This week I moderated another Social Media Today webinar as part of their Best Thinker webinar series, this time on the topic of Marketing Automation: Keeping Up With The Digital Transformation of Marketing. We assembled a diverse panel to give us their perspective on this topic consisting of: Dan Freeman, the President of Marketing Growth Strategies, John Wood, the Director of Client Experience at ToThePoint Marketing, and Samantha Chiappetti, the Direct Marketing Coordinator at LEGO Education. This webinar was also sponsored by Act-On who was recently named a leader in marketing automation by Forrester.
Dan started us off with some research his firm has done on the adoption rates of Marketing Automation in small, medium and large enterprises. The results might shock you: Large enterprises were the most widely penetrated part of the Marketing Automation market with around 20% of the large enterprise market. Mid-size companies were at about 10% penetration and small-size companies were less than 10% penetration. Dan also highlighted 5 key skills for success in Marketing Automation: Technology Expertise, Content Creation, Data Management, Lead Scoring and Collaboration with Sales. Many of the questions we got after Dan's presentation were centered on these 5 key skills.
John took over after Dan and talked about the age old challenge of post event follow-up and how Marketing Automation combined with post event follow-up can pay big dividends. This really resonated with our audience on Twitter - most people felt like post event email follow-up was seriously lacking and using marketing automation in your booth was a great use of Marketing Automation.
Samantha then finished off the presentations with a deep dive on how LEGO Education uses Marketing Automation with their 2 major segments - Pre-Purchase and Post-Purchase customers. For pre-purchase she detailed the titles and multiple channels they use to reach the potential customer. And for post-purchase she discussed the behaviors that they look for to trigger cross-sell and up-sell opportunities.
Now, if you have ever been on a Social Media Today webinar before, you know they are very "participant-driven" and we love to ask your questions of our panelists. Some of the questions we covered were: How to do Lead Scoring and what are some of the best practices? How do you ensure the sales team uses the leads you create? And how do you make automated emails not sound like automated emails?
If that piqued your interest, you will want to hear the replay of this webinar or review the slides from this webinar. Below, you can check out our Storify of the session. Otherwise we hope you will join us on another Social Media Today webinar! The next webinar is on Social Media at Work: Employee Advocacy Success Stories, sign up for it or you can view the schedule of upcoming webinars here.