Marketing automation is the beating heart of our inbound marketing services, fuelling everything we do across lead generation, content marketing and email automation.
Combining your inbound marketing strategy with a marketing automation software, we will work hand in hand with you to generate, nurture and convert new and existing leads into fresh customers for your business.
We’ll help you quickly and effectively combine your website and CRM with advanced marketing automation software to create an all-encompassing web platform for your business.
Once in place, we can track and measure lead activity and content performance, send tailored emails and offers to categorised groups of leads, and constantly adapt and tweak your approach to reflect the results. The result: a one-stop shop for all your marketing output and input, guaranteed to help you reach your goals faster and take your business to new heights!
Combining CRM and marketing automation is the way to actualise an inbound marketing strategy that works consistently for your business, driving growth at every opportunity (even when you’re off the clock).
By monitoring, tracking and measuring lead activity and engagement at all times, leads can be quickly categorised into distinct buyer personas. Then, by aligning your inbound strategy with B2B automation software, we can help you interpret the data you’re collecting to deliver consistently excellent content and email marketing automation campaigns that reach the right leads, at the right times, in the right places.
It’s all too easy to forget about existing leads and clients, even though they’re already engaged with your brand.
With marketing automation, lead and client nurturing becomes an easy-to-implement, high-impact approach to acquiring new business. You can track where leads are on their journey, categorise and score them, then approach them in a unique, personalised way (on literally any scale).
If you don’t know what’s not working, you can’t improve. B2B marketing automation software is an instant remedy.
Covering your website, your automated email services and all your social channels, automation software provides total visibility on every visitor interaction and every lead journey, to offer easy reporting across all metrics and KPIs.
This offers an effective feedback loop that allows you to analyse and optimise performance in real-time while allowing you to prove ROI every step of the way.
With CRM marketing automation in place, lead generation, content strategy and every other aspect of your performance enhanced marketing can knit together into a seamless process of growth.
We’ll help you integrate the best marketing automation tool for your needs – be that HubSpot, Marketo, Salesforce Pardot, or any other – and work with you to help your business flourish in the online space.
If you value an agile, proactive approach to creating and closing leads, marketing automation is the way to go. Its chief virtue is its speed and efficiency when it comes to customer analysis. When paired with Customer Relationship Management software, marketing automation tools can effectively bridge the gap between sales and marketing and streamline everyone’s workflows.
Outsourcing the grunt work of marketing to specialist software frees up your team and allows them to concentrate on creative marketing solutions and, crucially, the production of compelling content. Here are some additional benefits of marketing automation:
Increases email open rates
When you can tailor your email content to the subjects that you know your customer cares about, the likelihood that they’ll open your communications increases exponentially. Automation marketing makes it easy to see where your customer’s interests lie and so reveals how to best capture their attention.
Automates customer loyalty programs
Customers love being rewarded for their loyalty. It promotes return business and a deeper sense of connection with your products. Marketing automation software takes the headache out of administering loyalty programs manually and can capture additional customer detail to add to their profile.
Makes follow-up communication faster and more efficient
Everyone knows that the quicker you follow up on a potential customer’s expression of interest, the more likely they’ll be converted into a sale. Marketing automation software is vigilant no matter what time it is, and, based on the existing customer data, can intelligently select the precise sort of marketing communication that will capture the customer-to-be’s attention.
Provides clarity on the precise return on investment
The beauty of an automated marketing system is that nothing goes unnoticed or unaccounted for. An intuitive user interface makes the collation of all this data much easier than parsing everything yourself. It makes it really easy to see what strategies are effective and which need rethinking. It saves you a lot of time, money and effort when you have a real-time result that you can react to.
Want to go deeper? We’ve put together a blog that gives a more detailed look at the benefits of a marketing automation system. You can check it out here.
Marketing automation uses sophisticated automation software to measure and streamline marketing workflows and tasks so that you can reach the maximum amount of potential clients that fit your ideal customer profile. It’s designed to locate the leads with the highest potential for conversion so that you can focus your marketing energies in the most efficient way possible.
You can divide the way marketing automation software works into 4 specific areas: progressive profiling, lead scoring, lead segmenting, and automated programs.
Progressive profiling
This is the process of accumulating data beyond a potential customer’s name and email. This is one of the reasons why marketing automation is important – a name and an email are useful pieces of the puzzle but they don’t help you work out the quality of a lead. You need additional data to evaluate how to make your marketing approach and marketing automation platforms are there to make that data acquisition as seamless and intuitive as possible.
