Who Needs Marketing Automation?
What type of business will benefit from marketing automation?
You must agree that near enough every business has engaged with digital marketing in some form or another. Whether that is having a website, not necessarily responsive but have one at least, in 2016, using social media, emails and blogs – albeit not regular and often too short BUT nevertheless they are using digital marketing. Some might even be using SEO to increase their rankings and get found online.
Those businesses that are warm to using digital marketing and see the benefits in paying a professional to do it; are now moving further into the digital marketing world, encompassing traditional marketing still – as one should but also utilising email marketing, landing pages, paid search, paid social media advertising and extras like analytics, heat maps and more.
However, those that have seen the benefits of a powerful digital marketing campaign, with an effective return on investment are now wanting more and are getting it from inbound marketing services.
Inbound marketing is a more powerful and effective solution to current digital marketing trends using marketing automation to increase effectiveness of sales and marketing teams and increasing inbound leads. Cold calls, an outbound service is becoming a thing of the past with any outbound calls now highly effective as your outbound marketing team can now monitor who is visiting your website and downloading content you provide them.
Marketing automation is a method of automating time consuming services enabling more effective time management and skills on rewarding services.
Whether your business is B2B (business to business) or B2C (business to consumer) – businesses taking up marketing automation are seeing remarkable growth in quality lead generation, achieving faster and higher sales conversions and seen cost effective savings in time and management services in running marketing campaigns.
Facts
- Spinnaker – Case Study
- 250% increase in the number of people completing and submitting the “contact us” form
- $100,000 in marketing qualified sales opportunities in just 16 weeks
- iCharts – Case Study
- 20-fold increase in leads and sales opportunities monthly
- RM Hoffman – Case Study
- Doubled the volume of traffic to their websites
- Generated a 33% increase in sales leads year-over-year
- Grew year-end sales revenue by 15%
So, does your business need marketing automation? Should you invest in a marketing automation platform – here is how to find out.
If You Are A Startup Business:
Flexible pricing – Marketing automation software simple pricing models that can help with any growing and restrictive budget. A startup can grow effectively and use a low cost model and increase as their budget grows.
Effective database management – marketing automation has a high focus on email marketing and helps startups in developing and growing the contact databases. By utilising analytics and reporting options, the effectiveness of a campaign can be improved by reporting data on email open rates, click throughs and extra information like social shares, times and how many times opened. This data can then be used to segment leads, setup automated processes, send out further relevant and informative content and further nurture these contacts into warm leads.
Reduced costs of marketing teams – by using marketing automation software, to automate mass marketing services and automate time consuming tasks, marketing departments can be streamlined.
If You Are A SMB (Small To Medium Business)
SMB focused marketing solutions – Marketing automation software can be cost managed to produce effective automated marketing campaigns to small and medium businesses (SMBs).
Supports increasing website traffic of SMBs – Monitoring the effectiveness and ROI (return on investment) from any digital marketing campaign can be daunting. Finding out what is working – blogging, social media, email marketing and more can be time consuming and then following up on leads, and scoring these leads for effective outbound calls can be costly. With marketing automation these tasks can be simple and less time consuming – helping costs.
Increased drip marketing, more conversions – Marketing automation software enables simple building of landing pages, effective and quality emails, and enables detailed coordination of campaign data ensuring analytics of leads’ journeys through your marketing campaign. Features such as lead scoring, nurturing, automated response emails, helps in spreading brand awareness and sales conversions.
Reduced Marketing Budgets – Inbound marketing campaigns can be A/B tested to improve campaigns by testing the conversion and open rates of emails and landing pages by using the software’s built in analytics.
If You Are A Large Business
Manage multiple campaigns and websites – Powerful analytical data provided by automated software can prove the leads produced from email marketing, outbound marketing – content, blogs and social media. The data can show which posts work best, which landing pages have converted the most, which downloads are most read and which emails provide the best link openings
Manage large databases – By connecting with your CRM (Contact Relationship Management software) data can be streamlined and cold or dead contacts eliminated from the email marketing process. The lists can be grown and reduced effectively with reduced time consuming labour intensive hours. Lists can be purchased or obtained from forms for downloaded content and pdfs.
Customer segmentation – IF your business provides different services, possibly to different countries, segmentation can be setup to ensure that relevant content and language types can be sent to the relevant contacts. So, a person in France will only be sent information in French and relevant for their country.
Lead Sourcing – by using marketing automation software, leads can be targeted to different departments, individual sales people and monitoring for results and effectiveness.
Business working as one – quite often large businesses can be disjointed but by combining and aligning marketing and sales, each can see the work of the other and the business can be seen as one working unit.
These are just some of the benefits of marketing automation used in various sized businesses. If you are looking for a software for your inbound marketing campaigns, consider if you have a big enough team to manage it in house, or need to outsource to a dedicated agency. Choosing the software provider will be down to your budget and personal choice but Act-On are the fastest growing marketing automation software provider in the World and are increasing their content – provided free – and services to become the number one in 2016. The likes of PArdot or Hubspot and other,s can be more costly and difficult to leave if you decide that they are not for you.
Original Article