3 Reasons Your Marketing Automation Needs Revamping

Wouldn’t it be great if there were something out there that could save your marketing department time, resources, and money? There is – and it’s called marketing automation. It comes in the form of a genius product – marketing automation software – which is the secret to making your life a heck of a lot easier when it comes to sales and marketing. It’s your organizer. Your data collector. Your secret weapon.

So, when is it time to look into a new marketing automation software and/or process?  If any of the following three questions resonate with you, it’s time.

1. You are struggling to generate, nurture, and close leads

If you’re struggling to generate qualified leads for your sales team, it’s time to embrace the marketing automation funnel. This funnel has four stages: attract, convert, close, and delight. There are a couple variations of these four steps, but they all basically function in the same order.

Your goal while using this funnel is to generate leads, drive sales, and measure your ROI. In each phase, a marketing automation software can help by providing tools and data to support your efforts. Here’s HubSpot's break down of each phase and the marketing automation tactics needed to support it.

• Attract – Direct mail, social media, blogging, keywords/SEO, and customized pages
• Convert – landing pages, forms, meetings, messages, calls-to-action (CTAs)
• Close – Email marketing, workflows, lead scoring, CRM integrations (i.e. pipeline management, predictive lead scoring, etc.)
• Delight – Social media, smart calls-to-action, email marketing, workflows, conversations
  
  

 2. You spend time creating content but aren’t using it efficiently

Do you spend hours and hours each month writing blog content or a monthly newsletter? Marketing automation can make sure your content is getting to the right people at the right time. For example, if you write a blog about a case study on your company’s public relations strategy and efforts with a manufacturing company – does it make sense to send that during the attraction phase? Probably not.

A marketing automation software can monitor a lead, MQL, or SQL to see how and when they are interacting with your website, social media, and content. Why does this matter? Because if you see that one of these contacts is interacting with tons of content, you can use marketing automation tactics to nurture them into becoming a customer by providing content that matches their searching and interaction behaviors.

3. You need help reporting on marketing campaigns & ROI

Have you ever spent time scheduling social media posts on Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn but you ultimately forget to go back and measure the activity, engagement, and traffic they generated once the marketing campaign is over? Or maybe you aren’t sure what activity to measure? Could you say the same for your email marketing activities or content distribution and lead generation efforts?

What a marketing automation software does is provide you with the data and measurement you need to prove a return on investment (ROI) for all of your hard work. Some common metrics or KPIs that are measured include:

• Conversion rate
• Click rate
• Open rate
• Engagement rate
• Traffic from Channels/Sources (i.e. organic, paid, direct, social media, referrals, etc.)

Data like this is going to assist in future marketing campaign decision, but it's also going to help nurture current prospects by educating your team on what's working and what isn't working. That way you can make quick, but rationale, decisions on how to implement content, social media messaging, and email marketing into your prospects' buyers journey. 

Marketing doesn't have to be difficult when you have the right tools, knowledge, and data to support your efforts. This is why we are such strong supporters of having a marketing automation software and strategy. Are you ready to get yours started? Contact us by clicking on the call-to-action (yes, it's a part of our marketing automation strategy too) and we will be in touch with you shortly!