What Is Marketing Automation? How Can It Help Your Marketing Department? 5 Areas Marketing Automation Will Help You Succeed

The market leading marketing automation software company Hubspot, states that marketing automation is:

“At its best, marketing automation is software and tactics that allow companies to buy and sell like Amazon – that is, to nurture prospects with highly personalized, useful content that helps convert prospects to customers and turn customers into delighted customers. This type of marketing automation typically generates significant new revenue for companies, and provides an excellent return on the investment required.”

That sounds brilliant right? What does marketing automation mean for you and your marketing team?

1. Do More With Your Marketing

One of the best features that marketing automation allows you and your marketing team to do is simplify marketing tasks that can take up valuable time in your week. Tiresome manual processes are eliminated by replacing them with automated solutions.

This allows you to easily create and manage a larger amount of campaigns that run at the same time to boost your lead generation for the sales team. One person can become the equivalent of several marketing employees, allowing other members of the marketing team to focus on tasks that required more manual supervising.

PLUS - Using marketing automation software such as Hubspot will also enable your team to improve its lead qualification by knowing where, when and what prospects have been doing with your company’s marketing. For example, when they opened an email, what landing page form they filled out and what content they downloaded such as an eBook. This then gives your sales team the ability to tailor their sales approach.

To find out more about marketing automation, the team at JDR have written over 30 articles on marketing automation. Find out more - JDR Marketing Automation.

2. Workflows That Work For You

To get the maximum potential from marketing automation, you need to ensure that you have a wide range of assets working together in harmony to get the best results. To name a few:

• Landing Pages
• Forms
• Calls to Action
• Offers/Content

Marketing automation software gives you the ability to effortlessly move a prospect through the buyer journey from awareness stage to the decision stage using the assets above. Using powerful software allows for follow up emails and increased information to be sent as needed, on a pre-scheduled basis in the form of workflows, once the prospect enters the buyer journey. This nurturing helps to bring in leads and delight current customers.

3. More Turnover

Firstly, the decision to take up marketing automation shouldn’t be done with haste. As you can image the initial software costs can be high, but when used to its full potential will reap its rewards for your business tenfold.

Marketing automation allows you to nurture and educate your buyer. This delighted, well-informed customer will stick around and even bring others to your business by referral - resulting in increased revenue and profit margin per sale.

PLUS - Using marketing automation, marketers are able to deliver content that addresses whatever problem a prospect is facing at each point in the decision making process. By the time a lead reaches the sales team, they are not only much more qualified and ready to buy, but it has been proven that they are willing to make larger purchase with the company due to the level of trust achieved before they even speak to a member of the business.

4. Retain More Customers

Customer acquisition is vital to any business, but for continued growth, a business must focus its efforts on customer retention to ensure a healthy business. We all know that the cost of keeping an existing customer is a lot less than the cost of acquiring a new customer.  Marketing automation excels in customer retention, with content workflows and monitoring helping increase your retention by keeping your customers happy.

5. Easily Track Value

Marketing automation allows you and your marketing team the ability to monitor and make changes to certain parts of the workflow that are clearly underperforming. You can easily see, for example, which CTA is generating the most traffic to a landing page and which CTA needs to be changed or stopped in order to maximise the lead generation. Learn more about how to create effective CTAs with this great article - Four Tips for Developing Effective Call to Action Buttons.

PLUS - In order to enhance the outcomes of a campaign, allowing all key members of the sales team to view the results will be key. It is vital that the sales and marketing team are united throughout each campaign. Marketing automation allows the results to viewed and reported on very easily.

Adding marketing automation into your marketing and sales process will, without any doubt, increase your business turnover. It can be a big decision to implement marketing automation into your business, but by using the points above you can maximise the return on investment from marketing automation.