Five Problems Marketing Automation Platforms Help your Business to Solve
This article explains how investing in a marketing automation platform can help your business tackle some of the most pressing and complex problems faced by sales and marketing teams.
The combination of sky-high customer expectations, fierce online competition and unwieldy sets of customer data has presented marketers with some sizeable challenges.
Marketing automation software can help organisations plan and execute campaigns by automating the send of the most relevant messaging to the most suitable customers at the best possible time. These platforms can also help with reporting, so that marketers can determine what approaches have been most effective and refine their strategy accordingly.
This article explains how investing in a marketing automation platform can help your business tackle some of the most pressing and complex problems faced by sales and marketing teams.
#1 Low-quality leads
For the sales team, ensuring lead quality is one of the biggest challenges of all. Low-quality leads waste time on the part of the sales team, and money in terms of lost efficiency. How do you ensure your leads are ready to take your call, and avoid reaching out to those who are not interested in your service?
A marketing automation platform can help eliminate low-quality leads in a number of ways. Firstly, the company’s most suitable prospects, i.e., those who are most interested in your business, are selected from the outset. Automated tools, including integrated lead capture forms, SEO audits and scheduled social promotions, can draw in your most engaged potential customers.
The next step is lead nurturing. After these prospects are converted into leads, automated email campaigns can keep them warm by delivering the content and resources that are most relevant to them, depending on their previous activity, and at the right time.
Finally, lead scoring gives the sales team a better understanding of these higher quality leads based on their previous behaviour, enabling more meaningful conversations with them when it is time to get in touch.
#2 High customer churn rate
It costs far more to get a new customer than it does to keep a customer you already have, so for any business it makes sense to invest in retaining existing customers.
A marketing automation platform can help a business keep customers in much the same way that it can help land and nurture qualified leads. Fundamentally, marketing automation is a means of maintaining relationships with potential or current customers by sending them the right messaging at the right time, based on what you know about them.
It allows marketing teams to move customers through the sales funnel at a cadence that suits them by sending them the right content at the right time. Continue to send them material they engage with, and they will be more likely to return to you for thought leadership or advice.
Marketing automation also makes it possible to set personalised trigger emails, which can be sent to certain customers after they take a certain action.
#3 Maintaining a consistent brand presence
Customers will arrive at your website via different devices, or interact with your business through a variety of channels.
You want the customer to see the same brand identity, no matter where they’re interacting with you from, and this is particularly important if you are a business operating from several different territories.
Marketing automation lets you manage your brand identity, by allowing marketing teams to centrally control their brand visuals, create approved templates, and distribute them to other teams in the business so that a consistent brand identity is maintained.
#4 Difficulty demonstrating ROI
A marketing automation platform facilitates a data-driven approach to planning campaigns and measuring performance, allowing the marketing team to determine the impact of specific actions and demonstrate to the C-suite which of these are directly linked to revenue.
This approach makes it possible for marketers to make better informed decisions that align with company goals. It also allows them to be more ambitious with their own long-term goals, as they can be more confident of achieving them. Reporting capabilities ensure that everyone in the company is kept up-to-date with the performance of their latest campaigns.
#5 Siloed customer data
Although the sales and marketing teams, broadly speaking, work to the same goal – to increase company revenue – the teams’ access to different types of data about their customers may lead to different views on what actions are best for reaching this goal.
A marketing automation platform offers greater alignment between these teams by bringing together the data they each hold. This allows them to share their knowledge and better understand what each is doing so they can co-operate on providing the best possible experience for the customer.
Marketing automation can also bring harmony between the sales and marketing teams by facilitating a two-way communication between them. If the sales team has a hand in determining how leads should be scored and contacted, they’ll have more faith in the marketing process. Conversely, marketing can gain a better understanding of the sales team’s challenges and how they have observed leads to respond to brand messaging, and so create their content marketing campaigns accordingly.
For a better understanding of how marketing automation can help your business deal with its most pressing problems, as well as guidance on how to get buy-in from the C-suite, download Act-On’s report The Business Case for Marketing Automation.