Effective marketing programs begin with tracking all of your marketing activities in order to figure out which are working and which aren’t. Marketing automation provide tools that allow you to track and control a lot of your marketing activities, all from one portal. When used properly, marketing automation platforms like Marketo, Hubspot, Eloqua, and DialogTech can give powerful insight into your marketing universe.
Get the Most Out of Your Marketing Automation
The right marketing automation platform can be a very powerful tool for optimizing ROI, but you might as well throw it out the window if you aren’t getting a complete and accurate picture of where your leads are coming from.
When new leads come in, along with the contact information being collected, the source where they originate should also be captured, whether that is organic search, advertising, prospecting, or any other marketing activities. When you get as much information about the lead source as possible; all future communications designed to turn that lead into a customer flow from that original lead source.
Don’t Become a Victim of Bad Data
Powerful marketing automation tools have been developed so that you can track each and every lead back to their very first touch point. Maintaining the integrity of that data can be the difference between outstanding marketing ROI and rendering your marketing efforts useless.
It doesn’t take much to suddenly have bad data show up in your marketing automation tool. It happens with one wrong click or typo. It can then snowball out of control until it’s affecting a large chunk of the data that you rely on everyday to make your marketing decisions.
Without even realizing it a campaign could have a wrong lead source designated, and suddenly your organic search leads start showing up as event leads, your social media leads turn into paid search leads, or your direct leads change to prospecting leads. It doesn’t take very long for a lot of your data to get jumbled and once it does, it’s very hard to get the original data back.
How Do You Prevent Bad Data?
By taking a few simple steps you can ensure that you have great data that you can rely on to support your marketing strategy. Here are some ways we at DialogTech keep our data clean and accurate:
- Don’t let any of your leads slip through the cracks. Each lead comes from somewhere, and it should always be attributed back to its proper source. Google Analytics is a powerful tool that captures leads accurately from a multitude of sources.
- For leads that are entered manually into your lead management platform, make sure lead source fields are required. This means the lead source is recorded even when the lead comes from outside of your marketing automation tool.
- Standardize the options for your lead fields in your lead management platform. By doing this, when you run reports on lead sources, the data is easy to consume and digest.
- Don’t lose the original data. Make sure your lead source fields aren’t being updated or overwritten by another tool in order to preserve data integrity. You want to be able to attribute marketing successes to the original touch point, not the most recent.
- Make sure you are tracking leads from all of your sources. Online leads are relatively easy to track, but what happens when that lead goes offline and calls your business? DialogTech’s next generation call tracking captures every phone lead to make sure you don’t miss valuable lead source data. Integrate call tracking with your web analytics for a complete picture of all your lead sources.
What Comes Next
Once you have a foundation of good, reliable data you can continue improving on your marketing strategy. Decisions on where to spend your marketing dollars can easily be supported when you have the lead source data to back it up.
Only with clean data that is capturing leads from every source can you make quality marketing decisions for your company. Want to learn more about why tracking phone leads gives you better marketing data? Check out this white paper, Tracking Phone Leads: The Missing Piece of Marketing Automation.
