4 Common Marketing Challenges Addressed by Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Marketing

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Table of Contents

01 Challenge 1: Lead Generation and Scoring

01 Lead Scoring

01 Run Multichannel Marketing Campaigns

03 Challenge 2: The Customer Journey

03 Customer Journey Examples

04 The Journey is Complete, Now What?

05 Challenge 3: Aligning Sales and Marketing Strategy

05 Top 4 Ways to Align Sales and Marketing Strategy

07 Challenge 4: Marketing Return on Investment

08 Positive Reinforcement Cycle

08 Shorter Path to Qualification and Close

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Challenge 1: Lead Generation and Scoring A big focus in marketing is around finding new leads, qualifying them, and then sending sales-ready leads to salespeople. But it’s so much harder to identify leads now that buyers can conduct research anonymously on the internet, and through channels we can’t control. How can you identify buyers, where they are from, and what information they need when they are on your website?

Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Marketing allows you to add tracking codes to your website so that potential buyers are tracked from the very first encounter with your site – whether through banner ads, social postings or downloads. Once they identify themselves to you, all the previous data is linked to them in your database.

LEAD SCORING

To help you identify the hottest leads, Dynamics 365 for Marketing can score each one based on criteria that includes each lead’s demographic details and interaction records. You can set up lead scoring in as many ways as you’d like so that prospects are on the best path to drive them through to conversion.

A lead who meets your target demographic profile and has interacted with your marketing materials (for example, by opening emails, registering for downloads, browsing your website, or attending an event) will get a high score.

RUN MULTICHANNEL MARKETING CAMPAIGNS

Multichannel marketing campaigns within Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Marketing helps you attract the right prospects and nurture leads from email marketing, web landing pages, webinars, phone calls, and events using the Dynamics 365 Connector for LinkedIn Lead Gen Forms.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Marketing is designed to help you nurture more sales-ready leads, align sales and marketing and make smarter decisions. Most importantly, Dynamics 365 for Marketing works together with Dynamics 365 for Sales on the same platform which aligns teams with common data, connected processes and Office 365 collaboration tools.

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Challenge 2: The Customer Journey The mystery of the abandoned shopping cart. Even if your company doesn’t specifically have shopping carts for its goods or services, as a marketing professional, you are very familiar with this concept. A prospect takes a bite when you send out a marketing piece, they are on the line, and you want to reel them in to conversion without losing them. But what is the most efficient way to do so?

As you engage potential customers, they start by discovering your product or service, evaluate whether it meets their needs, look for a good offer, and finally make a purchase. This process is called a customer journey. A successful customer journey educates and prepares prospects for sales conversation.

With Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Marketing, you can send prospects on the most successful journey based on their actions such as emails they open, whitepapers or videos they download, etc. Configurable templates and designer tools are designed to set up your buyer’s journey and personalize based upon customer engagement. You can even segment customers based on demographic information such as decisionmakers in Texas, or women in technology, for specialized marketing.

CUSTOMER JOURNEY EXAMPLES

What are some examples of typical customer journeys? A simple customer journey might include a short interaction such as a single email campaign. A complex journey could include the full process from discovery, through nurturing, and on to marketing-qualified leads. Customer journeys can also generate and assign Dynamics 365 tasks for your sales team (such as a scheduled follow-up phone call), and trigger business workflows.

Dynamics 365 provides a graphical, drag-and-drop, journey modeler that works something like a simple board game. Each contact starts on the first tile which represents the customer journey content (by becoming part of a target segment), and then progresses through one tile at a time, with each tile representing a marketing initiative, decision point, or internal action item.

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A SOMEWHAT MORE COMPLEX EXAMPLE COULD WORK LIKE THIS:

> A new contact from New York wants to subscribe to your newsletter and fills out a marketing form on your site. This results in a new contact record in your database.

> You have a dynamic segment that finds all newsletter subscribers from New York, so the new contact automatically joins that list.

> You’ve created a customer journey in Dynamics 365 that starts with the New York subscribers’ segment as tile, so the contact starts there and moves directly to the next tile.

> The next tile in the journey is an email tile, so the system automatically sends a marketing email to the new contact, and the contact moves on to the next tile. The email message offers a free white paper for download.

