What is Marketing Automation?
In a nutshell, Marketing Automation (MA) is a software that enables marketers to automate many repetitive marketing activities like sending emails, classifying leads, scheduling social media messages, etc. The software also helps to collect marketing data across various marketing channels and turn the data into actionable insights when integrated with a CRM.
And it's a big deal - over the past several years, Marketing Automation has seen a huge increase in usability all over the world. In fact, the adoption of Marketing Automation has increased ten fold just from 2011-2014.
So what’s the reason behind this massive growth?
Probably the most significant one is that data, as a resource, becomes more and more available to technically any business. Interpreting, understanding and implementing the data correctly are what now matter more.
MA tools have basically become a unified hub of intelligence for marketers, where they can store all their customer/lead related data, analyse and use it to send the right information, to the right prospects, at the right time.
Also, MA tools can be easily integrated into your CRM systems; this gives sales teams valuable marketing data that can be used to personalize their communication with each potential prospect, allowing to close more deals in the same amount of time.
Another advantage of MA is ROI calculations. Today, marketers use various tools for each digital communication channel (email, social media, etc.), which makes it extremely difficult to calculate the ROI of marketing activities.
With the help of CRM integrations, marketers get the chance to use a single tool to unite all their marketing activities on, and have all data gathered in a single place, thus making ROI calculations, and later marketing investment estimations, precise and easy.
The key elements of Marketing Automation
Essentially, automated marketing can be visualized like this: The main goal of using automated marketing is to increase the number of high quality leads. This is done with the help of lead nurturing, lead scoring and website analytics.
Some of you might think “Okay, sounds pretty nice, is the investment worth it though?” Good question!
Some of the leading MA tools out there look fairly expensive (ranging from N800,000-N4,000,000/month), but the investment is well worth it. On average, MA improves your sales teams’ productivity by 14.5%, reduces marketing overheads by 12% and most importantly, increases the number of qualified leads by 450%.
Increasing sales and reducing overheads is a nice addition, but the real value lies in increasing the number of qualified leads. 80% of B2B marketers rate generating high quality leads as the highest profit potential, which is above increasing sales conversions (71%).
The three best MA tools available on the market today are HubSpot, Salesforce Pardot, and Marketo.
While choosing a tool that suits your business might be quite challenging (think about pricing, integrations, features, company culture, etc.), you can’t go wrong with HubSpot, since it covers the entire marketing funnel. HubSpot is the most popular MA tool available on the market today. And there’s a good reason why more people use HubSpot than any other tools combined.
The main point of investing into a tool is to be able to cover all stages of the buyer's journey - from attracting strangers to converting them into customers. It is also crucial to have all your marketing data and analytics gathered on a single platform so that you won’t waste time utilizing, researching and drilling through numerous marketing tools and their reporting.
All other stand-alone marketing automation tools (like email marketing automation, media tools, etc.) provide an incomplete solution: they take care of the bottom part of the marketing funnel, but kind of force you to use something else for the top part. HubSpot provides marketers with a real, all-in-one solution that will streamline your marketing and sales processes from the smallest interactions all the way up to making buying decisions.
Conclusion
MA is a huge deal and has been growing rapidly as more and more companies understand the potential this can have on their ROI. The key elements of MA are lead generation, lead scoring, lead nurturing and website analytics.
Using smart MA tools you can potentially cover the entire buyer's journey and increase the number of high quality leads that you generate. It's marketing that is personal and non-interruptive; just as it should be.
Sources: marketingautomationinsider; pardot
By Uri Bishansky, co-author, "The Smart Marketer's Guide to Google AdWords", and seasoned programmer who lives by excels and numbers.
Edited by ‘Dele Dele-Olukoju, Marketing Communication consultant and publisher of the online Marketing Communication Digest. He writes from Lagos, Nigeria.
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