There’s a clear link between increasing ROI and businesses who use marketing automation software in their digital marketing. But not everyone’s aware of these benefits.
The reality is that marketing automation software is still a relatively young thought in marketing, and the benefits of using it are not easily apparent to all. It really takes some research to truly understand how it can help your marketing efforts.
Right, this all sounds wonderful, but what exactly is marketing automation you may be asking? In
Automating the marketing process enhances multi- and cross-channel communication and lead
Let’s have a look at some of the benefits of marketing automation in a little more detail.
8 Reasons to Use Marketing Automation Software
1. Increased Efficiency
Automation, by the very definition, alleviates the manual activation and management of tasks. Marketing automation software allows you to pre-schedule certain tasks, cutting down on the time and resources needed to plan, execute and monitor your marketing activities. This frees you up to address more strategic or immediate responsibilities and improves your overall efficiency.
2. Increased number of sales-ready Leads
Using the lead intelligence, scoring and nurturing elements of marketing automation software allows you to feed the sales team with not only more leads, but with leads that are of a much higher quality in terms of sales readiness. The lead intelligence aspect is of particular importance as the sales team is armed with a deeper understanding of each lead prior to initial contact. This means they can tailor their opening call to the lead’s specific area of interest making for a far ‘warmer’ reception than a traditional cold-call.
3. Supports the Buyer’s Journey
Because marketing automation software combines channels and functions, what you’re presented with is a tool that can easily support the entire buyer’s journey well. Emails, blogs, social media, website building, CTA creation and analytics all in one place (just to mention a few). This helps you to create cross-channel campaigns that compliment each other and takes the buyer along their journey from prospect to promoter.
Because all of your analytics are in one place with marketing automation software, you can easily track prospects’ and leads’ journeys across your content, creating a map of their interaction. This helps you to understand what they’re looking for, and to create content to convert them more consistently and quickly.
4. You get a Comprehensive View of your Contacts' touch points
Marketing automation software seamlessly connects your marketing touch-points such as email marketing, landing pages, lead intelligence and scoring, CRM integration, social media marketing as well as campaigns and marketing analytics. This integration allows for detailed, holistic profiles of your contacts, which can help you effectively segment and target specific contacts based on behaviour and interaction preferences.
5. Provides a Detailed Overview of Your Marketing Efforts
Let’s talk about a previous point in some more detail. Imagine your analytics of all your marketing efforts were kept in one place, and then correlated into detailed overview reports in which you could easily read? Well, it’s possible.
This is possibly the greatest benefit of marketing automation software – that you can see how every channel is performing and reacting in relation to your other channels. Having easy access to this data allows you to constantly improve your content and marketing by understanding what is working best for you along the way. Access to this aggregated data is nearly impossible to create when working across multiple platforms, and definitely takes more time if you can ever get it right.
In fact, some marketing automation platforms even forecast revenue growth and manage your cash flow, based on your previous statistics.
6. Aligns Sales and Marketing Teams
This is important. For a business to function well, the marketing and sales teams need to communicate clearly… but marketing and sales are infamous for miscommunication and misalignment, which can result in a loss of conversion and so a loss of ROI.
Marketing might qualify a lead, but if they haven’t been speaking to the sales team, the buyer personas that they’re using to find leads might be completely wrong. Marketing automation software removes this concern by allowing marketing and sales teams to be able to see what each other are doing. Both will have access to the same information, whenever they want it. The space for misalignment between teams is minimised greatly.
7. Enhanced Personalisation and Eased Segmentation
Again we call on two facts: That all or most of your marketing channels are found in one place and, second, that all your analytics are in one place. Above everything else, this makes it far more possible for you to develop a unique voice and personalisation for your content.
The online will never replace face to face interaction, but it can come close. Personalisation is what makes your business stand out from the plethora of others, and anything that can aid you in building personalised content for visitors to your website is certainly something to consider. With marketing automation software, you can analyse how your visitors are engaging with each of your content channels and react to this. Find out which content they prefer, which keywords they use, which emails they prefer to open and click-through, and even when and how they interact with social media – there’s no jumping between different platforms to correlate this data, instead you can see it all on one.
8. Improved ROI reporting
Arguably one of the most significant driving factors for marketing automation adoption is the ability to not only deliver a better return on
I hope I’ve helped you understand marketing automation software a bit better, and come to the decision of whether or not it’s best for you. We recommend using HubSpot for marketing automation. It's easy to use and the learning curve is low, but the possibilities and power of the HubSpot workflows software is endless. Check out our Guide to HubSpot to learn what they offer and what is right for your business.
