Marketing automation: what is it and what does it mean to your business?
You’ve invested time, energy and money into great products and promoted them through your company’s website, but have you invested in the data you’ve collected from your marketing campaigns to engage with your customers at every stage of the buying process?
In recent years large corporations have significantly increased their focus on the data that the Internet provides them about their customers. They have evolved their marketing strategy to include the power of social media, blogging trends, electronic newsletters and content specific advertising, to name a few. But, how do they achieve this and why are they spending their valuable time and effort on marketing automation?
Marketing automation allows companies, of any size, not only to integrate all their online tools, such as email marketing, landing pages, online forms, sales CRM and blog into one single powerful platform, but to also run complex marketing campaigns and connect with their customers in a highly personalised way. It allows your business to automate individual and personalised communication with your customers without manual intervention thus saving time and money, shortening sales cycles, prioritising leads and optimising marketing campaigns.
A staggering 451% increase in qualified leads has been reported (by The Annuitas Group) through the use of marketing automation to nurture the experience of prospects.
Successful companies transform their data into campaigns that are personally focused on the individual rather than blasting out mass generic notifications. In fact, Amazon has been using this winning strategy for many years. However the recent introduction of Marketing Automation systems means that a team of programmers and data miners are now no longer required to achieve these same results. The automation of targeted marketing and the ability to analyse website visitor data has become available and affordable for even the smallest of businesses.
1. Automated Personalised Email
Let’s look at emails for example. Does your company send the same generic email to all of it customers? Lead nurturing emails and the development of relationships with customers has had proven success with best-in-class companies using it 2 x more often than less successful companies (68% vs 27% according to EmailMonday). These companies focus their marketing and communication efforts on listening to the needs of prospects and providing them with information and answers they really want, rather than the information they think they want. Through automated tailoring of emails to clients your company can provide the right information at critical decision points, creating a unique buying experience and contacting them at the moment they are ready to buy.
2. Lead Identification, Analysis and Filtering
What about all the data you have regarding customers or potential customers obtained through your website that we mentioned earlier. Marketing Automation tools will analyse the vast amounts of data your website receives and transform it in into credible leads converting to sales. Additionally, that information can be used to engage with your customers based on their Internet usage traits, such as where they click and what motivated them to click there. The system will map every interaction your customer has online with your company, such as visiting a page, completing a form, or downloading a brochure, and engage with them personally at each interaction (also known as a ‘trigger’). These details can be fed into a list of top leads via a point scoring system, and when the lead reaches a certain score it identifies it as ‘hot’ and this is the point where it can be contacted by a member of your sales team.
3. Dynamic Web Content
Additionally, the information about visitors to your website can be automated to seamlessly transform your web landing pages based on the visitors’ interests and attributes. These tools allow you to build powerful landing pages and dynamic web content, with very little need for programmers or developers and you will not need to modify your existing website!
4. Powerful Reporting Analytics
The analytics dashboard of Marketing Automation systems, goes one step further than Google Analytics in that it shows end-to-end ROI of individual customer accounts, right from when they first visited your website, through each campaign conversion, right up to the final sale, even if it happens weeks or months later, making marketing managers and departments directly accountable for revenue growth. It can project the expected value of the pipeline and the total lifetime of the customer, so you can forecast future performance.
5. Automated Marketing Infrastructure
Is your organisation like many of the other companies out there, which have a clear idea of how they want to promote themselves, but yet 63% have identified they don’t have the infrastructure to support it (Smart Insights)? Effective, lead generating digital marketing and its infrastructure is now affordable for even the smallest businesses, allowing you to get the best out of your data and get a competitive edge over the top performing companies.
Why should your company use automated marketing?
When considering marketing automation solutions it’s essential to understand the key benefits and what to expect from the tools. As the growth of social media continues, in parallel, automated targeted marketing continues to evolve, as such the features and tools available in these solutions continue to advance with the scope of progressing far beyond improving productivity by automating repetitive tasks undertaken by a marketing department. It can reap additional benefits some of which include:
- Saves time and staff resources
- Optimises marketing processes
- Increases qualified leads
- Reduces sales cycles
- Improves customer retention and builds relationships
- Improves efficiency, for example you can create multiple campaigns in advance and schedule them for automatic publication
- Maintains consistency – through automation of posts on Facebook, tweets, blogs, etc. all sending the same campaign message
- Improves accountability and demonstrates ROI
As marketing automation continues to mature the competition does as well. Today there are many solutions and companies available to meet your automated marketing needs and a few of the top leaders include Marketo, Hubspot, and Pardot, to name a few. However, ArayoWeb has recently launched a marketing automation tool, which competes with the best of them, but also comes at a much lower price with no contract. Find out more information on our marketing automation tool here and to request a personal demonstration.
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