Marketing automation is a fantastic way to boost your business growth, streamline your company’s workflows and better align departments by automating repetitive tasks, giving you more time to focus on your customers.
Do you have business growth on your mind, but too much to do on a daily basis? Marketing automation is for you.
You may have ideas and proposals that can seriously boost business growth. How do you implement them, though, when the daily grind takes up the bulk of your time?
Marketing automation takes some of this weight from your shoulders and automates tasks through sophisticated software and carefully created workflows. It does more than that though; it can also collect key information, segment data, send bespoke messages to specific buyer personas and more.
As part of an inbound marketing strategy, marketing automation can also go a long way to aligning your sales and marketing departments, improving communications within the company, and providing them with the data they need. As a result, they are perfectly positioned to nurture those leads most important to you.
The statistics speak for themselves, take a look below to see why so many brands are embracing the bots...
The biggest benefit of marketing automation is generating a greater volume of high quality leads, according to B2B marketers.
Marketers that use automation are said to be twice as effective at communicating, according to their industry peers.
67% of B2B marketers using automation say they see a 10% increase in sales through lead nurturing, and 15% see a 30% increase.
64% of marketers who have invested in marketing automation say they have seen benefits within six months.
Only 13% of marketers using blast email software use automation. They're also likely to generate twice the number of leads.
Businesses that have invested in marketing automation have experienced a boost in revenue. One company reported an increase of £76K.
Imagine, instead of sitting looking at a spreadsheet for a couple of hours each day, updating it with customer details, segmenting data and removing dead-end leads, you could instead be offering creative ideas for business growth or spending time building stronger relationships with new customers.
That’s the basic benefit of marketing automation. Using the right software, a system can be put in place that identifies key actions from existing and potential leads, constantly updating the data you’re collecting, nurturing targeted leads in the sales process with specific content, removing uninterested leads from your data lists and more.
Marketing automation can be as technical or as simple as you want it to be. You need it to save you time though, be able to integrate it into your CRM, have it collect and utilise data in the right ways, manage multiple channels, personalise your leads and – most importantly – improve the quality, frequency and volume of them.
As part of a creative, bespoke inbound marketing campaign, marketing automation can help to refine its impact and seriously boost a business’s overall growth potential. It’s can also be as flexible as you need it to be too, and can be altered alongside the changing wants, needs and tastes of your consumers.
For all the incredible benefits marketing automation can offer to a business investing in inbound, it’s by no means a perfect solution if you buy the software and expect it to magically churn out quality lead after quality lead on a daily basis.
A lot of work not only has to be done to implement marketing automation into your existing way of doing things. It needs to closely follow the habits of your target audience and buying personas to consistently evolve along with them to generate and nurture better quality leads on a more regular, consistent basis.
That’s why personalisation is such an essential part of the marketing automation process. Having software that only works to fire out emails to people on your data lists is not only a skin-deep approach, it’s also likely to turn off the people who matter to you most and discourage them from doing business with you in the future.
In 2017, 90% of companies said they wanted to implement an approach based on personalisation but less than 20% were actually doing it. It can be tough to achieve that perfect balance, but perfection isn’t really something you should be working towards.
Automation should be an ever-evolving process alongside your inbound marketing strategy. Work hard at it and you can build an internal system that refines the way you do business whilst also creating a fantastic, personalised outreach strategy that targets and attracts people most likely to become long-term brand advocates.
Let’s get this straight: marketing automation is a fantastic strategy that can be hugely beneficial for any and every business across a huge variety of sectors should they wish to implement it as part of a wider inbound marketing approach.
Where we say it can be beneficial in certain industries, we mean that it can be especially effective in industries where constant communication is an absolute must. Consider the recruitment industry, for instance. It’s an area where recruiters have to manage huge sets of data lists on a daily basis to try and best match the right people with the right positions.
At the same time strong relationships have to be constantly cultivated with commercial enterprises to assure them that you have the recruitment solutions perfect for them, that you’ll be able to provide them with a consistent stream of high-quality employees and, for want of a better phrase, aren’t ‘wasting their time’.
It’s a very relationship-heavy industry from all sides, which is why a personalised marketing automation strategy complemented with an inbound approach can be an excellent way to segment potential employees in unique ways to better keep them informed and match them with the opportunities that may be right for them.
Almost 40% of those using marketing automation say it’s something they are going to invest in over the next 12 months. There’s a lot of interest from brands in the possibilities automation can provide, certainly when they’re looking at a long-term growth strategy.
Plenty of Fortune 500 companies in particular have invested in marketing automation in some form, in efforts to refine certain tasks and achieve specific business goals. Some of the most common ways marketers are using automation include:
Marketing automation is more than just scripting a few emails and mapping out workflows. It's about being helpful to your clients and guiding them through your sales funnel. Marketing automation fits in where required to give leads the best possible experience. Below is an outline of how we as an agency turn strangers into customers and customers into your best salespeople.
Without these guys introducing us to HubSpot and supporting the integration