Professional services firms are increasingly recognizing the value of using marketing automation to maintain real control over their communications and campaigns. Automated email campaigns significantly reduce workflow and time commitment, while allowing organisations to deliver measurable results from every client and prospect engagement.
However, implementing marketing automation presents a unique set of challenges for professional services. That’s largely because professional services firms have more moving components than any other organisation. There is a range of individuals who need to be engaged in order to make a marketing automation model work: fee earners, partners, BD, HR, marketing, and IT all have a role to play in a successful implementation.
In this article, we’ll present some important steps to take to overcome the challenges involved in implementing marketing automation in a professional services environment. Then we’ll share how our consultative approach at Vuture will help you to develop a roadmap to successfully launch an automation model that will benefit your entire team.
Quick overview: what is marketing automation?
First, let’s take a step back and consider what marketing automation is. Quite simply, marketing automation is the process of automatically delivering cross-channel content, based on the interaction of clients with marketing assets. The typical model involves a highly centralised marketing output delivering a pipe of opportunities based on the actions of clients in the marketing funnel, which then produces hot leads for the sales team to convert.
The traditional marketing automation model is relatively simple. As a client interacts with various touch points, a central “pot” of marketing assets is delivered via various channels to the client in a nurture program. This program is designed to move a client down the pipe in order for a salesperson to eventually convert.
The benefits of marketing automation make it very attractive to not only professional services firms, but all sorts of organisations. Utilising automation allows marketing teams and companies to:
- Create relevant content and use triggers to share it in a timely manner, to coincide with the level of expectations at each stage of the relationship
- No longer waste hours in drafting or forwarding emails to fee earners or business development but instead, push out instant or timed notifications when a client or prospect engages with any of your campaigns
- Take nurturing campaigns to the next level by capturing client and prospect online behaviour in order to automate communications when and where they are more likely to engage
Key challenges for professional services firms that want to undertake marketing automation
Following are some of the unique challenges facing professional services firms when it comes to implementing marketing automation:
- The “product” being marketed is a person; someone who has a direct interaction with the client. This often breaks the lead nurturing cycle, especially when CRM usage is inconsistent.
- Marketing content is generated by the professionals. The idea of having a centrally planned suite of marketing assets is challenging, as it relies on regular content being developed by thought leaders who are not on the marketing team.
- Content is typically driven by outside factors such as a change of regulation, new assets, or market updates. It’s hard to build a typical lead nurturing program around a volatile flow of content.
- The salesperson is typically the fee earner. In many cases, it’s a one-to-one sale based on many years of existing relationship. A nurtured lead isn’t going to a central sales team.
- Events form a major part of the marketing mix, as the goal is to put the professionals in front of the clients.
How Vuture applies marketing automation best practices for professional services organisations
Our automation-for-professionals platform allows you to leverage the content which exists in your ecosystem, automate manual processes, and deliver verifiable leads. But it also works in a way that meets the needs and complexity of a professional services organisation, as noted in the illustration below.
By following a localised, centralised model, a centralised team can leverage the aspects of automation which work for a professional services firm and use roles and features to empower content to be delivered locally, subject to controls.
Following are examples of a few key automation practices for professional services firms.
- Automating emails using triggers and dynamic content
Where there are central marketing users distributing content via email, they can leverage triggered emails and dynamic content. Triggers are a series of emails which are sent based on a client’s interaction, or based on the information held in your CRM.
Some typical examples of how a trigger may be leveraged in a professional services firm include:
- An event RSVP is sent out -> then a reminder/second invitation is automatically sent a week later for anyone who didn’t RSVP -> then an event reminder is automatically sent to anyone who did RSVP -> and finally, a post-event survey is sent to everyone who attended
- An email is automatically sent to anyone marked as a Key Client in your CRM who visits a particular web page
- A series of triggered welcome emails is sent to a client to on-board when marked as a genuinely new contact in your CRM
- Bringing events into the marketing automation cycle
Because of the importance of fostering relationships between clients and their fee earners, events form an enormously important aspect of professional services marketing. For this reason, we have focused on solutions for automating event management, including:
- Registering clients at events: Our event management process allows you to send out invitations, capture RSVPs and other event choices in your CRM, and then automate emails to entice further registrants, as noted above in the description of triggers. A typical automated mail process might include:
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- Send a save the date email
- Automate a last-chance-to-register email for anyone who didn’t open the email
- Automate a reminder to come on the day of the event for anyone who RSVPs “yes”
- Automate a post-event survey for anyone who is marked as attended in your CRM
- Automatically leveraging relationships to make your fee earners more successful at events: Our event registration tools allow you to automatically mark clients in your CRM as attended at events, as well as capturing walk-ins, no-shows, and cancellations. The platform leverages information we know about the client to automatically notify their fee earner that their client has arrived at an event and automatically identifies opportunities to talk to the client about (e.g., things the client may have looked at on the website and other events attended). This automatically empowers the fee earner to be more successful in the up/cross-sell opportunity with their client in a very natural, non-salesy manner.
Conclusion
If you’d like to hear more about our platform, services, and solutions, and how we enable professional services organisations to gain successful control over their communications and campaigns, we would love to talk with you. Contact us and let’s have a quick introductory call at your convenience.