How much did you spend on marketing last year? Do you know the ROI of your marketing efforts, or how many sales closed as a result? Challenges abound when it comes to tracking the overall effect that your marketing efforts have produced, but it doesn’t necessarily need to be that way.
With the right marketing automation tool you can understand who your customers are, their buying behavior, and accelerate the buyer through your sales funnel at a much faster pace.
Additionally, using marketing automation takes the guesswork out of what marketing programs are working and which are not, by providing real data on how effective your marketing dollars are spent.
Marketing Automation is a technology platform that helps organizations manage marketing efforts across multiple digital channels, automate manual processes, and track results. Listed below are 5 considerations when choosing a marketing automation tool:
1. Tracking
With the right marketing automation platform you can track how a potential customer interacts with your brand, for example, email clicks, website visits, and content downloads. These digital insights allow you to understand your prospect’s readiness to buy, and give you the ability to deliver a timely marketing message, based on the content of the product or service they are researching, that will accelerate a buyer’s decision-making process.
2. Marketing Campaigns
A stunning, personalized email message to a prospective buyer can have invaluable results for a business. However, you may not have time to sit down and write out a personal email to each potential client. So, you need a well-crafted email campaign, that has a tailored, personalized message.
Another example of a marketing campaign to look for in a robust marketing automation platform are drip campaigns, which allow you to schedule emails and content to be delivered in an expedient, strategic timeframe leading up to an event, or webinar. Once the event has happened following up with the potential customer is critical to keeping them moving through the sales funnel.
3. Segmentation
In order to create impressive marketing campaigns you will need to have a better understanding of your prospective customer. A marketing automation platform provides this understanding through lead scoring, buyer behavior, and demographics. Through the use of online forms you can start to construct a picture of your lead using a method known as progressive profiling. By creating targeted marketing segments you can gear your messages to their specific needs and audience persona. These are a few tactics used to develop a marketing campaign with a personalized touch.
4. Website
The first impression that many potential clients will have of a company is from their website, a study shows that a website has 50 milliseconds to make a good first impression. What if you could capture their data, and promote back to them? You can! A marketing automation platform should support and augment your website, and provide real value in lead generation. Lead generation is produced through web tracking, online forms, landing pages, and much more. Additionally, by integrating with Google Analytics, other analytic tools, and website tracking reports a sales rep can gain insight about the activity the prospect has been taking on the website.
In the age of social media being able to execute and track your activity in one centralized place not only makes life easier, but allows you to have a more comprehensive approach to how your customers, and potential customers, are being reached. The right marketing automation tool will give you access to that type of insight. Gaining, and keeping, customers is a multi-faceted approach, with many complex elements, but that doesn’t mean it should be overwhelming. Increase exposure, traffic, leads, and sales with seamless social publishing through your Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn accounts.
While these are only a few considerations for choosing a marketing automation platform that meets the needs of your business, you can find out more about marketing automation here or contact us for more information: sales@oasisky.com.
