Marketing automation tools are sophisticated resources to streamline and improve marketing initiatives, delivering tangible results
Healthcare IT companies are working hard to solve complex challenges within the healthcare ecosystem. One of the key challenges these companies are facing is how to get their solution in front of the people who, likely, desperately need their solution. All while keeping costs in check and meeting sales goals.
This is where marketing automation comes in. Set up correctly, marketing automation tools like Hubspot, Marketo, and Pardot, can automate much of the marketing outreach, provide data driven insights, and keep sales and marketing pointing in the same direction.
When working with healthcare IT companies, we have found the following four areas drive the greatest value and deliver the highest marketing ROI: Inbound marketing architecture, Integrated CRM with custom objects, sales and marketing alignment, and data, data, data!
1. Inbound Marketing Architecture Automates Important Actions
Hubspot has focused their marketing automation around the inbound methodology, helping organizations by providing the architecture needed to build meaningful, lasting relationships with customers and prospects.
The premise of inbound is to create meaningful and valuable content that your prospects and clients are looking for and will find useful. By establishing themselves as a resource, companies establish credibility and intrinsic value. Content is created on websites and landing pages and shared through an omni-channel approach including advertising on Google/Bing, News websites, social media, and email marketing.
With a marketing automation solution, organizations can develop meaningful content and share it across marketing channels empowering marketing teams to deliver coordinated and high value campaigns.
2. CRM Management and Custom Objects Help Capture Critical Information
Inbound marketing efforts targeting leadership at healthcare organizations will drive conversions on your website and will build your prospect and customer database. Leveraging an integrated CRM allows you to to store, organize, and categorize this critical information into a robust database.
Not only can you keep track of all the contacts you need and easily send out targeted emails, you can also use custom objects to keep track of different aspects of your contact database.
For example, you can use custom objects to indicate whether someone is an active customer or a prospect and partition emails accordingly.
3. Sales and Marketing Alignment for the Win
Organizations that are planning for growth understand the importance of sales and marketing staying in alignment and driving towards the same goals.
Marketing teams are often operating in silos with limited teamwork with their sales counterparts. Sales teams are frustrated that they are not getting the support they need to be effective. Requests are sent over the wall to marketing teams that may or may not understand the sales team goals. Frequently, sales teams will develop their own lead generation campaigns and marketing materials because of the disconnect.
A part of the solution to sales and marketing alignment is having the teams play in the same sandbox via marketing automation and crm. When marketing teams are developing email marketing campaigns, landing pages, and digital advertising in a tool that integrates with their CRM and provides automated reporting to the sales team, the game shifts. Sales is now able to view the value proposition messaging that their prospects are receiving and engaging with and can quickly act on this information with timely follow up calls or emails. Personalized correspondence is possible with this level of visibility and coordination.
Leveraging a marketing automation solution gives organizations the tools to create marketing programs that create leads for sales and nurture existing sales opportunities with value added content.
The sales team is able to see where their prospects have engaged and what content has been valuable to them. This insight into engaged contacts enables the two teams to work together to drive opportunity for the organization.
Value beyond sales…
While HubSpot has a great Marketing Hub, it also helps manage support tickets, feedback, and acquisitions. All your necessary documents can be stored in one place, allowing multiple users with permissions to access them. Important tasks can be assigned and tracked to users, contacts easily imported and stored, and marketing campaigns developed, all in one easy-to-use location! The workflow is seamless.
4. Data Transparency through Automated Reporting and Dashboards
Keeping all stakeholders and leadership informed on sales and marketing initiatives, traction, and, ultimately, results is both essential and challenging. Leveraging an integrated marketing automation platform and CRM provides the ability to also have integrated reporting and dashboards.
At the beginning of projects, we will implement a reporting dashboard and schedule that includes creating automated reports for different members of leadership. We focus on training internal team members on how to create, manage, and edit meaningful reports so that reporting becomes integral to all campaign efforts.
Sales teams are then able to receive reports based on their prospect activity. Marketers receive reports based on the campaigns that they are running, and leadership receives reports on the results of the program in play. This coordinated reporting effort moves marketing and sales teams to be data driven in their campaigns and outreach efforts.
The right marketing automation solution can provide enormous benefits for an organization that is in growth mode. Identifying which system is right for your company can be tricky but is worth the investigation. With marketing automation, organizations can implement impactful automation, align sales and marketing, personalize communications, and become data driven through meaningful reporting. Ask us how!