Marketing automation has become a necessity for any digital, system-oriented, and fast-paced marketing department. This allows businesses to improve and accelerate their campaigns, reach more potential clients, generate more high-quality leads, and show returns on marketing investments.
What Is Marketing Automation?
Marketing automation services help software platforms and technologies for marketers develop. The automation helps manage all digital channels and automate repetitive tasks.
One of the main elements of marketing automation is email marketing; this is an ever-evolving technology suite that enables organisations to integrate several marketing tasks. These include data collection, contact management, campaign development, reporting, and returns on investment. The main objective is to give marketers the ability to bring leads to sales.
Most of the marketing automation platforms available in today’s age offer three basic functions: email marketing, visitor tracking, and contact database. Apart from these fundamental capabilities, the providers differentiate themselves by offering extra tools at an additional price. Their structures are based on the functionality and size of the database.
According to Statistics and data provided by Google, marketing automation has been on the surface for over 10 years. However, in the last 3 years, the industry has grown three folds.
Keeping this immense growth rate aside, marketing automation is still new for most companies, and a lot of companies are still reluctant in incorporating this in their marketing efforts just like they would with any other sophisticated strategies and technologies.
Why Do You Need Marketing Automation
It’s completely up to you to decide if marketing automation is best suited for your company. However, if you’re looking to improve your lead generation, lead nurturing, save time, and your overall internal marketing, then marketing automation might just be the best option for you.
You need automated marketing when:
- You’re spending more time building and upgrading your SOPs for different tools other than the usual tools.
- You don’t nurture your leads
- You’re sending every email campaign and blog post manually
- You’re unable to link your activities to metrics that can be tracked
- Your website is not generating a good amount of leads and sales
- You wish to put a halt to outbound sales
- You wish to stop cold call rejections
- Your sales team is looking for better and more qualified leads
- Your organisation wants to predict monthly leads
- You wish to expand your email list
- You believe your social media can assist your company
- You’re uncertain your content marketing is achieving the right targets.
The First Steps
You need to start by documenting your technical and marketing requirements first. You need a tool that helps you track and manage all data. If you don’t do this, you’ll end up paying more than you should for irrelevant functionalities.
Moreover, you need to take into consideration the software that is used. You need to ask can functionality and tools be integrated to enable closed looped reporting? Where can you track the results of your budgeted time and expenses? Is your company in need of an independent specialised software to achieve a greater impact? Answers to these questions will lead you in the right direction.
Why Marketing Automation Now?
All the successful and high performing marketing departments leverage marketing automation to build campaigns, analyse performance, and help their sales department in generating a healthy amount of leads that allow for a better return on investment.
It’s not like these companies have invested billions of dollars or they have been operating for a very long time. They are just leveraging the right tools; tools that enable them to plan better, make the right decisions at the right time, make all the processes aligned and smooth, alongside viewing the whole sales funnel. Since the marketing landscape is now dominated by digitisation all around, these abilities have become vital for your success.
As marketers, you would always prefer to have a better volume and high-quality leads. More importantly, you need higher revenues to help your business grow. It is highly important to systemise all repetitive tasks, get comprehensive analytics for your reports, and have accurate data.
Should You Prefer An All-In-One Solution Or Get a Specialised Solution
What kind of technology levels you opt for depends entirely on your business needs, budgets, time, and resources. There are all-in-one tools that allow more control for a growing team. However, such solutions also require heavy investments.
On the other hand, specialised solutions push your team to learn several technology platforms and maintain discipline in keeping up with the ever-improving solutions. If you have a small team, specialised solutions are a better option. However, if your organisation is seeing rapid growth and has a lot of departments, running multiple roles, you need to consider maximising the number of software.
What tools and size of a marketing automation platform you need depend on your needs and the size of team you have. What’s certain is the fact that marketing automation will help your firm achieve great results in a very short period. Get in touch with Seamless Ideas and have the best experts consult you regarding all the digitisation and technological solutions.