Progressive profiling software stores a potential customer’s name and email as a cookie the first time they enter their details and then remember it for any subsequent interactions. The user is then asked additional questions with every new interaction, things like job title, industry, etc. This new information is then stored and used to deepen your understanding of each user so you can tailor your marketing approach to them.
Lead scoring and segmenting
Automated lead scoring is one of the reasons why marketing automation is such a powerful tool. You set the parameters based on your ideal customer profile and the software assigns points to each user based on the way that they interact with your site and how closely they fit your profile.
Once a user accumulates enough points, it becomes clear that they are a viable lead. Next, the software can take a deeper dive into the specifics of viable leads and determine things like what stage of the buying cycle users are at. The software can then identify which ones would actively welcome your marketing approach and what strategy to take. The beauty of these marketing automation systems is that all the analytic work is taken out of your hands so you don’t have to waste time monitoring every single person who approaches your content.
Automated programs
Marketing automation tools are also crucial in making your approach to a potential customer. With all the data you’ve accrued, the software can create personalised communications that respond to the user’s profile. This prevents you from sending irrelevant or repetitive messages, something that would be simply unmanageable if you were managing a high volume of leads the old fashioned way.
Want to know more? You can read our blog on the “Dos and Don’ts of Marketing Automation” here.
If you’ve managed to accrue a decent number of leads but find that they’re not converting into sales with the speed you were expecting, lead nurturing is one of the methods you can use to convert a potential customer into an actual one.
Marketing automation makes this process easy. Here are some lead nurturing tactics that will help you reach elusive customers-in-waiting:
Plan multiple approaches on multiple platforms
As every marketer knows, potential customers rarely respond to the first call to action by making a purchase. Most people need to feel entirely comfortable before parting with their money, a process which involves a lot of consumer-based research and a sense of growing trust in your brand. The customer’s progress through the buying journey or position in the ‘marketing funnel’ can be closely monitored by your chosen software.
Marketing funnel automation helps you consolidate and analyse your approach across multiple platforms. This means you can monitor and adjust the way that you interact with your leads as necessary. You can see at a glance if emails are being opened, webinar invitations are being accepted and if they’re spending more time on your website as a result.
Lead scoring
This is one of the areas of customer analysis that really lends itself to automation. The right software can monitor every potential customer as they explore your content and then apply a score based on parameters that you’ve set.
This means the leads that best fit your customer profile are quickly flagged and you can devote your energies to nurturing them. The software can also tell you where individual customer’s interests lie so that you can put them on a predefined communication track that best fits their needs.
Tailor content
Automation allows you to take an unprecedented deep-dive into user analytics so that you can monitor exactly where your potential customer’s interests lie. If they’re spending a lot of time on your webinar page, for instance, you can put them on an email marketing track that puts your upcoming broadcasts at the forefront. This means you’re always providing your prospective customer with relevant, engaging content that will keep them returning until they’re ready to make a purchase.
The question is not so much which software is the best, rather which software is best for the demands of your business.
There are many powerful marketing software platforms out there: Hubspot, Marketo and Salesforce Pardot, just to name three of the most popular options. But in deciding which of these might be for you, it’s important to take stock of what your company really needs.
One of the key considerations is the size of your marketing department, your ambitions and your budget. There’s no point taking on a giant piece of software, no matter how powerful if you don’t have the resources to train yourself and your team how to use it to its fullest advantage. Even the biggest marketing companies have to dedicate a huge amount of resources into getting the best out of their automation system.
This is not to put you off marketing automation – far from it. When it’s deployed correctly there’s nothing better for getting the best results from your marketing strategy. Before you even start pricing up the various options on the market, it’s important to take stock of what resources you already have so that you don’t duplicate anything.
For instance, you should make sure that your desired marketing automation tools don’t overlap with your existing customer relationship management system. You need to think about the aspects of your business that need special attention. For example, if your business contains an e-commerce element, then you need e-commerce marketing automation that integrates with your existing platform.
Another area to think about is whether or not your chosen system contains costs beyond the monthly or annual subscription. Some services charge an additional fee for API access and third-party integration. Think carefully about what you need to execute your marketing plan effectively and make sure that your chosen software has the capabilities to perform in every area you need. Then you can get on with the important work of executing your marketing strategy, secure in the knowledge that you’ve got the right tools for the right price.