What is marketing automation?
Marketing automation streamlines, automates and measures marketing tasks. If your company is not currently using automation software your competitors soon will be, as more and more companies are starting to realise that it solves most common marketing problems
such as:
Lack of time
Lack of communication between sales and marketing teams
Lack of ‘on the spot’ ideas
Lack of accurate analytical data
…to name but a few.
Marketing automation software is designed for marketing departments and organisations of any size, those with a customer database of 10 to 10 million. It allows you to effectively market on multiple channels and automate repetitive tasks. It is not a strategy, it is software that helps you with your marketing needs.
It’s not realistic to expect to have a one to one relationship with all of your potential customers so you need a marketing team. Your team target and communicate with the people that fit your customer profiles or personas.
Soon your marketing team will outgrow the Outlook, Word and Excel spreadsheets they once used and instead of pulling in another marketing team with salaries and job benefits etc. you’ll need to find something more efficient and cost effective. That is Marketing Automation. No employee wants to sit all day laboriously emailing potential customers and emailing users every time your company posts a blog, so you get software to do that. Therefore your employees aren’t underachieving and leaving due to mundane jobs, they can be re-designing your company’s next marketing campaign. You achieve operational efficiency, grow revenue faster and retain employees. Read our marketing automation guide to inform you and your team how you can save time on repetitive tasks:
A company could find a potential customer from a Facebook “like” to a Google search, from a Twitter comment to a shared blog post. In a busy marketing team one or more of these could be missed or ignored. This is where automating your marketing comes in.
Some people think that “automation” means impersonal but it actually helps and alerts you to your customers needs and interactions. It assists you in nurturing people that show an interest or have commonalities with your company. Instead of bombarding advertising out into the ether in the hope that a potential customer will respond, you are able to tailor your marketing campaigns to relevant people.
It depends which software you choose to use for this, these are some examples of what HubSpot’s software can do:
Scheduled email mailing
Scheduled social posting across various channels
Scheduled blog posting
Newsletter subscription mailing
Alerts you to a lead/potential customer
A/B testing
Update your website
Reporting, analytics that show measurable results
Control over who uses the marketing automation tools
To maintain your companies brand image you can use your automated marketing software to create templates, email signatures and message platforms.
Instead of relying on outbound methods such as buying advertising, buying email lists and aggressively pushing audiences into becoming leads, inbound marketing is the practice of attracting potential customers through good quality content that draws people towards your company’s products/services naturally/organically.
To learn more about increasing your search positioning see our blog post
"3 ways to get found in organic search results with inbound"
By closely aligning your marketing with your customers’ interests, your brand will attract, delight, engage and nurture its customers over time. There is a verification service that ensures you are using the correct email address to find out more click here: Top 10 Bulk Email Verification and Validation Services Compared.
Tip: One of the quickest and easiest verification tools to use (also a free tool when you're starting out) is Hunter.io
Replace those repetitive, manual marketing processes with purpose built software and applications that increase your companies productivity and performance. Get automating now... To help you get started we've got a FREE eGuide which explores all the tricks to get more from your marketing...