Why should a marketing automation solution be on your priority list for 2019? I’ll share my thoughts as director of a small marketing team that relies heavily on marketing automation. The benefits are many, but a major advantage is having a centralized hub for our marketing activities so we can streamline and automate our efforts to deliver relevant content to our audience. And that, as any marketer knows, is critical today.
Here are 4 reasons you should consider implementing a marketing automation solution for your own business:
1. Productive Marketing (regardless of the size of your team)
As a marketer who wears many hats, automating manual and tedious processes allows me to focus more time on valuable marketing areas such as blogs and videos. Marketing automation has allowed us to build an effective marketing strategy and improve brand identity.
Additionally, available integrations with other programs, such as Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Sales (CRM), webinar programs and video platforms, create efficiencies in processes by reducing duplicate efforts with setup and reporting. These integrations allow us to ensure we’re not just inundating our audience with content and communications, but instead fostering them through a personalized educational journey unique to them.
2. Simplified Nurture Marketing
Nurture marketing is often a struggle for companies and marketing automation solutions make it much easier to nurture and develop relationships with your prospects and deepen relationships with customers. Nurture marketing allows you to ‘listen’ to the needs of your prospects and customers by tracking their activity through your website, emails, or social media. In addition a good marketing automation solution will help you provide a more personal experience, not cookie cutter.
For example, if a lead watches a webinar then visits our Implementation and Upgrades landing page, I can set a trigger-based campaign through my marketing automation program that will deliver the lead an email the next day with a link to download our white paper on upgrade strategies. This delivers each person meaningful content, at exactly the right time.
3. Personalized Experiences
As the above example also shows, the personalized experience you can deliver with marketing automation can be set up to align with your company’s goals. Nurture streams, lead scoring, trigger-based campaigns, and areas of interest can complement your sales strategy and ensure leads are advancing through your qualification process.
Another major benefit of an integrated marketing automation solution is having the analytics you need to pinpoint which marketing initiatives are working and for which prospects/customers. But, you also have the flexibility to update rules to evolve with new strategies. This data allows you to improve your marketing objectives by focusing on what works for your audience. At the end of the day, it helps you get the backing needed to justify your marketing budget for these tactics.
4. Aligned Sales and Marketing
Most marketing automation programs integrate with your CRM system and pass useful information to sales. For example, our program has a plugin that allows our sales team to see important information – such as registering for a webinar or downloading a white paper – that gets populated on the lead card.
In addition to reporting each lead’s activities, our marketing automation solution also determines the lead’s urgency level by measuring the timeline of the engagement. All this information helps our sales team understand interest before making contact so when they do – they are more informed, knowledgeable and personalized. When you can connect one-on-one with a prospect, you can place yourself into the prospect's journey instead of starting at the beginning.
Marketing automation isn’t just about prospects. It also helps companies engage with existing customers on a regular basis. Several studies have shown that marketing automation improves customer retention. By ‘listening’ to your customer's activity and engagement with your content, you can understand their needs and deliver information specific to their solution.
Is implementing a marketing automation solution part of your 2019 strategy? If so, what type of solution are you considering?
About the Author
More Content by Amanda Sherry
