Every organization has its own unique set of challenges and opportunities when it comes to aligning marketing automation strategy with data. But for energy and utility companies, which have incredible troves of data at their disposal, the idea of syncing all that customer information into a cohesive marketing strategy may seem nearly impossible.
Too often, utility companies will keep this customer and usage data siloed, not using this key information to inform marketing strategy—or any business strategy at all. With a strategic look at their martech stacks, energy companies can take their marketing efforts to another level, leveraging that massive heap of data to make informed, targeted marketing decisions that pay off.
Creative consistency and lead integration are a utility company’s secret weapon in leveraging data toward marketing success. But for a large utility company, that’s not so easy. That’s where the help of an agency that can alleviate the burden comes in.
Understanding Your MarTech Providers
Your utility company probably has a robust martech stack; most do. But how many platforms are you using? And have they been synced? What features are you paying for, but ignoring?
We’ve seen many big utility companies with multiple underutilized, misunderstood and expensive marketing technology tools in their stacks. Ideally, you will take a strategic approach to the tools you have chosen. Each platform should complement the other platforms in your stack, without redundancy or competition.
A strategic and nimble martech stack will be the key to allowing your utility company’s sales, finance, operations and marketing departments to work together toward the same objectives.
Many of these platform service providers offer training and assistance during the onboarding process, but when that’s over, you’re left with no one to help you make sense of all the information at your fingertips.
A marketing automation partner can work with you to sort through all that data to identify gaps and areas of opportunity around optimizing and streamlining your systems integrations, platforms, tracking and reporting, and program management. This could be your utility company’s opportunity to offer personalized, relevant information across the customer journey, supercharging customer acquisition, CRM and retention.
It’s important to determine the level of maturity of these programs and how they can be used to optimize your company’s marketing goals and objectives. With utility companies, our key objectives are usually to streamline and improve lead handling and tracking, align martech stacks to integrate reporting and optimize full pipeline analytics, and develop and implement marketing performance reporting and business-level key performance indicators (KPIs).
Some objectives for a utility company looking to dig into martech platforms to improve marketing automation may include:
- Leveraging landing pages to support more programs
- Organizing folder structure to mirror corporate marketing structure
- Implementing lead handling
- Improving and customizing lead scoring
- Tracking/attribution – web analytics and CRM alignment
- Managing lead lifecycle
- Reporting
- Sales enablement (sharing lead-level data with Sales via SFDC integration)
- Improving lead nurturing
- Social media integration
Benefits of Data-Driven Marketing Automation
A closely aligned, streamlined and strategic martech stack will have immediate benefits for your utility company’s customer relationship management and marketing efforts. Harnessing the wealth of data your platforms have been collecting over the years will affect nearly all aspects of your business. Some of those benefits can include:
- Improved Lead Handling & Distribution—By leveraging your martech platforms to auto-assign leads and sync each other, you can greatly reduce manual labor and get leads into nurture programs earlier.
- Marketing Attribution & Pipeline Reporting—Aligning all inbound marketing, marketing automation and CRM systems with capturing and recording source data will enable all systems to associate leads with campaigns and unlock pipeline reporting that includes meaningful attribution data. This will enhance reporting, offer insights into marketing effectiveness and uncover marketing ROI.
- Improved Web Analytics Implementing—Web analytics event tracking along with aligning goals with KPIs will make web analytics more powerful and meaningful. Recording important engagement behavior on the site and attributing it to marketing campaigns will help you measure their impact.
- Expansion of Marketing Automation Functionality—Working toward a greater utilization of the capabilities of your martech stack, including lead scoring, automated lead handling, nurture programs and expanded capabilities such as social media, will support better mid-funnel engagement and late-funnel sales support.
- Funnel Reporting and Lead Disposition—Adding campaign source data to lead records and aligning it via your martech platforms to campaigns and opportunities will support better full-funnel reporting. Additionally, automating lead distribution and enforcing better data practices with the sales team will allow for more accurate insight into down-funnel lead disposition and success.
- Success Planning—Identifying key business goals, marketing objectives related to those goals, and the strategies and tactics marketing uses to address them will uncover KPIs in marketing channels and digital interactions. Leveraging these KPIs can direct how and what to track and report and will drive a dashboard design that will serve key business stakeholders as well as your company’s marketing team.
Marketing automation can transform and accelerate the way any company does business—from prospecting to customer lifecycle management. For an energy company, that can make the difference between playing catch-up and finally getting ahead.
But getting that marketing automation in shape can be an overwhelming—almost Herculean—task. A marketing automation partner with experience harnessing big data and taking control of even the most cumbersome martech stacks may just be the easiest first step you can take.
To discuss how Mower can help your brand, contact Stephanie Crockett.