Google Analytics and know what your customers are searching for. I want to go back to one other thing that you had mentioned which was pitfalls. One other benefit of marketing automation is that you’re able to provide a better experience for everyone in your database. That marketing database that you’re going to build with your marketing automation system includes, and I know marketers don’t like to talk about this, unsubscribes and preferences. If you have somebody that decides that they don’t want to hear from you and unsubscribe, guess what?

If you don’t honor that, you’re only going to make it more apparent that you don’t necessarily value what they’re telling you. And if anything kills a business quicker it’s for a customer to not feel valued. Marketing automation systems almost all have a preference center, where someone can say, “You know what? I’m really not interested in any of your sales information, but you do some great events. You do some great webinars, you do some great in-person events, and I want to know only about those.” What’s great about that is we can actually set that up where maybe you don’t lose the person, but you can now talk to them in a way that’s meaningful for them and in that way continue the conversation to maybe where some day they will be ready for that sales conversation, because they see you as a thought leader and respectful of them.

Why is Sage so interested in marketing automation?

Sage is the accounting software company formerly known as Peachtree Accounting, and Stone was curious about its connection to marketing automation. “I have found this conversation tremendously informative,” he said, “but I think what’s really standing out for me is that an accounting software provider has this level of knowledge about marketing automation and this level of genuine interest in capitalizing on that knowledge base to serve their customers.”

Sarah: You know, the great thing about Sage is that they have decided that they want to be the most effective company that they can for the businesses that they serve. They look at marketing automation as a way to serve their customers and their prospects in an efficient and effective manner. One of the things that they really invest in is looking at what technologies are going to help move it forward because accounting is one of those things that everybody needs, right? Everybody needs numbers on a page in order to be an effective business. However, what does that really mean to you? Does that mean the numbers are how many invoices I get out? Does that mean making sure that you’re being effective in terms of your accounting practices? Sage is saying, “Okay, what are the best ways that we can serve our businesses and what are the most effective technologies? How can we move the business forward?”

For instance, there are a couple of technologies coming that are going to be revolutionary in terms of how small businesses specifically integrate with our other products. Those are the type of things that Sage really promotes. And marketing automation is a key part. Being efficient in the way that we deliver messages to you is going to be key.

Key challenges
Sarah asked Bonnie about the biggest challenges she observes, as an owner of a small business that utilizes marketing automation tools. In response, Bonnie described the human error that sometimes prevents these tools from working together as efficiently as they could. “So it’s not a flaw in [the programs] necessarily or the marketing automation, it’s really just kind of making sure that you have internal processes in place that take advantage and make sure that you’re using it in the right way.”

Sarah: When you talk about marketing automation, you can talk about the technology itself, but you also want to consider marketing operations as part of that as well because there are things that you can do in your business, just like you said, Bonnie, to make sure that those things are operationalized in a real way. It’s always going to be the human elements that are the biggest jam.

There’s plenty more to learn in the full interview, which you can access on Atlanta Business Radio’s website. And if you have a great idea for a topic you’d like to hear discussed in a future episode of Atlanta’s Most Trusted Advisors, please let us know!