5 ways marketing automation can help your sales
What is Marketing Automation?
Marketing Automation is exactly what it sounds like. It is a way of a way of automating your marketing processes. You may already be doing this. For example, email marketing, you send the lead email then you have 2 different emails planned to send depending on whether the recipient opened the email or not.
However things have moved on a lot since we all started with email. We now have SEO, PPC, Social media, mail, print, TV, Radio and so on. Just how many of these you use is of course dependant on your budget, target market and strategy.
So for the multi-channel marketer the headache is in identifying which message was seen by who and where. This is where marketing automation comes in. By essentially linking all your marketing campaigns into one platform you can start to see who your most engaged prospects are.
For example did “prospect A” follow you on Twitter and also open your recent email prior to making contact?
Targeting
Marketing Automation allows you to target the right people at the right time. For example, if you see that you have x number of prospects who aren’t engaged socially then you could develop a campaign based on that data to increase their exposure to your social channels. Whilst I appreciate this is potentially a very simplistic use of such a system, it does highlight how with the right data you can use it to spot gaps in your approach
Analysis
Most marketing automation platforms will provide a number of ways of viewing your data to give you greater insights into where your leads are coming from. For example, you may be able to set up a custom funnel to see just where your prospects are dropping out. Or you may be able identify just how many touch points they need to go through before they feel comfortable in doing business with you.
Personalisation
A standard feature of nearly every marketing automation suite is the ability to personalise your message, from a simple twitter response to a pre-planned email that could trigger a series of pre-planned responses. The biggest opportunity for increasing your personalisation is that you can hand pick your top prospects to contact personally and start to build a personal rapport.
Lead Management
A number of the top systems use either a lead scoring system or custom thresholds that you can set to determine where in the process a prospect might be. By using such processes you can ensure that the most receptive are fed back into your outbound sales team or appointment generators. Whilst those lower down in the lead scoring system can be identified as such and carefully nurtured until they are ready to be approached.
Time Saving
This is often a big one that is overlooked, with many business owners often looking to save money, especially when the going gets tough. Of course this makes sense, but should saving money be at the cost of losing time?
The modern marketer/business owner is faced with so many options for marketing now it can be hard to identify just where you should be investing your time and money. This can lead to a scenario where it becomes hard to see the trees for the woods. Which can become frustrating and in turn lead to adverse decisions being made that could hurt the business.
By unifying all your campaigns and marketing lists under one platform it will give you level of visibility you may not have achieved before. By setting core tasks and processes to happen automatically will mean that you have the time to work on other aspects of your business or marketing.
Enterprise Level
Eloqua
www.eloqua.com
This is an enterprise level solution that has everything we would expect of such a solution but with the costs reported to be over £25,000 a year it is probably out of reach of most smaller businesses.
SalesForce
www.salesforce.com/uk/
Although they are going to marketing as a CRM/Cloud Solution, they offer just about everything you could possibly want from such a tool including a marketing automation suite. Writing about salesforce would be an article in itself with the depth and breadth of the products available.
Medium/Large Business
Hubspot
www.hubspot.com
This is designed for medium and larger business with packages that scale with usage, like many the pricing system is based on the number of contacts you are managing.
Marketo
uk.marketo.com
Like Hubspot, Marketo offers tiered bands that scale as your marketing scales, but again look at what you need and compare the offerings before you commit to ensure you have the right product.
Small/Medium Business
Infusion Soft
www.infusionsoft.com
Infusionsoft offers work flow processes and a simplified way of managing marketing automation as you would expect from a product targeted at smaller businesses. The costs are also considerably less than the previous providers.
Salesformics
Whilst relatively new to the market they come with a simplified price point and host a number of customisable features to integrate with most marketing tools. Including Mail Chimp, Eventbright, constant contact and Dropbox to name but a few with more integrations being developed all the time.
Contact us to see how we can help your business