Streamline your inbound marketing campaigns by making friends with marketing automation software.
If you’ve been focusing part of your marketing resources online, which is something that you should be doing if you haven’t already, then you’re probably aware of some of the inbound marketing basics – from social media integration to content marketing. However, odds are good that your local Ottawa competitors are right there with you. What separates the most successful companies from the pack in this day and age is the use of marketing automation.
What is marketing automation?
There is countless amounts of data that you can collect from users that are visiting your website. This includes how many times an individual user has visited your website, what pages he or she prefers to visit, how much time that individual spends on each particular page, how they find their way to one of your website’s landing pages and much, much more. This information is invaluable to helping you to adjust the different aspects of your website in order to make it more effective in capturing leads. However, tracking all of this data for each individual visitor would take hours upon hours of work. Multiply this by the actual number of visitors coming to your website and it would be absolutely impossible to track and sort the data manually. Which is why using marketing automation software is such a key to the success of your website. Marketing automation software will automatically follow the data trails of each visitor and sort the information for you, making the analytics process way easier.
How can it help you?
The data that the software collects for you enables you to figure out important strategies, such as when the best time of the week and the day is to release new content onto your blog, what the best thing to say in your email newsletter is and what keywords have been the most effective in bringing in leads. Marketing automation software is integral to helping to streamline your inbound marketing campaigns, improving not just lead generation but lead conversion as well, increasing website traffic, improving your ROI, reducing your costs and much more. The following is a more in-depth breakdown of a few ways that marketing automation software can be used to improve your business.
Keep in Touch With Customers
Once upon a time, a lead would take a linear and easily influenced path to becoming a customer. It’s no longer like this – instead, most leads will do their own product research. This means that marketing is more about building relationships with your leads. Through the use of marketing automation software, you can send marketing emails, automate your phone calls and much more. Automation provides more options to keep in touch with consumers.
Establish Your Brand
Effective branding consists of regularly exposing leads to your business without coming across as badgering. Marketing your brand and keeping each individual lead exposed to your brand will take an incredible amount of man hours to do manually. Marketing automation software will eliminate the need to work this hard while also making the strategy of establishing and exposing your brand much more sound.
Fuel Growth
Marketing automation software can be incredibly useful for creating more customers. For example, you can automate your email marketing and nurturing campaigns to help turn leads into customers. This can be done by automatically segmenting your email list and sending out timed content to carefully nurture each lead. There are a lot of stats that back up the fact that marketing automation will fuel the growth of your customer base as well. According to Focus Research, almost 75 percent of businesses that use marketing automation experience a return on investment within one year, while 44 percent see a return on investment in as little as 6 months. Around 28 percent also experienced an increase in the revenue per sale according to Chief Marketer.
Bringing It All Together
Making sure that your marketing team communicates clearly with your sales team is incredibly important. Your sales team depends on the data that marketing provides in order to more effectively nurture your leads. By integrating your marketing automation software with your customer relationship management software, it will be much easier to keep your marketing and sales in alignment.
As you can see, using marketing automation is essential if you want to make your inbound marketing strategy more effective as well as efficient. You can’t understate how many resources you’ll be saving through the use of marketing automation, both in cutting down the hours it would take to do certain tasks manually and by providing you with the data to adjust different facets of your online marketing strategy to avoid wasting resources on less effective marketing efforts.
