As a business or marketing leader, chances are pretty high that you’ve heard about marketing automation. It’s not a new concept, but maybe you are unsure about certain things and wondering if you should make the investment or not, by the end of this post, you will have the clarity.
What is Marketing Automation?
In its simplest form, Marketing Automation is the process of streamlining and automating manual marketing tasks, processes, and workflows using a software platform.
Automating your marketing allows you to be more efficient and sustainable, increase revenue and grow into a more powerful marketing team. Basically, it helps you gain intelligence and nurture relationships in a way that is almost impossible to do manually.
Marketing automation tools like HubSpot include email marketing, landing pages, forms, campaign management, lead nurturing/scoring, lead lifecycle management, CRM, social media, SEO intelligence and marketing analytics among other features.
However, it doesn’t mean that every business is ready to start automating, it also doesn’t mean that everything can and should be automated.
The worst mistake to avoid is being tools-driven. There is a sea of tech stacks out and new ones are released daily. Your marketing automation vehicle should be driven by a strategy that is woven into your business vision.
Marketing Automation is not a tool to replace your marketing team. Marketing automation is only as smart as the person or team behind it, and it’s crucial to get the planning and strategy right.
So now that you better understand marketing automation, how do you know if it’s time to revamp the way you work using marketing automation to nurture prospects with highly personalized, useful content that converts them into customers?
5 Signs You’re Ready For Marketing Automation.
1. You Have A Marketing Strategy
A marketing automation tool cannot replace the thinking, brainstorming and creativity that goes into building out a marketing strategy.
If you do not have a direction on where your marketing is going and what levers to pull to make marketing and business decisions, then you should probably pause and fix that first.
Oftentimes, you will see the gaps that need to be filled with automation when you thoroughly think about your marketing strategy.
Once you have a working strategy, you can see where automation can be used to enhance your efficiency by scaling intelligence.
2. You Are Looking to Grow
As a small business, when you are ready to grow you will know, what you may not know is what to do to unlock that growth, or how best to do it to avoid ending up in chaos.
Once you hit that growth wall, you will discover that the way you’re doing things is not netting you the financial gains needed to grow, or you have seen a little bit of growth but have not been able to scale your processes to allow for even more growth.
To achieve growth and hit revenue targets, you must have sustainable processes in place to generate, nurture and follow up on leads.
With marketing automation, you not only set yourself up to drive more inbound traffic to your website, but you also can use the intelligence you gain from their activity to follow up and deliver content that matters most to them.
Next, you can monitor when they’re ready for a sales discussion and prioritize your follow-up based on who will likely buy.
3. You Do Not Have An Automatic Lead Nurturing System
Leads are the ‘new blood’ of every business. Without a constant flow of fresh blood, the business will die. However, most businesses do not have a structured way of acquiring and nurturing leads(strangers) to become customers.
Marketing automation can come in here.
With a proper marketing automation setup for lead nurturing, strangers who visit your website or any of your digital storefronts are captured and nurtured to become paying customers.
A simple automation process for nurturing strangers would look like this:
- Capture leads
- Send them a welcome email
- Follow up after a few days and offer additional value
- Check if they are engaging and warming up for a sale
- Send a couple of other communications that establish your business as a leader in your industry
- Offer a low-entry product or free trial (if available)
All these steps can happen under the hood of marketing automation – without you lifting a finger.
4. You Are Using Many Disparate Marketing Tools
From experience of working with many small businesses, many of them use several tools that:
- Don’t integrate
- Are costly
- Require expertise
- Are difficult to maintain
A proper marketing automation tool will have most of the functionality you are using across all of these tools or at least provide a smooth integration between some so you can cut down on cost, consolidate your tech stack, and cut down on time spent maintaining, and pulling reports out of each of the tools independently.
5. You Are Looking To Improve Efficiency
In many small businesses, employees have to handle a wide range of responsibilities and never have enough time. Marketing is often a shared role along with sales, support and business development. Oftentimes, this leads to marketing efforts becoming subpar or abandoned altogether.
Marketing automation helps businesses with limited resources run successful marketing campaigns and gain efficiencies.
You can do this by creating repeatable workflows, landing page and email templates, and automated reporting and emails, so that employees can take those time savings and focus on other crucial business activities.
Keep in mind that marketing automation tools are not “plug and play.” There is also an investment of time on the front end to get everything set up and to create content.
Are you facing any of these challenges?
It’s time to automate your hassle away.
Drop us a line and tell us the area of your marketing that is repetitive, taking too much of your time, inefficient, cumbersome, boring, and costly. We will work with you to automate it using simple and affordable tools.
Let’s automate your business
