Although having a large team to support our goals is the dream for many of us marketers, the reality is that it’s more common than we think to be part of a 1-2 person team charged with driving leads and revenue for our organization. This challenge has taught us to be resourceful, automate for efficiency when possible, learn how to prioritize our efforts, and truly give it our all. As a small team, it’s amazing when we pause and look back at all we’ve accomplished.  

We recently interviewed our customers at Joyride, a unique bottleless beverage manufacturer and distributor, and were truly impressed with what they are doing with a 1.5 person team. Kat Krieger, Joyride’s marketing director, and a part-time intern have gotten creative with their marketing approach in order to tackle everything from social media, lead scoring, lead nurturing, and much more.

The team recently implemented marketing automation to help them more efficiently execute some of these efforts and have seen amazing results. But what is truly astonishing is the way that they are using it to perform one-of-a-kind activities such as developing a unique sales qualification score and quantifying their sustainability for use in future nurture campaigns.

Keep reading to learn 3 key takeaways we gained from our conversation with Joyride regarding how to focus and maximize your outreach, drive engagement and get results with a small marketing team. You can also check out Joyride’s full success story here and get all the scoop about how marketing automation is enabling their small team to dream big and transform their marketing strategy.

1. Emphasize What Makes You Unique

Joyride is truly one of a kind in the beverage industry as the only bottleless manufacturer. The company puts a huge emphasis on sustainability and doesn’t have any single-use bottles or containers in their supply chain. “When we talk about sustainability, it’s not just because it’s a nice thing to do or a box that we should check. We truly believe it’s important and that we are making a positive impact on the world,” says Kat.  

Joyride is taking advantage of this unique characteristic of its core business to make its marketing even more interesting. The company has been using Act-On’s marketing automation platform to track the impact of its customers. Kat says that having these insights will enable Joyride to explore various ways to share this information and plans to get customers further invested in their sustainability mission through nurturing efforts.

“With Act-On, we can track how many bottles someone has saved from use or how they’re impacting the environment based on what they’ve ordered. So as we start scaling out really, really fun nurturing campaigns, I can start talking to my customers and make them feel good about what they’re doing. This let’s them know that working with us is not just about caffeinating their employees – that’s just a bonus. The real benefit is how we’re helping their company put good back into the world. It shows them what impact they’re able to have with smart purchasing decisions.”

2. Always Be One Step Ahead

Something to keep in mind when you are part of a small team is that you should always aim to work ahead where you can, so you have time and space to work on any last-minute priorities. Kat says that Act-On’s marketing automation has enabled Joyride to plan and schedule out their social media ahead of time and ensure that their Instagram, Twitter and Facebook followers always have opportunities to engage with relevant content.

“I would say a challenge for us is really just getting consistent content out there. But actually we’re leaning on Act-On quite a bit to do that. We use Act-On in Oktopost both in order to help us be really proactive and get things scheduled well in advance. So even if I get pulled into some major project, even for months at a time, I know there is relevant material that’s going out, which is really, really helpful for a small team.”

3. Focus on the Best Opportunities

Joyride has also been using marketing automation to ensure its small team is using its time efficiently and focusing on the best opportunities. To aid in this process, Kat has developed a unique sales qualification score that enables Joyride to identify whether a lead has the qualities and characteristics of their ideal customer. Kat notes that this sales qualification score has improved marketing/sales alignment and helped her team mobilize sales to take action at the right time.

“The sales qualification score consists of 45 different criteria that all gets calculated based on our inbound form. And that comes into Act-On where we assign points based on how they’ve answered every question. That score immediately syncs to our CRM and informs our sales leads or sales managers how quickly they should act on the opportunity or the lead, and whether it’s really a fit for us. They can do this just at a glance, almost without even looking at the answers, because they’re gonna know when that particular score is above a certain level, that they wanna get on that opportunity right now.”

This is just a glimpse of what Joyride has accomplished since implementing marketing automation, and we’re thrilled to see what new creative marketing strategies Kat and her team develop in the future.