Don't Let Your Marketing Automation Feel Like a Bad Amusement Park Ride

Think about the last time you went to an amusement park.

Or, if the last time was “never,” think about the last time you went to Whole Foods on a Sunday afternoon… or Target on Black Friday. 

What I’m saying is, imagine a place that is hectic and exciting, with a lot going on and more than a little bit of sensory overload! 

That’s how your marketing can feel to prospects. If you’re engaging with prospects through a marketing automation platform, your system probably has multiple entrance points and offers a wide range of experiences. Whether your prospect chooses to go for the main attraction (a “Request a Demo” Roller Coaster) or sample a few games in the Blog Post Arcade, you want to keep your prospect going on ride after ride—not disappearing into the crowds. 

The best park experiences create a lasting impression and make you want to go back again. As a marketer, that should be your goal for every interaction—a lasting impression that carries a lead from first touch through new business. Transform your focus from racking up downloads to raking in business. 

Is Your Marketing Automation an Overpriced Admission Ticket?

Be honest. What is the state of your marketing automation programs? If your system is full of half-filled records or your nurture streams are misaligned, it might be time for an update. 

That out-of-date or messy system is giving your prospects an underwhelming experience with your marketing. Just like a bad ride at the amusement park, that experience can cause them to leave and never look back. 

Overhauling your system is a big job—but there’s a path to improvement through incremental changes. Give your arcade games a facelift rather than calling in the demolition team. 

Smart marketers are using strategies like interactive content to fuel those improvements in their systems. Interactive content both resonates more deeply with your audience and gives you tools to improve lead profiles, lead scoring, and nurture streams; so your marketing amusement park experience is perfect every time. 

That might seem impossible—like hitting all the roller coasters in a single day. But choosing content types that actively engage users rather than sending them static downloads creates a VIP experience. Give your users a fast pass to cut to the front of the line and get the content they want, not get lost in the crowd.

Interactive Content Transforms The Experience

Common examples of interactive content include assessments, personality tests, quizzes, calculators, and polls. While there are numerous use cases for getting more out of marketing automation with interactive content, here are three reasons it works so well: 

1. More (and Better) Profile Data

One culprit of messy marketing automation platforms is incomplete profile data. Your goal is to fill in those gaps, but the only way to do that (it seems) is to present long lead forms – dooming your conversion rates. 

With interactive content, you can include a lead form to collect your basic demographic data, then use the questions and answers throughout the experience to gather the specific qualifying information you and your sales team need to score, nurture and close deals. It’s like progressive profiling wrapped in a much more entertaining package. 

Let’s say you’re building an ROI calculator. Your audience is interested because it will help them understand what they can expect to gain by investing in your product or service, so they’re happy to answer questions your sales team cares about – like how many units they might purchase, or the size of their implementation team. 

Suddenly, your prospect profile is filled with way more information than you had before – and your prospect is happy to have the info on their potential investment. Win-win. 

2. More Effective Lead Scoring

Amusement parks excel at guiding visitors from one ride to the next. Your marketing automation platform should do the same through lead scoring. 

Typically, marketers base lead scoring on demographic characteristics and basic behavioral triggers – web pages visited, content offers downloaded, etc. 

Traditional lead scoring often works well, but occasionally passes over leads that aren’t ready to talk to sales. It also gives the salesperson little to grab on to when driving that initial conversation. 

Through interactive content, marketers can ask questions their sales team uses to qualify leads, passing the answers into marketing automation and on to CRM when the prospect converts to a sales-ready lead. 

That’s what the team over at Ecova did with a recent piece of interactive content. They created a short quiz to let prospects know if they were on the right track to getting good utility data. The quiz included questions the Ecova sales team uses during the qualification process, speeding up qualification and disqualification so the sales team could focus on only the hottest leads.

3. Targeted and Personalized Nurturing

Many marketers invest in marketing automation for the ability to send “one-to-many” messages with the feeling of “one-to-one.” According to a DemandGen Report study, 73% of B2B marketers cited better response to campaigns/offers due to targeting/relevancy as one of the biggest benefits of lead nurturing. The challenge there is maintaining personalization and the feeling of a true face-to-face conversation. 

Segmenting for lead nurture is important, but can be time-intensive. With a database of tens or hundreds of thousands of leads, how can you apply unique characteristics to each lead to give them hyper-targeted follow-up materials?

With interactive content, you can feed all the question and answer data into your marketing automation system and trigger nurture emails associated with those results. This is supercharged marketing automation – rather than simply nurturing according to behavior or demographic data, you can now nurture according to what your prospects are really thinking and saying.

Win “Park of the Year”

There you have it – three ways to provide a great user experience through your marketing automation system. There’s no crying over a dropped ice cream cone because with better data, more accurate lead scoring, and personalized, hyper-targeted nurturing, you’ll deliver more MQLs faster than ever.

Improve your customers' marketing experience by downloading 10 Ways Interactive Content Boosts Marketing Automation.

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