What Marketers Can Learn From Warren Buffett

Warren Buffett is no CMO — but that doesn’t mean marketers can’t learn from his business strategy.

Buffett is often quoted on his top two rules of investing, which are:

1. Never lose money, and
2. Never forget rule number 1.

This principle should apply to your hard-earned leads and customers, too!

Marketing the Buffett way

Marketing automation serves as your company’s backstop by ensuring leads don’t slip through the cracks or drop from memory. Given the time and cost that goes into generating a lead, simply not losing them (or forgetting about them) puts you at an advantage compared to your competitors. Done right, your customers will thank you through their loyalty and repeat business.

Warren Buffett is also famous for his perspective on the value of a single dollar. Buffett sees a dollar’s value as its worth when compounded annually for the next twenty years, which far exceeds one dollar today. Likewise, marketing automation multiplies the value of a lead by nurturing and reactivating it, over and over, until it drops out or becomes a customer.

As a rule of thumb, only 25% of all B2B sales leads are ready to purchase at the time they’re created — but about half of the other 75% will be ready to buy in the coming year. This means that staying in touch and building trust through nurturing offers a direct path to future business.

The benefits of automation

Marketing automation delivers benefits in a number of ways, including raising your brand or product’s awareness within your customer contact base, standardizing marketing across channels, targeting priority customer segments with personalized messaging, and automating manual repetitive tasks to free up time and resources for revenue-generating activities.

Some interesting proof points:

• DemandGen reported that 83% of companies using marketing automation were benefiting from more warm sales-ready leads, and 67% were benefiting from better response to campaigns
• Nurtured leads make 47% larger purchases than non-nurtured leads. (Source: The Annuitas Group)
• In a 2015 survey commissioned by Autopilot, customer communications sent every 2–4 weeks generated twice the leads as those sent every 4–12 weeks or even less frequently.

• And according to Forrester Research, companies that excel at lead nurturing generate 50% more sales leads at a 33% lower cost. (Source: DemandGen Report)

Your automation roadmap

Automation makes your business more scalable and productive (and helps you avoid leaving money on the table). To succeed with marketing automation, it’s important to understand the critical junctures in your customer journey.

The customer journey has three core phases: Attract, Acquire, and Grow.

1. Attract customers by turning strangers into leads

Most people new to marketing automation focus first on attracting new leads. There are a range of online marketing strategies that you can use to drive traffic to your website. While these visitors are still “anonymous,” meaning they haven’t given you their contact information, your marketing software can start gathering data on their activity. This information enables you to develop a history of the visitor’s online activity, and fine-tune your messaging based on their prior engagement.

The goal is to turn these anonymous strangers into known contacts by capturing their details with online “lead capture” forms. A common way to do this is to recommend relevant and valuable content in exchange for contact details and permission to market to them, a process known as “opting-in.”

At this point, the hard work of capturing a new lead is done, you can now add these contacts into your automated lead nurturing — where the Buffett approach really comes into play.

2. Acquire customers by converting leads into paying customers

Once you are successfully capturing and growing your contacts, automate your process of staying in touch to convert them into paying customers. How you execute this will depend on your business model.

In each of these models, the opportunity with automation and nurturing is to help buyers overcome common hurdles, including learning the product, understanding pricing and value, reviewing security concerns, referring to customer stories or consumer reviews, and planning their purchasing and implementation.

Doing so effectively requires mapping out the buying cycle, and deploying the right messaging at the right time. More advanced ways to improve performance include messaging across multiple channels (e.g. emails, text messages, postcards), and personalizing content based on a customer’s product usage or customer data.

3. Grow your customers into loyal promoters

The same principles used to attract and acquire contacts can be applied to win them over as loyal and valuable long-term customers. Of the many different types of automated journeys you can take customers on, several to consider include:

• New customer on-boarding: the most successful customers are those who start out leveraging your services in the right way. An automated “welcome” journey that takes new customers through a specific on-boarding process is an excellent way to set them off on the right path.
• Targeted upsell and cross-sell: target specific high-value customers with relevant offerings and personalized messaging.
• Major communications: Newsletters, company announcements, and event invitations are a great way to build better relationships with your customers.
• Customer feedback surveys: Conduct regular satisfaction surveys, including the Net Promoter Score (NPS), to identify areas for improvement and a quantitative baseline for improving your products and customer experience

Believe in Buffett

Customers are like cash— Warren Buffett wants you to hold onto them! Luckily, marketing technology has made this possible. By developing an automation lifestyle (Attract, Acquire, and Grow) within your customer journey, you can hold onto your current customers while you generate new ones. That’s the beauty of marketing automation — a part-technology, part-process, part storytelling approach that keeps your leads from slipping through the cracks.