What is Marketing Automation and How can it Help Grow your Business?

The traditional forms of marketing and lead generation are changing rapidly, thanks to new technology and methods that are proving to be more effective. While the reliance on the sales funnel model will probably not change much, how the funnel is filled is definitely evolving.

This is due in a large part to marketing automation.

If your company is not yet taking advantage of marketing automation, now is the time to take a serious look at implementing it.

What is Marketing Automation

First, it’s important to understand what marketing automation is in order to better learn how it can help you. As the name implies, it’s a system where repetitive processes are automated in order to make your digital marketing campaigns more efficient and intelligent. Instead of the traditional means of finding new leads, nurturing them and working towards the sale, software platforms such as those offered by Hubspot and Marketo handle all this. This is an ideal example of how Software as a Service (SaaS) can work for your company.

What You Can Do With Marketing Automation

There are numerous tasks that can be automated with this type of software. In the early stages of your campaign, you can use it to help generate demand for your content with keyword research and SEO tools, as well accessing competitor analysis. This quickly gives you the information you need to make sure your inbound marketing campaigns have the best chance of success. Next, you can utilize the platform for creating effective landing pages that convert website traffic into qualified leads.

Once you have this capability, marketing automation then helps you score your leads and helps you decide how best to nurture each of these leads using automated email to deliver relevant content at each stage of the buying cycle. Instead of relying on outdated lead development methods, you now have a fully featured suite at your fingertips that can help you learn more about your individual leads and this, in turn, helps you quickly build an individualized strategy to help close that sale.

Taking Advantage of New Marketing Methods

The big push in internet marketing right now is focusing on social media marketing. It’s an incredibly powerful medium, but it’s also time-consuming. Instead of paying someone to manually post on your profiles on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and other social sites, you can utilize marketing automation to help drive your social marketing campaigns.

Making Traditional Methods More Effective

This type of application doesn’t leave old marketing methods behind, however. Email marketing, for example, still has a huge part to play and when executed correctly, is still one of the most effective ways of marketing your product and nurturing your leads. When you can automate your email marketing, you are making your campaigns work harder for you and with measurable results and returns.

Analyzing Your Results

You need to know how every aspect of your marketing campaigns are performing and you need this information in a timely fashion to ensure that all of your efforts are as successful as you would like them to be. Marketing automation suites also offer the ability to analyze your results immediately.

Need to see how your demand generation is doing? You’ll get the results at a glance.

Need to know how well your social campaigns and landing pages are doing? No more waiting to find out.

With this type of application, you have more information at your fingertips which means you can make better decisions and truly fine-tune your campaign for success.

CRM Tools

One proven way to improve your marketing campaigns is through the use of a powerful customer relationship management suite. These applications contain robust CRM tools that help you manage your leads more effectively.

What This All Means For Your Bottom Line

At the end of the day, with any type of marketing method, you need to see the return on investment (ROI). While content marketing still remains difficult to quantify, when you are utilizing marketing automation tools, you’re getting a much better picture of your campaign and you can control all of the aspects of the campaign to ensure that it is more profitable.

You’re also ensuring that by automating repetitive tasks, you won’t be spending more money on managing employees to handle the same tasks. For a business owner, this is a win-win situation. The costs are less and the results are better and easier to manage.

Where It Is Heading

Marketing Automation is quickly becoming an accepted means of improving a marketing campaign and its being implemented from FTSE 100 and Fortune 500 companies all the way down to the sole consultant. It’s going to continue to evolve and improve as demand grows and you’ll be able to reap all the benefits mentioned above as developers find new ways to automate even more aspects of your digital marketing campaigns.

Could your business benefit from;

• Greater marketing accountability?
• The ability to generate more and better-qualified leads?
• A way to measure and increase the effectiveness of marketing?
• A tool set to deepen relationships with existing and new customers?
• Better metrics and reports?

…. then talk to us about marketing automation. As an agency we are able to offer clients significant discounts on the leading software automation solutions!