Marketing Automation: What It Is and Why You Need It

Here's a simple look at how marketing automation works:

• A sound advertising and social media strategy is developed, and tactics like SEO and valuable content bring visitors to your website via marketing automation.
• The website or landing page offers strong benefit copy and valuable content, and visitors fill out forms to become leads.
• Based on the questions asked on the "contact us" web form AND website behavior (downloads, pages viewed), leads are automatically scored (a model defined before the system is in place) by marketing automation software.
• Leads are segmented based on their score and enter various tracks for follow-up. Following up with leads through email is called lead nurturing and includes links to additional valuable content such as white papers and webinars. Nurturing allows increased engagement of potential customers. The more engaged they are, the more likely they will become customers.
• Higher-quality leads are turned over to sales immediately with marketing automation software. Lower-quality leads remain in the system until additional engagement occurs. In essence, salespeople receive fewer total leads, as they only receive quality leads. When they can spend more time with quality leads, their time is spent more efficiently, they close more deals, and the revenue per deal increases, thus overall ROI increases.
• By integrating CRMs with social media and other marketing platforms, salespeople report their deals and win values, which then are reported within the marketing automation system, which in turn allows us to evaluate what media sources, messages, events, or other tactics generate the most efficient quality leads and sales, thus an analysis of "cost-per-deal" can be done.

Marketing automation is more than a glorified email program. By tracking the website behavior of prospects and putting them into lead nurturing sequences, you can truly provide them with unique messages based on their behavior with marketing automation. When messages are relevant, increased engagement occurs, and the likelihood of sales increases with marketing automation software.

The key reasons to adopt marketing automation into your business are plain and simple:

• You have a need to increase new customer revenue
• You have an opportunity to resell/upsell existing customers
• You have the ability to engage with prospects with relevant marketing messages

Marketing automation won't work properly if you don't take these steps to make sure you're ready:

• A better way to research and define your target market. 
• Know what the customers' needs and issues are
• Have a content strategy that maps out messages toward all levels of your prospect's buying cycle. 
• Understand the customer buying process using marketing automation customer journey reports.
• Map the content towards a "drip process" whereby the content is distributed throughout various touch points and delivery channels in a timely, ongoing manner
• Ensure your current database is cleaned and optimized for the newer marketing automation system
• Have a specific editorial calendar grouped for each audience segment
• Have a pipeline of content ready for implementation- white papers, case studies, webinars, newsletters, surveys, etc. all written and designed.

Assignment of roles to those responsible for the activities- managing the platform, the content, and the measurement can be automated with marketing automation.

The main benefit of replacing manual lead-generating processes with marketing automation software is that it allows companies to reach out to potential customers in a timely, more efficient, manner.

Time Savings

With marketing automation tools such as email marketing best practices and social media marketing, you can plan your strategy, create campaigns, and automate when to run the campaign. There will also be timed emails sent to customers depending on where they stand in the sales funnel to incite more interest which means that you can keep nurturing your leads without having to click send when everything is automated.

Personalized Ads for Better Lead Conversion

Personalization with marketing automation can help you create content that is customized to different audience segments. This way, without seeing the same site or ads as everyone, your customers will be able to arrive at landing pages that speak more to their personalities and in turn, result in more leads and conversions. Being able to present useful content from the get-go with customization can help people connect with your brand better.

Lead Scoring

With marketing automation software you can build sales and improve productivity with lead scoring. You can have access to more qualified leads to help your sales teams be more efficient with lead nurturing. By prioritizing high-quality leads, your marketing efforts are able to gain better sales conversions and increase company revenue. Also, email marketing features of marketing automation will continue to nurture low-quality leads and move them along the sale funnel and alert your sales teams when the lead matures. 

Better ROI

By helping connect with the right type of visitors with a targeted approach, you can lower the customer acquisition costs of your marketing efforts and greatly improve conversion rates with marketing automation. The increased ROI is going to seem almost instant when using marketing automation and it will only continue to improve the more your use your marketing automation software.

Better Reports

By being able to automate marketing campaigns with marketing automation software, you are able to reduce the amount of human intervention required to keep your marketing efforts running efficiently. For example, with marketing automation software, you are able to automate email marketing campaigns to appeal to more customers and influence sales by creating a positive buyer experience, without having to manually do anything. Later on, you can make more informed decisions based on your existing marketing data to continue to improve your future marketing efforts without having to painstakingly review marketing data. 

Scalability

One of the best features of marketing automation is how it can grow alongside your company’s growth. With fewer manual processes to attend to, marketing automation software is able to automate sales campaigns regardless of the scale of the campaign. And with access to better marketing reports, the scaled marketing campaigns will perform efficiently.

If marketing automation is the right move to improve your marketing and sales processes, compare the best marketing automation software vendors to increase revenue.