Marketing Automation is more than a buzz word, it’s a vital part of modern marketing. Essentially it is a ‘force multiplier’ allowing a marketer to get more done with fewer resource by having software automatically prepare and send the next email or touch point. More than this, the tools have developed enough intelligence to allow them to halt or modify the planned campaign based on the behaviors of the prospects. It’s not just a time-saver, it allows you to ‘do the right thing’ for each prospect immediately and in a timely manner; a service level that would be hard to meet without a massive team.
Why Should I Consider Business Marketing Automation?
There are many good reasons to use automated marketing campaigns such as complex segmentation or interactions with cross-channel marketing efforts such as social media, but the two biggest drivers are scale and a long sales cycle.
Scale
Quantity, as the saying goes, has a quality all its own. But if you’re talking about mass mailings and multiple campaigns that quality is called ‘overwhelmed’. How can a small team monitor, not to mention respond to, thousands of emails per week? Typically, they didn’t used to. Prospects either actively replied, or they didn’t. You hope they get so excited by your message that they pick up the phone and call. But hope is not a plan and a modern campaign can notify you when someone is only slightly interested enough to read or click but not call. And then move to a faster track or even notify you to call them.
Sales Cycle
Quantity, as the saying goes, has a quality all its own. But if you’re talking about mass mailings and multiple campaigns that quality is called ‘overwhelmed’. How can a small team monitor, not to mention respond to, thousands of emails per week? Typically, they didn’t used to. Prospects either actively replied, or they didn’t. You hope they get so excited by your message that they pick up the phone and call. But hope is not a plan and a modern campaign can notify you when someone is only slightly interested enough to read or click but not call. And then move to a faster track or even notify you to call them.
What Are The Benefits Of Marketing Automation?
There are many benefits besides having a small marketing team punch way above its weight class.
- Smooth use of Content. All the ebooks and videos and white papers can be seamlessly integrated into these planned campaigns. And based on what people are reacting to you can refine and improve your content.
- Dynamic personalization. It’s not enough to just say “Hello Bill” in your emails. Now you can shift prospects into relevant campaigns that reflect their interests; all deduced form which links they followed or pieces of content they read. How about: “for someone like you who's interested in modern Big Data tools you may want to..” etc.
- Tie-ins to other tools. You can incorporate web forms, landing page activity, existing tags you’ve assigned the prospect, or social media behaviors into the logic of your automated campaigns. Its relatively simple to create literally hundreds of variations of campaigns by combining your different emails and content and keywords in different patterns. A level of segmentation that is totally impractical when you first look at your prospect list. The beauty is, they themselves tell you what they’re interested in and your marketing automatically adapts.
- Step-by-step tutorials. An automated campaign is perfect for delivering a pre-set course. This might be education on your topic, in support of your software trial, or anything else that is episodic. We know that nobody will read a 30 page email. But if they start engaging with your 3-page emails they may make it all the way through.
- Oh yeah… Sales! Your tools don’t just run in the background. They can notify you when a prospect exhibits buying behavior. This can be a high lead score, visiting the pricing page, repeat visits, or some other criteria. But they haven’t called you yet. So you call them, before they take all the education and interest you’ve provided a visit a competitor’s site.
What Are The Downsides Of Marketing Automation?
If you do it right, there are very few of these. But there are a couple of traps you may need to monitor.
- Re-using bad text/emails. Just because you’ve automated the messages, and they go out smoothly every Day 3 of your campaign, that doesn’t mean they couldn’t be better.
- You forget to un-automate. Sometimes its soothing to watch all this automated marketing work and work. But, you, or somebody else, still has to pick up the phone. Sometimes you can close a small B2C sale with automation alone; sometimes the price point is too high or the product is too complex. Marketing Automation will prep the prospect for you and point to the most interested ones. The rest is up to you.
Is Business Marketing Automation For You?
This quick summary of a complex and rapidly-evolving topic is meant to whet your appetite. You should explore the various vendor websites and determine if any of them particularly meet your needs.
Here’s your checklist:
- Do I need help in contacting all the marketing prospects we have?
- Are we letting a lot of ‘maybe’ prospects slip through our CRM unnoticed?
- Do I have a long sales cycle?
- Is my product new or complex enough to warrant nurturing?
- Does my company offer a software trial?
- Would I like to do more with less?
If you answer ‘yes’ to any of these, then you are in need of Marketing Automation for your business.
Do you have questions on how to integration marketing automation into your business strategy? Drop us a note and we'd love to help!
