A GUIDE TO MARKETING AUTOMATION

What is Marketing Automation:

Marketing automation is a process where a software platform helps you to automate your marketing and sales engagement to generate more leads and take better measures for marketing success. It automates and measures marketing tasks and workflows so that companies can increase operational efficiency more effectively and grow revenue faster. It replaces old manual and repetitive marketing processes through gearing more efficiency and effective progress.

Why use Marketing Automation:

• Builds trust with your audience: Trust is one of the very important reasons why a customer chooses any company to buy any product or have any services.An automated marketing campaign that is pre-programmed into the system can help build trust in your product or service much quicker than the traditional routes.
• Build interest in your product or service: Constant marketing and awareness are very important for developing a brand into a known and successful venture. The issue comes where companies are not being able to reach and scale every lead and follow-up. Automation of your marketing helps to get higher level of consistency and it is achieved along with an increase in the conversion rate which must be implemented properly.
• Helps after service customer retention and generate more leads: Customer Retention has been proved to be much cheaper than acquiring new customers and hence should be very important for every company. Post sale or providing service, it is very important to conduct a customer review. 88% customers trust online reviews as much as a personal recommendation. When the service or the product has been delivered, it’s the perfect time to be asking for a review and introduce the customer to your referral scheme. Marketing automation also helps here with several customer management and referral services to enhance more and more lead generation.

Role of Marketing Automation and how can it help you:

Marketing Automation helps you in:

• Generate more lead
• Prioritize leads
• Nurture those leads to a sales-ready state
• Management of all digital marketing campaigns
• Generate report on lead efficiency rates.

Who should use Marketing Automation:

Marketing automation is for the companies with a large number of leads and follow-ups often tend to mess up with the database or gets misleading which in turn compromises marketing goals. Hence, marketing automation helps to control and manage a big amount of marketing workflow for these companies.

It is even very important for the people with small companies having a few leads and follow-ups. Marketing automation helps them nurturing and generating more leads and follow-ups for them in a very cost-efficient manner in a very efficient and effective manner. Hence, no matter if it’s a large or a small scale company, marketing automation is for all, and if implemented correctly can be a very powerful tool.

Benefits of Marketing Automation:

1. Lead Nurturing: Set-up customized, automated engagement tracks that free up time to focus on important leads, preventing early-stage leads from slipping through.
2. Easy Data Collection: Easily collection of important data prospect information using forms and custom landing pages.
3. Cost Efficient: Automating repetitive tasks will help improve productivity and efficiency in an effective manner without engaging and hiring more and more people to manually work upon it.
4. Enhances Communication and Collaboration: All the communication and collaboration is automated and hence companies no need to rely on employees for constant follow-ups.
5. Lead analytics: No longer chasing down dead ends. Automated analytics shows leads having interest in you, and follow up with only those generated better customer turn-ups.
6. Overall Analytics: Gives you overall analytics that generates reports including how well marketing automation campaigns are working, and where leads are coming from.

Challenges of Marketing Automation:

Ref: https: //www.i-scoop.eu/marketing-automation-fails-role-vendors-content/

Important statistics of Marketing Automation:

Ref: https://www.marketo.com/marketing-automation/

95% of companies reported some benefit from marketing automation. They found that companies can expect to achieve an increase in marketing staff productivity between 1.5 and 6.9% and increase sales productivity by an average of 4%.

Important Steps to perform while doing Marketing Automation:

1. Create targeted content that directly addresses your customers’ demands. That content should be extremely high-quality, entertaining, engaging, & shareable.
2. As you build out marketing automation strategy, you will learn more about your leads. Use this information to empower your company to re-invest that data into refining your marketing strategy. Use marketing automation software to streamline this process.
3. Update regularly to market trends for your marketing and analytics software to communicate effectively with each other. This integration will help ensure that your brand is delivering the right marketing messages to the right audiences at the right time.
4. Build qualified and targeted traffic to be successful in their marketing. We want to attract audiences who will ultimately become happy, long-term customers (who will refer other customers).
5. Once you have visitors on your portal, the next step is to convert them as customers. Start collecting information about them. Once you start building an organic customer content, you can start reaching out to your customers and prospects in a better way so that you can re-engage them through your content.
6. Make sure to maintain relationships with customers for various long-time benefits.

Closed-Loop Marketing

What is Closed-Loop Marketing?

As per Hubspot, Closed-Loop Marketing is a process by which Sales reports back the status on the leads generated and provided by Marketing.

In the scenario of Marketing Automation + CRM(Salesforce.com) environment, a solution should be provided which is based on integrating both the systems and applying Analytics and Reporting on top of it to provide a feedback to Marketing department about the leads they provided to Sales in the CRM. In the absence of a Closed Loop Marketing solution, Marketing department never receives the feedback on the leads they provided to Sales and thereby cannot improve their processes or the quality of leads.

Integrating Marketing Automation with CRM for Closed-Loop Marketing:

Important Checkouts:

• Marketing automation should be—first and foremost—driven by value.
• Care about your customers. Send them marketing messages that generate interest.
• Always be looking for opportunities to listen to feedback.
• Stop promotional blasts, and focus on ways to pull audiences close to your brand. Marketing automation means targeting the right users with the right message at the right time in their buying journeys, hence avoid spamming.
• Monitor and analyze feedbacks on regular basis with an objective eye.
• When executed well, marketing automation can help build strong prospect customer relationships. Depending on your company’s marketing model, a single lead can be worth upward other million leads.

CloudFountain Inc. is CRM consulting firm with expertise in providing CRM+Marketing Automation solutions for SMB clients. We would be extremely glad to receive feedback from you.