A strong lead management process requires B2B marketing professionals to respond to each prospect within the buying process. However, as your business grows, understanding and responding relevantly to a buyer’s interest is almost impossible to do manually. To ensure that your marketing efforts are targeting customers and prospects with the right messages at the right time, a marketing automation software is key.
What Is Marketing Automation?
Marketing automation software brings together content assets such as landing pages, emails, web events, etc. and delivers them to prospects at a time when it is most relevant to them in their buying cycle.
Knowing the "right time" is key to effectively engaging prospects with your brand. Conducting an analysis of your target audience and capturing demographic information, along with their interactions with your brand through your website and social platforms, allows you to qualify a lead and deliver to your sales team. Most marketing automation platforms integrate seamlessly with popular CRMs, so your sales staff can most likely continue to use their existing tools.
Marketing automation and Drupal?
I’m skipping ahead in the process and assuming you’ve already determined that you need a marketing automation software. The question now is “how effectively will this software integrate into a Drupal website?”
Drupal is definitely one of the better marketing platforms, and with a simple install of custom modules, the most popular marketing automation platforms can quickly be integrated with your Drupal Site.
Below are just a few examples of custom Drupal modules that have been created for marketing automation platforms:
- Marketo Munchkin Module - (created by Mediacurrent's Damien McKenna) The Marketo Munchkin is a very simple module to output the Marketo Munchkin tracking code obtained from http://www.marketo.com/.
- Eloqua Module - This module allows you to build webforms that directly parallel forms in eloqua, and can thereby be posted into eloqua.
- Pardot Module - This module adds Pardot web analytics directly onto your Drupal site. It supports general visitor tracking, path-based individual campaign tracking, and path-based lead scoring.
Conclusion
Personally, I recommend every Marketing and Sales Director investigate marketing automation software. To truly grasp the value provided by marketing automation, a level of understanding is needed, which only develops from in-depth personal experience with the technology, or a thorough investigation of its core features and functions. In either case, plan to spend a significant amount of time learning the ins and outs of the solution features. However, I strongly believe that companies that implement a marketing automation system to support their marketing and sales efforts are better equipped to manage lead flow and process leads more efficiently.