> The next tile is a trigger (set to trigger on the email). It keeps the contact here until either a week goes by, or they click the download link. The trigger branches the path, so if the contact clicks to download the paper, they’ll take the “true” path immediately; but if a week goes by without a click, they’ll go down the “false” path.

> The top (“true”) path continues with more tiles designed to nurture the lead further. Because the contact clicked the link, Dynamics 365 generated a lead for that contact, which represents their expression of interest in the product promoted in that white paper. Some tiles along this path might initiate or evaluate lead interactions (such as surveys or event invitations), while others might generate internal events (like assigning a task or launching a workflow in the CRM system). As the contact interacts with your initiatives, the lead builds up its score until it’s ready to forward to sales.

> The bottom (“false”) path starts with another email tile, which sends a reminder with a second chance to get the download, after which the contact might continue down the same type of nurturing path if they respond or get dropped for now if they don’t.

THE JOURNEY IS COMPLETE, NOW WHAT?

Once the customer journey is completed (i.e., you have a new customer) you can gather insights regarding the events that took place, better understand purchasing behavior, and tweak the journey for the next set of prospects.

You can also put your new customer into another step of the journey: advocacy. Advocacy is where your current customers sell for you! Whether it is a reward for a referral or creation of a case study that you place on your website, getting your customers to advocate for you is the best marketing you can do. Unfortunately, many companies skip this step or think of the buying process as over. Just because a purchase has been made, that doesn’t mean the process has ended. This stage is critical to retaining customers and acquiring new ones. It is crucial for companies to maintain positive post-purchase relations.

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Challenge 3: Aligning Sales and Marketing Strategy Aligning sales and marketing teams is a challenge as old as the corporate structure itself. For most companies, marketing’s job is to generate leads, and sales’ job is to turn those leads into clients. But this process should not be siloed. It should be a cohesive, aligned strategy. Sales and marketing alignment shortens the sales cycle and links ROI directly to marketing materials, which makes you look like a marketing rockstar.

TOP 4 WAYS TO ALIGN SALES AND MARKETING STRATEGY

1: TOP-DOWN INITIATIVE

In a lot of businesses, there’s huge tension between sales and marketing teams. In sales, they don’t appreciate all the work that marketing does, and marketing doesn’t understand all of the different situations that the sales team faces. The very first step is an executive agreement.

Once you have executive buy-in, bring in a fresh pair of eyes, such as a sales operations person, who works directly at the intersection of marketing and sales. This person should work directly with each team to direct where content marketing assets are kept and how they’re organized, keep CRM systems aligned and organized, and help marketing and sales leaders create effective analytics tools.

2: CONTENT IS KING

You’ve heard this expression before. Content marketing’s role, as it concerns sales, is to push potential customers further down the sales funnel before a salesperson even contacts them. Since customers today research purchases in the early stages of the buying cycle, content marketing takes on the education role once held by sales professionals.

When creating marketing assets, think about how content can help answer customers’ questions and concerns along each step in the customer journey. Content needs to be distributed throughout the funnel. Let sales direct the content you come out with, and then you’ll be able to help at every level of the sales funnel.

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3: BETTER LEAD GENERATION STRATEGY

Lead generation suffers when sales and marketing aren’t aligned. With marketing and sales working together, there’s a higher focus on the quality of leads. Marketing is a continuous process of strategy, execution, evaluation and adjustment. Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Marketing is intuitively built to align sales and marketing, by sharing the same database for a 360-degree view of prospects and customers. It allows for easy access to contact and lead information, lead scoring, and communication between sales and marketing. Marketing can assign calls or follow up to a sales team member when it’s time, and sales can login and see the prospect history.

4: BUILD A MARKETING FUNNEL THAT SUPPORTS YOUR SALES PROCESS

Using the right digital tools allows your organization access to insights that will help build a process for sales and a funnel within marketing that are not only aligned but customized to the needs of your buyers—thus creating a process built on 1:1 engagement at scale.

Inbound marketing best practices focuses on moving buyers from the Top of the Funnel (ToFu), to the Middle of the Funnel (MoFu) and ultimately into the Bottom of the Funnel (BoFu)—engaging with digital touchpoints through their buyer’s journey and responding with the right content at the right time and right context. This creates more sales-ready leads that are more likely to convert to paying customers and ultimately improves marketing’s ROI.

