Directors in charge of B2B business development may have heard many extraordinary claims in favour of marketing automation. It can increase your marketing ROI, improve the relevance of your brand messages, help you penetrate new markets, increase your lead generation capacity, and boost your conversion rate of leads to sales. It can help you cut the cost of your HR and marketing operation, focus your time more effectively, report results more accurately, and completely eliminate the causes of baldness.
All but one of these claims, by the way, are entirely true. But what is often not fully explained is how smart marketing automation can make your marketing budget go further and improve your results. The efficacy of marketing automation is the way it improves and streamlines four key marketing tasks. Using a marketing automation platform saves dozens of person-hours on these routine tasks, while simultaneously removing human error from the equation and boosting efficiency. This is a powerful formula for success.
Here are the ways in which a marketing automation solution can help:
1) Define Your Strategic Marketing Objectives
A classic problem that always faced marketing and business development teams was how to precisely define their objectives in order to reach their goals in a cost-effective way. The starting point is an understanding of your target market and the profile of the decision-makers you need to reach. This includes analysing how your solutions can resolve the issues faced by your target businesses. Only then is it possible to define goals.
Historically, strategic objectives would come about as a result of many hours spent in meetings and review panels. With marketing automation, they can be established once – and then strategic goals generated at the drop of a hat. This process is especially efficient if done with the assistance of a partner agency working to make marketing automation successful for you.
2) Segment Your Prospect Database
Prospects who end up on your customer database are a broad church, drawn to your website from all sectors of your market. Some may be leads you wish to pursue, and others may not be. Some may or may not be decision-makers in their respective companies. So, one of the most labour-intensive tasks of traditional marketing is to segment your prospects based on potential worth, receptivity and spending habits. A marketing automation platform can carry out this process accurately with a fraction of the input. This enables you to carefully create relevant content that will be effective for all the different buyer groups in your database.
3) Schedule Your Content
Physically sending out marketing content, whether in the form of emails, blog posts or social media updates, is a labour-intensive task. One of the most effective marketing automation solutions is the ability to schedule content at the most effective times, while cutting out all the time that used to be wasted on the process, and not waste time with ‘prospects’ who are unlikely to buy
4) Track Your Results
How to tell if your marketing campaign has been successful: by tracking your results based on the goals you set at the outset. When doing this manually, analysis is neither a quick nor an easy process. Results typically come in piecemeal over the course of a few weeks or months. There has to be a reliable mechanism in place to tie results to a specific campaign, as opposed to other causes. Moreover, success is often measured by a combination of metrics; such as keyword search position, new leads, web traffic volume, conversion rate, total monetary gain and ROI. Compiling these stats into spreadsheets and crunching the figures for accurate results used to take days upon days of effort.
Marketing automation software can allocate and sync data from content campaigns directly onto your platform, including email open rates, web page views and social media shares. This gives you instant access to an enormous variety of reports, graphs and analytics, all of which can be customised to suit the goals of your campaign.
Innovation Rather Than Reinvention
You will notice from this article that none of these tasks are anything new. That is the key thing about marketing automation. It isn’t a magic wand and doesn’t try to reinvent the wheel. Instead, it takes tried and tested methodologies that have worked well for years, then automates and supercharges them by means of powerful software and web-based applications. The results from using these solutions are compelling. If you would like to find out more about what marketing automation can achieve for your business, please get in touch with one of our team for an informal chat.
