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What is Marketing Automation?
As the name suggests, marketing automation is something that automates your marketing tasks for you. It does everything from automatically sending a pre-written welcome email to the new visitors, informative content to prospective leads and engaging content to your customers to sending an invoice, stock refill reminders, offers, information about new products to the buyers, etc. If you look at the factsheet, marketing automation has done wonders. By increasing the sales productivity by 14.5%, qualified lead generation by 451% and reducing marketing overhead by 12.2%, marketing automation has proven to be a miracle for the business industry. The global market will only grow in the upcoming years and more investments will be made on marketing automation tools.
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Marketing Automation Facts
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Need For Marketing Automation
When your business has just started to grow and you are trying out new ways to foster it, jumping to investing in a new software might sound daunting. But trust us on this, marketing automation software, when used to its full potential, can multifold your business’s ROI. When the business is ready to rise up, you will definitely need a platform from where you can track the progress of all the teams, lead transfers, campaigns, projects, products, content and everything that you have put into marketing your products and services.
But, what will happen without automation? John McTigue at Kuno Creative explained what happens when you’re not using automation.
“It’s like shooting an arrow in the dark. It would be just a guess, a hope that whatever you are offering might be liked by the leads. But we all are aware that the buyers in today's world need more information, and more specifically, the right kind of information, something that they are searching for and not a random sample of products that they don’t even need.”
Evolution of marketing automation helps you identify and segregate potential buyers. From here you start generating qualified leads, nurturing them with personalised and relevant content to keep them hooked, and finally closing them into a customer. Now you know why we are vouching for it. Before launching any campaigns or program execution, it is necessary to plan the whole process because once you hit the go button; the whole process should be smooth and the campaign should run on its own. And that’s where marketing automation comes handy. This is how:
Marketing and Sales Alignment
Getting your marketing and sales team aligned from the very first step is crucial to avoid confusion later. Both the teams should have a clear idea of their definition of a qualified lead and focus on their nurturing and closing them when they’re ready. With the marketing automation software, it gets easier for both the teams to track results and create high-impact changes whenever needed on a single platform. The sales team can define their perspective of an ideal lead while the marketing team can generate campaigns to attract visitors and hand over the leads that match the criteria. Goals should be set at this stage where the number of sales-qualified leads that need to be generated by the marketing team and handed over to the sales team for the anticipated conversion is decided.
Content Strategy
There’s no denying the fact that content is the most important factor of any marketing campaign. It’s the way you communicate with a huge audience, ensuring you reach them at the right time. If you have something great to offer but your content is not doing justice to it, it will be difficult to win over the market. So, yes! Creating compelling, informative and relevant content to drive in traffic and keeping the ideal leads is crucial at each stage of the customer journey, be it awareness, consideration, decision or delight. Three times more leads are generated with content marketing than with paid search. Generating content is the task of your creative heads but how and when it should reach the right lead or customer is where marketing automation takes over from.
Lead management
Since you’ve aligned your sales and marketing teams, they will be able to agree upon the characteristics of the leads they want to focus on. Once you’ve generated the leads, to nurture them, relevant content and information is sent through emails, texts, blog posts, social media posts, and so on. This is usually done through CRM integration. CRM integration ensures that the right messages are being delivered at the right time to the right customer through the right channel. After nurturing, we move on to lead scoring. A score is assigned to the newly generated leads based on their likelihood of closing into a customer. The better the score, the more qualified your lead is. These leads are then transferred to the sales team for closing.
Workflow Development
A workflow defines the entire customer journey based on the triggers that the users pull. These triggers could be a form submission, social media or email clicks, page views, content downloads, and other similar things. These workflows are automated and personalised, which helps in managing a lead through the entire process, such as adding a contact to the list, updating the stage of the journey, removing and transferring a contact from one workflow to the list, and other administrative tasks that enable your marketing strategy to reach your leads effectively. A sample workflow is given in the picture below.
There are different types of workflows that are used at different stages of the customer journey, such as welcome workflow, re-engagement workflow, feedback workflow, cart abandonment workflow, anonymous user workflow, topic workflow, lead nurturing workflow, upsell workflow, renewal workflow, etc. On the basis of who you are trying to target and at which stage, you will be able to initiate the right one.
Campaign Management and Optimisation
Through campaign landing pages, you can attract more leads and in exchange for relevant content, more information can be collected on their characteristics. Marketing automation can analyse the behaviour of the user at every stage of the campaign and helps you focus only on potential buyers. Also, through marketing automation, you get a detailed analysis of the processes running both at the marketing and sales level. The campaign pretty much runs on its own. However, periodic optimisation is necessary to ensure the smooth running of the campaign and achieving targets on time.
Marketing and ROI Analytics
Yes, with marketing automation in place, you can easily analyse the performance of various processes by means of measuring Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and goals. Analysing everything is important as to see how effectively your strategies are meeting your leads’ and customers’ expectations. ROI generated from using marketing automation is both tangible and intangible. First of all, it increases conversion rates and hence, more customers generate more revenue. Second, you don’t have to outsource your creatives because marketing automation software allows you to generate your own campaigns. Since it automates your marketing, less manpower is required and human errors are prevented.