Adding automation with digital tools helps accelerate your pipeline and gives you insight into how buyers are moving within their journey to the BoFu. While marketing has control and data of the content at the ToFu, they typically don’t have control or view of the BoFu. Aligning process and tools is extremely important to improving sales and marketing success.

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Challenge 4: Marketing Return on Investment It’s the age-old marketing struggle. Better understanding which ads, emails, and events are driving new leads and conversions. Nobody wants to be lost in the abyss of a “spray and pray” marketing strategy, or a pure volume game where if you can just stuff more and more leads into that funnel, just by sheer luck you’re going to get some diamonds in the rough. We are all awash in data and information, yet according to McKinsey, only 10 percent of marketers currently use insights to improve performance.

With a properly aligned marketing and sales alliance, marketing gets a huge help in one area that’s long been a challenge: reporting ROI. Marketers’ budgets are increasing every single year, but it’s very difficult for most CMOs to really tell what their contribution to revenue is because most of us marketing leaders are still thinking about the number of leads and not showing what we contributed to revenue. When we think about sales and marketing alignment, and how those two need to operate as one, anything that a marketer does should be to increase revenue. To track ROI, look at KPIs such as “deals influenced” or “deals sourced” to connect specific marketing materials straight to bottom-line results.

A marketing automation platform such as Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Marketing addresses this by bringing all these disparate marketing activities together in a flexible way so you can execute with a fuller view of actions and reactions in real time.

This connectedness allows you to gain a better understanding of the prospects and insights through how they are engaging and responding to your marketing assets. In turn, you are more quickly able to identify content and tactics that are yielding results and those that are underperforming. You can apply these insights to prune marketing activities that aren’t delivering and achieve higher ROI by focusing on the best activities to target the best prospects and attracting more like them.

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POSITIVE REINFORCEMENT CYCLE

Bringing your marketing activities under the umbrella of a marketing automation platform leads to a virtuous cycle of positive reinforcement. As prospects download articles, visit your website pages, respond to specific email campaigns, or attend events and webinars, Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Marketing incorporates the new data and provides actionable insights. You can use these insights to refine each step in your buyer’s journey and invest more in campaigns and approaches that are driving the best results.

SHORTER PATH TO QUALIFICATION AND CLOSE

The insights you gain as buyers’ progress through the journey allow you to continually refine your criteria for what constitutes a good lead. You can use these insights to adjust your objective lead scoring models to assign lower or higher scores for specific activities and prioritize leads that are ready to buy. The benefits of insights you gain during the buyer journey don’t end with marketing. Sales can also benefit from the complete view of how a lead has engaged during the marketing campaigns and use those insights to continue the conversation towards deal closure. Ultimately this leads to a shorter path to qualification and close and less wasted time chasing unqualified, less valuable leads.

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ALITHYA GROUP INC. IS A LEADER IN STRATEGY AND DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION IN NORTH AMERICA. Founded in 1992, the Company counts on 2,000 professionals in Canada, the United States and Europe. Alithya's integrated offering is based on four pillars of expertise: strategy services, application services, enterprise solutions and data and analytics. Alithya’s Microsoft practice covers a wide array of capabilities, including Dynamics, Azure, business and advanced analytics, digital solutions, application development and architecture.

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ALITHYA DELIVERS INNOVATIVE MICROSOFT ERP, CRM, BI AND DIGITAL SOLUTIONS AND SERVICES ON PREMISE OR IN THE CLOUD TO COMPANIES IN NORTH AMERICA AND EUROPE. THE AWARD-WINNING COMPANY IS ONE OF THE LARGEST RESELLERS OF MICROSOFT DYNAMICS 365 (FORMERLY DYNAMICS AX AND CRM). WE ALSO OFFER STRATEGIC CONSULTING DELIVERING A BLEND OF CLASSIC AND PRODUCT-BASED CONSULTING SERVICES THAT HELP CLIENTS REDUCE COSTS, IMPROVE PROCESSES AND INCREASE REVENUE THROUGH THE JUDICIOUS USE OF TECHNOLOGY.

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