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5 minute read
Marketing today exists just as much, if not more so, in the realm of digital as it does in traditional mediums such as television commercials and billboards. To reach the largest market on a tight budget, everyone from multinational corporations like Coca-Cola to local businesses must turn to digital marketing. There are many marketing automation tools to help you out there, but there is one like no other -- a global leading marketing automation software, HubSpot.
To do digital marketing well, organizations need to effectively broadcast their message across multiple mediums simultaneously while measuring the impact of their efforts. And that's where a marketing automation platform comes in hand.
Digital Marketing Mediums
Arguably, the three most important areas of digital marketing that require distinct tools and skillsets are social media management, blogging, and search engine optimization (SEO). Each medium contributes to the overall success of a digital marketing campaign, and without all three, an organization’s marketing efforts are drastically undercut.
- Social media
HubSpot's social media management tool enables marketers to schedule posts, generate URLs that track clicks and visit origins, follower and unfollower data, trending topics, and platform-specific analytics.
While these tools can be found for free, using a lone-standing tool is time-consuming and expensive long-term because it requires users to hunt down data and calculate its relevance to an overall marketing campaign manually.
The benefit of social media, beyond the obvious goal of acquiring fans and prospective customers, is that it gives organizations insight into how their brand is performing in real-time.
Marketers often use social media analytics to test new approaches, to gauge a crowd’s responses to a particular message, and to get an overall understanding of how people feel about an organization. Without connected data, marketers’ jobs become increasingly time-consuming, and the benefit of social media diminishes.
- Blogs
Marketers use blogs to publish new content with the help of tools such as Wordpress, Drupal, and Squarespace. Blogging tools make several aspects of publishing content easier. Most notably, blogging tools provide bloggers with templates making it possible for a copywriter or non-HTML, Java or C+ fluent writer to create and publish content.
In addition to making the design aspect of blogging easier, HubSpot blogging tools help websites foster a community. A comments section, the RSS Subscribers feature, social buttons, and several other widgets that allow blog customization come in handy when tracking and making a blog appealing and accessible to a niche market.
Using free-standing blogging tools may seem like a good deal initially, but if a blog exists outside of marketing automation software, it makes it difficult to identify how effective an organization’s blogging efforts are in relation to a global marketing campaign.
For example, knowing if the same prospective customer who recently followed you on Twitter also shared your most recent blog post on facebook would not be possible or would take hours of poring through data to establish without automation software.
However with global marketing automation software like Hubspot, an organization can know who their fans are, and how they interact with an organization’s blog instantaneously.
- Search Engine Optimization
SEO is the oldest and most analytics-focused aspect of digital marketing. SEO is nearly impossible to do now without the use of tools to help identify several measurements. Some of the most important measurements HubSpot SEO tools allow you to see include:
- Organic versus referral traffic to track social versus search engine performance
- Backlinks to track domain authority
- Bounce rate to detect if content scares users away
- Pages crawled per day to ensure search engines are finding a website
- Conversions to predict future purchases and time follow-ups
Why using tools within marketing automation software is smarter
When you enlist these services without connecting them via a marketing automation service, it will cost you more in the long term both in terms of time and money you’ll pay an engineer or developer to connect your free services.
Specifically, your analytics will be inaccurate if, for example, your social media doesn’t speak to your blog to identify how many visitors came from each specific platform. While some SEO services claim to have enough precision to identify where traffic comes from, the time it will take you to sort through data and narrow down an origin source will be so tedious that using a service that connects metrics automatically will be worth the initial cost.
When your marketing platforms speak to one another, your content can be designed around what’s getting you attention, clicks, visitors, and conversions with much more accuracy than if your metrics aren’t connected.
With the use of marketing automation software, you don’t have to waste time connecting data between your primary website, your social media platforms, your SEO measurements, and your blog performance. The marketing software will automatically look at your brand’s performance across all mediums at a single point in time.
Your measuring power increases in speed, accuracy, and contextual relevance when you use marketing automation software. Meanwhile, you save money on hiring a developer to customize the way your website communicates with “free” stand-alone Unbounce services.
Conversions
Driving conversions, or leads, is the end goal of all marketing. A conversion is when a prospective customer fills out a form on a website.
Without marketing automation software, conversions can be captured with services such as Unbounce, or by hiring a web developer and designer to customize landing pages for a website.
Unbounce provides forms that exist as templates for landing pages. When prospects complete a conversion, services like Unbounce notify marketers via email.
While services like Unbounce may be appealing initially, using marketing automation software saves time, and increases a marketer’s ability to track a prospect's engagement with a brand online.
For example, as soon as a prospect converts, using marketing automation software, every other activity they perform on any platform using the same device will be tracked back to them. This allows marketers to automatically know where their prospects are in the sales cycle.
Email Marketing
Email marketing is one of the most powerful tools a marketer has up their sleeve. It can be performed on several levels.
With services such as MailChimp, anyone can send out emails to lists for free. However, this technique is more or less static because it doesn’t allow for automated emails generated by prospective customers’ actions.
Using email marketing services through marketing automation software allows marketers to send out procedural emails, as well as to create workflow emails triggered by actions prospects take when they interact with a website. For example, if a prospective customer reads a blog article, they can be sent a series of emails about the topic they read about.
Using marketing automation software makes it possible for email marketing to be personalized, targeted, and iterative as a relationship with a prospect advances.
Following Prospects Through the Sales Cycle
Using marketing automation software such as Hubspot is the best way to target prospects as they move through the sales funnel. While marketers can use excel sheets, hold meetings between marketing departments to share information, and pour through data, doing so is both time consuming, and less likely to yield accurate information than simply using marketing tools that automate this process.
With Hubspot, marketers can set automated notifications and marketing actions, such as send out an email or an invitation, when prospects interact with their brand anywhere online. In fact, without marketing automation software like Hubspot, marketers are left shooting in the dark and often don’t know how many times a specific prospect has retweeted them, read a blog article, or downloaded a whitepaper.
Hubspot is necessary to get a 360 degree understanding of how prospects are interacting with all aspects of a marketing campaign, and to plan the kind of personalized follow-ups that drive conversions.
Hubspot makes data accessible
As digital marketing becomes increasingly important to a brand’s success, the tools necessary to track customers’ and prospects’ online behavior have grown to be intertwined. Without an understanding of what customers do at all times, an organization is at risk of delivering irrelevant marketing pitches. Hubspot makes it possible to market intelligently, effectively, and directly. Do your organization a favor and begin using automation software now!