An Introduction to Marketing Automation | Get Leads and Sales
DIGITAL MARKETINGCONSUMER BEHAVIOR
Due to innovation in technology, businesses have now the possibility to develop and deliver sales engagements with more impact and insight. Thus, they don't have to lose any more of their time with cold-calling in order to attract the attention of potential customers.
This is happening because companies have realized that using more than one (digital) marketing channel can help them reach quickly their marketing and sales targets. More than that, depending on the company's industry and structure, IT professionals can build bespoke marketing automation solutions to take care of all serious sales and digital marketing requirements.
1. What is marketing automation?
Marketing automation is a complex but necessary tool for you as an entrepreneur, digital marketer or salesperson that can simplify your day-to-day operations and make your workflow functional and run smoothly.
It can add massive value to your organization because with its help, through advanced software platforms and technologies, you can better automate marketing, sales and business processes and generate more leads, conversions and sales.
Collecting and integrating customer data, targeting and segmenting customers, analyzing and optimizing campaigns without much human intervention are just a few of the options offered by these platforms.
2. Automate digital marketing campaigns across multiple channels
By using a centralized and comprehensive platform that integrates different digital marketing and sales activities, your company can efficiently manage and nurture leads and generate (more) sales. Therefore, these leads can be captured and converted into sales opportunities when automated processes within the company are preferred. And both marketers and sales members work together and are responsible as a team for the progress of the entire marketing and sales funnel.
Hence, marketing automation is here to offer your business the possibility to create and launch smart marketing campaigns for your product promotion, production, performance and customer satisfaction.
For greater results, digital channel strategies (multi-channel) are combined and work together focusing on the channels that are of the highest interest to your company, the most popular ones being e-mail, social media, search engines.
This is where the role of the marketing automation platform comes in, developed to bring together the most important channels for your company and support you as a marketer or salesperson to handle a multitude of tasks in one place.
Marketing Automation Lifecycle Source: business2community.com
For instance, you send your target market an e-mail that contains a user-friendly landing page to click on and find info about the product you are promoting. In the mail, you add a link to the landing page where your potential customer can learn about your product, buy it, or share the page with a friend.
When your customer sends the product's page to his/her friend and he/she buys from your company, the software can recognize who recommended the product and can offer both to your prospect and to his/her friend a discount.
These digital marketing strategies can take the form of an automated process that businesses can implement and get to the results that they expect.
When using automated software for the customer journey, you as a marketer can gain knowledge about which users opened the mail, the number of users who clicked on the landing page's link, time spent on that page, users that converted via payment form, how shareable was that page, etc..
As you can see, all these broad and detailed campaigns can be created through marketing automation. While the campaign is running, you as a marketer can monitor and evaluate campaign success, gain new insights about your users' preferences and behavior, adjust and develop a digital marketing plan as needed, make informed marketing decisions based on data.
To make qualified leads achieve the highest point in the funnel and move the business closer to its objectives, elevate your growth marketing expertise. Get involved in processing the information obtained through the platform in a productive way to authentically develop functional growth marketing tactics.
Model of lead generation funnel through marketing automation tools
3. Why is marketing automation technology important for your business?
If applied correctly, marketing automation can become a powerful tool for your business through the tech-savvy campaign strategies you design and implement. In this way, you can easily reach your target market and convince it about your product's value in solving its problems. Then, you can bring into the sales and marketing funnel the right customers without the need for your company to lose time and effort towards inefficient practices that are very costly.
Now, you as a business owner can redirect your attention toward other precious activities such as harnessing the new data gained through marketing automation. All you have to do is to analyze this information and transform it into knowledge which is the fundamental component of business intelligence.
All this data that marketing automation tracks, processes and sorts is primordial to support a business intelligence approach. It offers actionable insights for you as an entrepreneur, marketer or salesperson to plan the right tactics and strategies in advance and discover and harness new sales opportunities.
Here are 15 best-known marketing automation tools adopted by businesses from different industries:
CONCLUSION
These are just a few of the countless marketing automation solutions that exist on the market. Try several platforms until you identify the most suitable one that best covers your most pressing marketing and sales concerns. With its help, when creating unique and targeted marketing and sales strategies, your campaigns have now a higher chance to deliver performance.
So, if you want to grow your business efficiently and cost-effectively give marketing automation a try. You will realize the tremendous impact it can have when planning, deploying and managing (digital) marketing and sales campaigns. Your work will be simplified but prepared for the next spontaneous challenge.
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