According to Hubspot, a leading marketing automation software company, marketing automation is:
“At its best, marketing automation is software and tactics that allow companies to buy and sell like Amazon – that is, to nurture prospects with highly personalized, useful content that helps convert prospects to customers and turn customers into delighted customers. This type of marketing automation typically generates significant new revenue for companies, and provides an excellent return on the investment required.”
But what does that actually mean for your marketing department?
1. Productivity
What Marketing automation allows your team to do is simplify routine marketing tasks. Marketing automation allows a department to easily create and manage this quantity of tasks. Operating a full campaign and multiple campaigns, becomes a simpler task in the department. One person in the team can become the equivalent of multiple marketing employees, allowing other personnel in the department to focus on tasks that require more manual monitoring such as responding to social media comments and organising print media.
Along with the ease of use (no coding or design experience is required using the Hubspot software for example), marketing automation also improves lead qualification as leads can be prioritised within the software. This makes it easy for the sales team to rank the leads your department has generated by interest level in a certain product or a specific action, such as filling out landing page form or interaction in a workflow.
2. Automate Workflows
To get the best results from marketing automation a wide range of assets are needed. In every successful inbound marketing campaign these areas are required:
- Website
- Form
- Calls-to-action (CTAs)
- Landing pages
- Offers
Marketing automation enables your department to bring all of these lead generation areas together.Marketing automation enables your department to bring all of these lead generation areas together.
The ability to smoothly move a potential customer through the buyer’s journey is incredibly powerful. The nurturing ability of workflow automation allows for follow up emails and increased information to be sent, as needed, on a pre-scheduled basis. This nurturing helps to bring in leads to the sales department that have already been qualified.
Listen to Will & Dave discuss Marketing Automation further in this podcast:
3. More Revenue
As with any software investment, marketing automation can be a costly purchase. Once set up, If used to its full potential, marketing automation is guaranteed to be well worth the initial investment.
What marketing automation allows you and your department to do is nurture and educate your buyer, from initial contact to well after purchase of your product or service. This delighted, knowledgeable customer will stick around, and even bring others to your business by referral - resulting in increased lead generation for the sales team and increased revenue for the business.
Using marketing automation, your marketers are able to provide content that addresses whatever issue a potential customer is experiencing at each point in the decision making process. Once a lead arrives at the sales team, they are much more qualified and ready to purchase, but also are ready to purchase more, as they are trusting of your company due to your marketing automation efforts.
To find out more about marketing automation, JDR have these articles to explain even more: Marketing Automation Articles
4. Retain More Customers
Customer acquisition is important to any business, but especially for your marketing department. For continued growth to occur, a company must focus on customer retention, and this falls into the remit of any marketing department. It is proven that the cost of keeping an existing customer is much less than that of acquiring a new customer. Marketing automation has the power to make customer retention a major part of your business. The marketing intelligence of automation allows you to have a greater understanding of customer intent. This gives you better insight into what the customer’s next move might be. Then, being one step ahead, you can satisfy those needs before they even know to ask for it.
5. Understanding The Value
Marketing automation software gives you and your marketing department the tools necessary to track and monitor each step of a marketing campaign. Tracking your campaign closely allows you to see what is working and what isn’t. For example, what CTAs are converting, and what CTAs need to be updated or stopped to get maximum lead generation. It is important that the sales and marketing team are aligned throughout each campaign. With the tracking abilities of marketing automation, keeping your data fully visible to sales and marketing teams is easy.
Marketing automation allows your department to streamline, move leads effectively through the buyers journey, increase customer retention for your business and ultimately increase revenue for the business.
