Marketing Automation - What Is It?
Over the past 12 months, digital marketing folk across the globe have been talking about marketing automation like it’s the most important thing since sliced bread.
They may have a point, but what actually is it? Google’s search tools show that traffic for the term ‘Marketing Automation’ has risen by 40% in the last year, but why and what’s all the fuss about?
As a digital agency, we get asked this a lot by clients. If it’s your first time reading about marketing automation, don’t worry it’s not about robots and you’ll still be in a job. We’ve put a few basic steps together to help you understand. Let’s take a look at what it’s all about.
What is it?
In a nutshell, marketing automation is software that allows businesses to target prospects online and provide them with highly personalised and useful content over a period of time which will eventually nurture them into conversions or customers. By using marketing automation in this way, businesses can see significant increases to their revenue or goal completions; the ideal return on investment.
Check out Hubspot’s great analogy for marketing automation –
Imagine you’re trying to grow a plant. First you need fertile soil ripe for the growth of your plant. Next you need seeds themselves to care for, and last you need water and light in order to nurture those seeds into a lush, blooming plant. It’s not foolproof, but it’s not impossible. In our story, effective marketing automation looks just like nurturing this plant does. At the end of the day, we hope we’ve nurtured our leads (the seedlings) well enough to produce actual paying customers (a lush, full-grown plant.)”
Marketing automation software allows you to create, deploy and automate online marketing campaigns and sales activities that increase revenue and maximise efficiency. Think of it as a set of tools that will help to streamline time consuming tasks such as automating a lead qualification process, reaching out to existing customers with certain behaviours or creating a dashboard for your digital campaign.
How it is generally being used at present?
There is definitely a huge buzz around marketing automation at the moment. Marketing bods across the world often invest in expensive marketing automation software believing that all of the tools they need to grow their business online will be included. However, this isn’t the case as many marketers ending up with very complicated and powerful marketing automation tools, which work for existing customers in the middle of their funnel but doesn’t provide a solution for generating new leads and nurturing those potential prospects (the whole purpose of using marketing automation!).
Many of those working at digital agencies or in-house will often buy lists of email addresses and target them rather than focussing on developing future inbound leads. This may seem like a quick fix, but it’s a very short-term solution and won’t help to create that established relationship that you need to make with your potential customers.
In essence, organisations delivering thousands of emails to addresses that have no idea who, how, or why they are being contacted will quickly become known as spammers and find a poor return on their investment. This is why for your marketing automation to be a success, you need to build it around genuine leads.
Working with your CRM
If you find yourself thinking that marketing automation may be what your business needs, then integrating it with your existing CRM system is a necessity. Your CRM system should already be an essential part of your business operations allowing you to track and access your customer data and other important metrics. Integrating your current CRM system with marketing automation software can allow you to get an even better understanding of these customers by tracking how they respond to your campaigns or their behaviour on site, and provide alerts if these consumers are showing potential goal completion behaviour and much more.
This is why it’s incredibly important to use both your existing data and organic leads rather than purchasing lists as mentioned previously.
Does your business need to invest in marketing automation?
Let’s split this down into a few key questions which are worth asking yourself –
Q. Do you currently have a healthy flow of organic leads for your business to target?
Q. Have you thought about a content strategy that goes hand in hand with a potential customers journey?
Q. Do you know what conversations need to be had with prospects and at which point?
Q. Are you using any analytics software to track what your leads are doing and where they are engaging with your business online?
These are all great signals to show that marketing automation could work very well for your business. By using it within your current overall marketing strategy, it has the potential to be very effective.
Successful marketing automation
In order to ensure that your marketing automation strategy is successful, there needs to be a lot of thought put into it.
Hubspot have defined two key principles that they believe are vital to keep in mind when creating a strategy to engage your customers.
Recognizing that marketing automation does not do marketing and lead generation for you, but can help scale your successful efforts.
The first step is building a pipeline of good fit leads by generating relevant, optimized content that speaks to your prospect’s needs and challenges. This is where inbound marketing becomes the building blocks of your marketing funnel.
Centering your marketing messages around the real, live person at the receiving end of your campaigns.
That means we should treat them like a real person, not a fragmented self across different tools like email, social media, etc. If we can leverage all the marketing tools, channels and behavioral data possible to paint a complete picture of a person, we can nurture them based on their unique challenges and interests, not based solely on the emails they open or click through.
How do I know which marketing automation software to choose?
There are already hundreds of start-ups offering marketing automation services and software for businesses. Many of these are extremely expensive and difficult to get a grip of, despite how easy they claim it is to use.
If you’re considering using marketing automation software, these key features are worth keeping an eye out for –
CRM Integration – Easily integrate with your existing CRM system and help the marketing and sales areas of your business communicate easier.
Lead Nurturing – Automate that frustrating process of lead qualification and keep their engagement high with automated content.
Email Marketing – Target particular groups with personalised content for further engagement.
Analytics and Reporting – Understand response rates, segment and view habits of your customers.
List Management – Organise your existing lists into multiple segments for better targeting.
If you would like a chat about how marketing automation can help your business, Parallax would love to hear from you. Get in touch with us.