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4 minute read
Every business desires higher revenue and faster growth. Unfortunately, we often struggle to align people, processes and technology in order to achieve these goals. As most Hong Kong businesses have discovered, this is where marketing automation becomes vital. What doest it mean? In its simplest form, it is a category of software that helps companies to streamline, automate and measure marketing tasks and work flows.
Who needs marketing automation?
The answer is: Everyone who feels they could do with a few automated processes in their marketing.
While large enterprises are currently the biggest consumers of marketing automation software, even small and medium sized companies stand to benefit. With regards to industries, marketing automation isn’t selective. The early adopters were primarily B2B industries such as hi-tech/software, business services, and manufacturing. But recently, all kinds of business from all major industries are adopting marketing automation. Today, B2C industries such as financial services, healthcare, retail, and entertainment are all using marketing automation to maintain and extend customer relationships.
You need to know what marketing automation is not;
Given that marketing automation is rather new concept, sometimes people confuse it for different things. We need to make it clear that marketing automation is not;
A fancy name for email marketing
The simplest way to put is that email marketing is just a subset of marketing automation; and a very small one so to say. Marketing automation covers pretty much every marketing process – from direct mail to phone campaigns and social initiatives.
A way to send spam
Being that marketing automation is quite powerful, you might be tempted to use it to send email at every available opportunity. If you do so, don’t expect any positive results. In fact, even with marketing automation, consumers can still mark your emails as spam and opt-out of your email lists.
A solution that delivers value without effort
Finally, even with marketing automation, you still have to work very hard. The software only helps you to streamline several activities. You still need the right strategy to bring together the different components of your marketing campaign.
What does marketing automation do?
There are several tasks that you can accomplish with marketing automation. While the possibilities somehow depend on the type of business, some of the benefits are straightforward.
Nurture relationships
Typically, only about 20 percent of leads are sales-ready when they come in. For the remaining 80 percent, you need a sound strategy to nurture them until they are ready to buy. You can use marketing automation for this.
Retain and extend customer relationships
After a consumer has made a purchase, you would still want to get hold of them because they’ll definitely be making further purchases in the future. Marketing automation helps with up-selling and cross-selling as well as nurturing customer loyalty.
Build alignment with sales
Aligning marketing with sales is another strong point of marketing automation. After profiling your leads and identifying hot the hot ones, you want the sales team to follow up quickly, but with the right messages. Through marketing automation, you can automate sales processes such as sales alerting, lead recycling, and so much more.
Prove and improve marketing ROI
Marketing automation also gives CMOs valuable insight into which marketing programs are working and which ones aren’t. This allows for easier and more effective decision making.
Common features of marketing automation
When you implement marketing automation, you will be expecting a lot in terms of streamlining marketing activities. Here are five main things you can accomplish with marketing automation;
Create and manage emails, forms, and landing pages
Marketing automation can to some degree replace your Email Service Provider (ESP). Through marketing automation, you should be able to; accomplish batch email marketing as well as email delivery and reputation management, manage real-time triggered emails, create and manage effective landing pages and forms, test your emails, and optimize emails, landing pages and forms for mobile.
Lead management
Lead management is another very important marketing task that you can accomplish with marketing automation. The marketing automation software allows you to create and manage a marketing database, you’ll have a clear single view of the customer, and you also benefit from multi-touch campaign/lead nurturing. Other benefits come in the form of; easier and more effective lead scoring and grading, online behavior tracking, segmentation, automated sales alerts, sales intelligence, and revenue cycle modeling.
Lead generation
While marketing automation initially didn’t provide capabilities for lead generation, some vendors now do. If this is the case, you will benefit from program management features, cloning, event marketing including webinars, and program import/export among others.
Social marketing
Marketing automation software also come with valuable social marketing features that can instantly benefit your overall campaigns. Some of the features you can expect include; social listening and tracking, social sharing and campaigns, social profiles, social engagement and promotion, and social analytics.
Analytics
Most automation software also features various analytics capabilities. Depending on the software you choose, some of the analytics features you can expect include; web analytics, SEO/Keyword analytics, basic reporting, multi-touch revenue attribution, Program ROI analytics, and revenue cycle metrics.
Additional features
Apart from the five main features discussed above, marketing automation software could also be capable of;
- Resource management – including budgeting and calendaring
- Infrastructure capabilities – including sandboxing, API integration, and user access management.
- CRM integration – including advanced data synchronization and self-healing schema.
…and so much more.
Buying marketing automation
For most companies, this could the hardest part of all. You need to select a functional automation software program that meets not most but all your business needs. Here is a step by step guide to help you through.
- Write down your goals for the project – what exactly would you like to achieve with the automation software? Do you want to capture more leads or a higher quality of leads? Is it improved conversions that you need? Write it down.
- Plan your timeline – remember that marketing automation is an evolving process. The timeline should revolve around when you plan to start the selection process, when you want to start implementation, and when you want to see the first value.
- Identify your requirements – what specifically do you want to automate? And, what level of additional services, training, and support will you need?
After that:
- Consider assembling a team to make the selection and manage the solution
- Evaluate potential vendors against your needs.
- Talk to pros in the industry, and then
- Make a decision
After you purchase the marketing automation software, roll it out, optimize, and improve.