Marketing to customers today can be a challenge. Customers are not all in the same place, reading the same blogs, watching the same streams, and consuming information and entertainment from the same places. To reach customers today, you have to be prepared to use all the channels you have available to you–an omnichannel approach. That takes time and expertise. Some tools can take over many of the more laborious, repetitive tasks and help business owners stay in touch with their current customers and potential customers. Marketing automation can change a business for the better if used correctly.
What is marketing automation?
Marketing automation tools take repetitive marketing tasks away from you while providing more personalized attention for your customers. They are most often web-based tools that assist businesses with lead generation, qualifying those leads, as well as customer engagement. Engagement can be through a website, emails, and social media. Each has its place in an omnichannel marketing strategy and has its own way of improving marketing KPIs.
Put your sales team on the fast track
An example of automation available through the HubSpot Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platform, is called Sequences. This tool allows you to nurture your prospects over time by automatically sending a series of targeted and personalized sales emails. This system also helps remind you to follow up with contacts with automatically created tasks. Automation like this creates a system for reaching out and following up that you can set and “forget” until you’re prompted to field a reply, reach out on LinkedIn, or make a phone call.
Choose a platform that connects and automates all your marketing
To achieve marketing automation many businesses cobble together multiple programs over multiple channels. A Blissfully study found that small to medium businesses use an average of 102 apps across the business. The result is often frustrating and less than ideal. There are thousands of apps available to automate various aspects of marketing including the following:
- Drip email campaigns
- Scheduled and posted on multiple social media platforms
- Digital and Social Advertising
- Optimize websites to attract organic search traffic
- Publishing blogs
- Capturing leads
Getting reliable data from these separate apps to make business decisions is a challenge.
A platform like HubSpot with all marketing tools natively built on top of a robust CRM solves the problem of insight into your marketing performance. All data from all campaigns and marketing actions flow to the same place and can be reported on. Automation and reliable, actionable data achieved.
Keeping customers front and center
When you’re doing marketing right, communicating with current and prospective customers takes some time. It can be all-consuming. Marketing automation will cut done the time needed to conduct email campaigns, social media posts, and ad campaigns. When campaigns are conducted on a full marketing platform like HubSpot, campaigns are related and tied together making each part more effective, and easier to manage.
When connected with your CRM, marketing automation systems support your marketing strategy to target a specific audience. Workflows to automatically segment your audiences, analyze your website visitors’ behavior, manage campaigns, and score leads, save hours of work, and empower your sales team.
Will Marketing Automation increase sales?
Certainly streamlining any process will make it more efficient and more productive. With marketing automation, the right tools can take a company past efficiency and into ROI by optimizing triggered campaigns and lead scoring, just to name a couple of advantages. Your marketing team is enabled to generate great leads, putting your sales team in a better conversion position.
Marketing automation does not replace the marketer
These systems are not meant to replace the marketer in an organization. Rather, they streamline the process, improve marketing performance, as well as make it more efficient, and add layer of sound analytics. But it is not as simple as pushing the “go’ button.
Being able to easily email your customers when you have something to say is powerful. If you are blasting out the same message to all of your customers every time you have something that is of interest to only a portion of them, you run the risk of ‘burning’ those contacts. When used properly (and completely), marketing automation can make sure a company is sending the right message to the right set of customers.
The goal of any commercial company is to generate revenue. A digital marketing presence supports that goal in three ways.
- Driving traffic to your online platform (website, social media platform, etc.)
- Converting that traffic to customers
- Closing the sale with new and current customers.
Marketing automation, when set up and used correctly, can assist in all three of those tasks, providing scalability that might not be possible without it.
For a company moving into marketing automation for the first time, there is a tendency to add the technology without reflection. Successful integration starts with a review of goals and current marketing strategies. This ensures that a company is not automating a current strategy or process that isn’t accomplishing company goals.
The best advice for a company wanting to scale its digital marketing efforts is to start sooner rather than later, but in adding marketing automation to those efforts, make sure those efforts are in alignment with company objectives and customer needs.
Marketing Monsoon, LLC is a growth agency specializing in lead generation, sales enablement, and customer engagement for alternative energy, healthcare technology, and staffing and HR companies. Our expertise includes strategy development, content marketing, lead generation systems, local search marketing, social media marketing, and email marketing. Get started on your strategy today by reaching out to Marketing Monsoon at (866) 851-1793.
