What is Marketing Automation and Why Do You Need It?
Marketing has changed more in the past two years than in the past fifty. Everyone seems to be talking about Marketing Automation these days and many companies are investing massively in this new breed of technology. In fact, the Marketing Automation industry is expected to reach $7.63 billion worldwide by 2025. Why such colossal investments? Simply because companies around the world are striving for more efficiency in the way they generate revenue and more return on their marketing spend. That’s exactly what a great Marketing Automation tool can deliver.
What is Marketing Automation?
Marketing Automation is the technology that enables you to generate more revenue by sharing the right content to the right person at the right time and through the right channel, automatically. It gives you the unfair advantage of knowing who you’re talking to, what they are interested in, their web activity, how they interacted with your emails, what they say on social media, etc.
“We can identify how and where our customers engage with our brands – on social media, offline or online, mobile, on their way to work, at work, wherever, whenever. We track all those customer interactions in Journey Builder and deliver messages at the right time.” – L’Oréal
Do you need Marketing Automation?
The short answer is yes. Because automation is always beneficial. It’s the best way to increase your business efficiency and performance.
Here are five more reasons.
- Save time.
Automating anything will save you time, but we all know how long combing through data can take. When you replace manual work with automated rules and campaigns, your team will have much more time to focus on more creative and strategic tasks.
- Personalisation.
It allows you to take your marketing activity to an ultra-targeted level. You can start to collect data on your customers such as name, location, birthday, and order history to serve up targeted, relevant messages.
- Improve collaboration.
Another benefit of Marketing Automation is the ability to assign appropriate tasks to the appropriate team when a specific criteria is met. For example, your sales guy should get on the phone as soon as a customer has shown interest (whether that’s opening and clicking multiple emails, or viewing a specific page on your website).
- Better reporting.
As marketers, we love reports because they tell us if our efforts are working and highlights where we can improve. With Marketing Automation you have heaps of information at your fingertips – such as knowing who clicked, opened and on what device.
- Use multiple channels.
Marketing Automation isn’t just email. Most tools incorporate social media and SMS to reach prospective customers.
What tool should you choose?
There are a few tools out there that are geared towards either B2B or B2C, as both have vastly different needs.
If you’re a B2B business (you sell to other businesses) then Pardot could be a good option for you. Salesforce Pardot is tightly integrated with the Salesforce platform, which is immensely important to enable Sales and Marketing to work hand in hand. Also, Pardot is relatively straightforward and easy to use. Pardot has seen the largest growth in 2016 with an astonishing increase of 108.9 percent. It’s one of the 6 biggest technologies that hold over 57% of the market share. It’s best for small to medium sized organisations that have decent lead/prospect volume, and want to increase conversions through lead scoring, profiling, and nurturing. Pardot also has a cool ROI calculator which you can check out here.
Salesforce Marketing Cloud on the other hand is ideal for B2C companies and has the power to get very granular with your segmentation. For example, you can track who has viewed certain pages on your website or blog and visited your contact page in the past month but did not complete a form.
We’ll delve into more differences in a future blog post.
How do you succeed?
Strategy.
It’s as simple as that. Marketing Automation strategy is paramount. From simple and straightforward, to extremely complex and executed in multiple phases, your strategy is unique to your business and key to leverage the power of your marketing automation technology. Copywriting, design and messaging all come into play, align with your business objectives. You need to know who you’re talking to, why you’re talking to them, and what your ultimate goal is.
Strategy will help you understand how you can maximise your return on investment, and measure it closely. Increase revenue, reduce cost, improve customer experience, Marketing Automation can also save you time and streamline disjointed processes. For example, you can set up automatic replies and notifications, guide someone through the buying process, automate staff onboarding, etc. There are so many ways it can benefit your company and save yourself time and energy.
In closing, measurability has changed everything. Perhaps the biggest benefit of Marketing Automation is the ability to make smart, data-driven decisions. We are no longer relying on billboards to tell our story and hope someone will notice. Now, we know who notices, who’s reading, who’s engaging, and who they are. This is something that has changed the marketing game forever – and we’re only just getting started.
Still have questions about Marketing Automation? Don’t hesitate to reach out!
