4 Steps to Successful Digital Marketing Integration

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It’s time to align your digital marketing channels and devices with your marketing automation platform. Wouldn’t it be great if there was an “out of the box” solution to make this integration seamless? Unfortunately, it isn’t quite that easy. It takes thoughtful strategy, calculated decisions and a fair amount of work to make it successful.

Here are four key considerations that we define with our clients to help ensure the best possible integration:

1. Customer
2. Journey
3. Information
4. Channels

1. Customer: What Do You Really Want to Know? When integrating your campaigns with marketing automation, the key driver is to help you, as a marketer, understand your customer better. Start by clearly defining what you want to know about your customer, so the interactions on your digital marketing channels – like your website, social media and display ads – capture the engagement metrics you are focused on. Then you can start to create a complete customer profile.
2. Journey: Where Do You Start? With marketing automation advancing how marketers engage their customers, it’s more important than ever to define the actual buying journey. But it isn’t as easy as you might think. With B2B organizations, there is typically a matrix product and market structure. Mapping that journey across product lines and market industries can become overwhelming. The best way to get started is creating a primary customer journey. For each major product line or market, branch a new buying journey to account for the unique go-to-market strategy. When you are done, you will see the unique journeys that can now be built out in your marketing automation platform.
3. Information: What Analytics & Insights Do You Need? There is a critical link between the information you gather from digital channels and devices, and data that comes from your marketing automation platforms. You’ll need to clearly define the metrics and marketing insights you’re seeking to align with your goals. Think of it in two ways:
   • +

   Show value

    – What results are you driving?
   • +

   Build understanding

    – What’s driving those results?
4. Channels: How Do They Align?
   With the foundation of your customer profile defined, the buying journey mapped and a clear understanding of what information and insights you are seeking, now you can align your current and future digital marketing channels to the marketing automation workflows.Here are some best practices to get you started:
   + For each of your digital marketing channels, tag the interaction with key attributes for your customer, journey and campaign to get the information and insights you need. Leading platforms like Salesforce Marketing Cloud and Pardot have this as built-in functionality. Another recommended approach is to leverage Google tag management as the connector with your marketing automation platform.
   + When you set up your journeys in the marketing automation platform, start with the channel as the first engagement point. Website forms will most likely be the first contact collection point, but the customer journey starts with the digital channel – and it’s important that the journey reflects that interaction.
   + As you plan your campaigns, start with your customer persona and map the touch points along the buying journey – including digital, mass media, social and mobile. Mapping this out out will help provide a consistent user experience once they enter your nurture campaigns.

   By starting with these four key steps, you’ll create a seamless experience for your customers. And your automated digital marketing strategy will think – and go far beyond – “out of the box.”