The ability to generate leads is essential for the continued success of any business. Today, marketing automation is the best way to do that, as well being ideal for increasing sales and improving market penetration. When a marketing automation system is used, potential customers who already have an interest in your products can be identified and targeted with your campaigns. But what would an ideal marketing automation system look like?
An ideal automated marketing system should include a completely transparent signup process. By this, we mean providing the additional information prospects may be looking for in exchange for their contact information. It’s important to be honest with prospects at all times, but especially at this stage. Therefore, they will need to be made aware that they will receive further communication as a result of leaving their details.
Although a visitor may be willing to provide their contact details via a website, they may still be a long way from feeling comfortable about being contacted directly. It really depends on what you are selling, what information is contained on your landing page, and how well that content has been written.
You will need to nurture your prospects over time before they are ready for a direct sales approach. One way do this is to send a series of scheduled, automated emails. A marketing automation platform can be used to contact a lead to thank them for their interest in your product, and then ask them if they have any other questions or concerns about it which your landing page may not have answered.
Ideally, this kind of automated nurturing system would be able to accommodate several stages of messaging and be flexible enough to handle the individual requirements of different categories of prospects.
Believe it or not, the way in which your prospects’ information is managed makes a big difference to the number of leads you ultimately end up with. When all of the information supplied by prospects is automatically sent to a CRM database, your sales team have all of the information they need to turn that prospect into a qualified lead. Instantly, your team members can see not only the name and details of the prospect, but also their areas of interest. This level of information relevancy is instrumental in our ideal marketing automation system.
The ideal automated marketing platform offers seamless integration of the entire CMS system. We’re not talking about tacking on a CRM to an existing system and only using it for the management of contacts; we mean integrating the system fully so that all aspects of it can be used. This is the key to an ideal automated marketing system.
Full integration means that the sales and order processing departments are always connected. This allows for information to flow freely between departments. When information flow is uninterrupted, sales quotations can be based on information that’s current, accurate and real. Information about current prices, delivery times and stock can be instantly gathered and provided, leaving prospects with no surprises about what they’ll receive as customers.
Unlike the old days when sales forecasting could be compared to looking into a crystal ball, today’s marketing automation systems allow you to predict with a high degree of certainty what your leads will do. Our idea of the ultimate automated marketing system is one where you can forecast your sales based on where a prospect is in the sales process, and allocate their probability of becoming a customer based on known parameters, instead of guessing where they may be headed next.
If you want to know more about how marketing automation can benefit your B2B campaigns, help is available at no cost to you. Our marketing automation eBook contains everything you need to know to streamline your campaign and achieve a level of automation that will keep leads coming to you round the clock. Get more from your marketing today by clicking here to download our marketing automation guide.
In Hubspot we feel we have discovered the ideal marketing automation application that fulfils all the functions described in this article and a whole lot more. You can find out more about Hubspot by visiting their website here, or by reading the introductory articles posted on our blog. To chat with one of our team, give us a call on 01332 343 281.