Imagine being able gain visibility of your customers’ journeys prior to purchase and using this data and knowledge to develop tailored marketing campaigns that return the most on your marketing investments. Imagine being able generate more website visitors, more leads and more customers without having to hire more staff but just through improving productivity of your current sales and marketing team.

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This is what automated marketing can do for your business.

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Marketing automation uses software to automate and improve the effectiveness of marketing and sales activities.

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The sales and marketing process is not linear, especially in the current digital age. Potential customers will spend much of their time researching a business, their services or products, before they make the decision to engage further and purchase.

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So how can any business work out the return on their marketing spend if they are not able to see which channels had the most impact on their revenue?

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This is how marketing automation can help. Here are some of the main benefits of using marketing automation to grow your business and save time and money.

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1. A clean database

Anyone that has worked with a CRM system will know how difficult it can be to keep it tidy and up to date. Whether it be staffing time restraints or just lack of information available, maintaining a complete CRM is a near impossible feat, unless you have a CRM team onboard whose sole responsibility is data cleansing.

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This is where marketing automation can greatly benefit an organisation. If set up correctly, a CRM can be automatically updated using information provided directly from the actions of the lead or customer, and their interactions with your digital marketing.

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Scenario

A lead is added manually to the CRM with just their email and name. That lead comes back to the website and provides their details via a form to access a how-to guide, this time also providing a phone number and job title which is set to automatically update in the lead record within the CRM. The how-to guide is about a specific product; therefore, the product of interest is automatically updated on the lead record within the CRM too.

As a result of automation rules, this lead now has at least 3 pieces of extra and important information about them which can be used by the marketing and sales teams to target them with information of interest.

Furthermore, each action taken by the lead or customer is tracked within their CRM record, meaning a sales representative can see their interests and the journey they’ve taken when engaging with the business and products.

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Marketing automation means marketing emails and nurture campaigns will be sent to lists automatically drawn from the most up to date information, and sales teams will have a more complete understanding of their lead before they give them a call.

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2. Lead scoring to prioritise outreach

Using marketing automation, it is possible to set up triggers that automatically update the stage of a lead within the sales and marketing process, helping the marketing team to send the right information to the right person at the right time. Lead scoring also helps the sales team see the wood for the trees and prioritise their outreach by warmest to coolest.

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Scenario

A score threshold of 100 is set up representing the point at which the lead is primed to purchase. Automated rules are put in place that score a lead depending on their actions. For example, they may have visited a particular product page or the contact page on many occasions, indicating a high interest in the product or an interest to speak to someone.

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As the lead interacts with the website and other online marketing channels, their score updates which triggers a marketing workflow to send them relevant information at the right point in their journey. If the lead score reaches a score of 100 it’s time to notify the account manager that it is time to give that lead a call.

3. Increased productivity in sales and marketing

One of the main benefits of marketing automation is the ability to run digital marketing campaigns as if the business has a marketing team of 50.

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Once set-up, automated marketing campaigns can be left to run on their own, requiring only tweaks and monitoring. This enables your marketing team to get on with what they are best at – creativity!

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As already mentioned above, marketing automation provides the sales team with a level of information about their leads and customers that they could only dream of normally, such as their interests, their activity, and their interaction with your brand. This will make calls more efficient and successful, and greatly improve overall customer experience.

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Whether sales or marketing, automation takes the time out of repetitive and laborious tasks, increasing productivity, creativity, and overall happiness within the workplace!

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4. Increase revenue and average deal size

Marketing automation allows for seamless cross-selling and upselling, meaning an increase in average deal size and overall revenue.

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Using automation its possible to tag customers interested in a specific product and enter them into a workflow that will send them information on relevant products and services, personalised to their interests.

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In addition, automation of customer follow-up means you will likely experience a reduced churn rate and increase in customer life-time value as that customer continues to receive useful and targeted information even post purchase.

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5. Exposes roadblocks and highlights where value lies

Using automation provides a level of reporting that is not usually attainable, allowing for quick and easy identification and resolution of any roadblocks within the marketing and sales process.

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Scenarios

• A website might be drawing in hundreds of visitors because of an excellent content strategy, but few are converting to tangible leads. In this case the marketing team would need to revise their conversion funnel and how they can start converting some of these visitors via clear call-to=actions (CTAs) and forms.

• There may be an abundance of leads being handed to the sales team but for some reason none are being converted into sales. In which case the business would have to look at whether this is an issue with the lead scoring, i.e. simply the leads are not yet ready to purchase and being handed to sales too early, or whether the sales team requires more training in closing deals.

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Marketing automation also provides visibility of where the value lies within the process. It provides a clear picture of how spend on a particular area, such as Google Advertising, is performing and benefiting the business. Using automation, you can see that X number of website visitors came from that Google Ad, X went on to convert into a lead, and X finally went on to purchase.

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This transparency is a huge advantage to any business spending money on marketing. It provides a clear picture of return on their investment and how and where to invest more or less going forward.

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6. Save time managing social media campaigns

Finally, a great benefit of using marketing automation is to save time managing social media campaigns. Automation allows you to schedule and post to multiple accounts all at the same time. Although this function has been available for years with platforms such as Hootsuite, embedding your social media within the same platform as the rest of your digital marketing allows you to track leads and the value of each social channel on their journey to purchase.

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There are many more benefits of marketing automation, but I believe these are some of the main ones!

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Marketing automation and inbound marketing isn’t a fit for every company, but for those planning to invest in digital marketing strategies to grow their business, it’s definitely worth considering.

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If you’d like to discuss whether marketing automation would be beneficial for your business, give us a call.