Ch. 4: Why use marketing automation for your business?

Lead generation is an extremely important step in any business’ growth. Automating the many steps between marketing and sales gives your team more time to focus on overall strategy and nurturing the leads that show real promise. That means more prospects, and more customers.

Marketing automation can also give you a richer, more detailed picture of potential customer behaviour.

Using behavioural tracking methods such as following a user’s path through your website, marketing automation software can help your marketing team understand prospects’ interests and where they are in the purchasing lifecycle. Follow-ups can then be customised around those insights.

For instance, say a particular customer is reading about a broad category of products. This might indicate that they are at the beginning of the purchasing process, researching and comparing while preparing a short list. If they later download white papers on a specific product, that could indicate a narrowed focus, and a readiness to talk with a salesperson.

Bringing together information from touchpoints — including website visits and downloads, social media activity, and direct marketing — enables automatic scoring, qualifying, and prioritising of leads. This, in turn, can drive wider marketing campaigns, including:

• Trigger-based marketing messages
• Infrequent “drip-feed” emails to maintain interest
• Personalised emails
• Facebook or Twitter messages
  

Nurturing leads can be tricky and time-consuming. Guiding a lead through the journey is absolutely worth it when it ends in a sale, but not all of your leads are going to convert to sales. In fact, according to Gleanster Research, 50% of the leads businesses generate are qualified, but not ready to buy right now.

For a small business, that can create a dilemma: You know roughly half of your leads are qualified, but still need nurturing. But with a small team handling both sales and marketing, you can’t exactly afford to keep constant tabs on half of your leads. Don’t stress! Computers were invented for precisely this reason: To do the work humans just don’t have the time for. Marketing automation can help.

It seems like everyone is talking about “big data” these days, but few businesses have a grasp on how to collect and utilise it. Marketing automation allows you to effortlessly embrace big data, collecting valuable intelligence at scale and putting it immediately to work.

By providing a single platform for dashboarding and analytics, closed-loop reporting, and collecting and storing data, marketing automation platforms are the most comprehensive solution for measuring campaigns and predicting consumer behaviour on a small business budget. One of the many benefits of a marketing automation platform is the ability to assemble a more complete profile of your prospects than ever before. A/B test marketing assets to find the techniques that work best, and truly understand how sales and marketing are impacting the bottom line.

It’s no secret that in many organisations, integration between sales and marketing can get a little rocky. But why? As technology continues to evolve and shape the buying cycle, the work of marketing and sales only grows closer together, making efficient collaboration more important than ever.

Misalignment between the two departments isn’t necessarily the fault of one or the other. The fault lies with outdated processes and structures. When marketing and sales work with different tools toward separate goals, it’s only natural for tensions to build. Fortunately, marketing automation can help by improving lead quality, increasing revenue, and automating traditionally manual processes like lead assignment and follow-up.

Ready to take this whole marketing automation thing to the next level? Pair it with a customer relationship management (CRM) system. Integrating CRM with marketing automation helps you delve into detailed behavioural tracking, like the pages your prospects are visiting, the types of content they’re interested in, and where they are in the buying cycle. Suddenly you’ve got incredible insight into exactly what your leads are interested in, which lets you custom-tailor everything from content marketing to sales pitches.

Which brings us to the final part of the journey, for us and for your buyers. Time to go all the way down the funnel to sales, where it’s essential to keep the pipeline flowing.