Beginner’s Guide to Marketing Automation

Harnessing Marketing Automation, Strategies for Success.

Do you find your marketing team’s productivity hampered by repetitive, banal tasks that take time away from actual work? Though tedious, these tasks are nevertheless important. Emails, social media, website updates, and other necessary marketing functions can’t take care of themselves; someone has to do the grunt work for a campaign, promotion, or advertisement to be successful.

In today’s technology-driven business world, that ‘someone’ can be more effective when complemented with a ‘something’. Those actions can be effectively automated using solutions designed specifically to carry out repetitive, but highly logical and well thought out task that set customers through a pathway to closing a sale. Humans of course can still create the content, set the parameters, and monitor the outcomes, but software executes the task. This concept and practice is essentially known as Marketing Automation, and there are many software tools available for its implementation into your business’ operations.

However, Marketing Automation isn’t only about expediting the processes of marketing. The general purpose of marketing is to create awareness and generate leads that should ideally be converted to sales. Automation software can track customers all the way from their initial point of contact down to their first purchase, all the while gathering important data on that customer’s preferences and actions that help decide how best to continue to sell to them while moving them toward the path to purchase, otherwise known as the funnel. This allows the savvy marketer to re-target and even generate more leads based on demographic metrics.

Marketing automation tools can be fundamental assets to your company. Finding the right tool for the job is important however, as well as understanding how to integrate software into your marketing procedures rather than relying on it solely.  

How Sales Automation Tools Can Help Your Business

Marketing Automation software will fuse all your marketing elements together to create customer lead journeys for each person who touches your brand on all digital touch points.

We all want our marketing campaigns to exceed all expectations, and marketing automation is designed to help us do just that. The impact of Marketing Automation can extend to nearly every aspect of business and when matured can be quite complex to easily explain.

In our experience, there are four specific goals that Marketing Automation addresses more effectively than any other tools on the market:

• Increase inbound digital sales conversions (web & social leads)
• Increase sales team accountability
• Boost email marketing performance
• Improve digital lead distribution effectiveness

Envision obtaining 10,000 leads per year and going on to close 2,000 of them per year. What about the other 8,000? Do you have a process to follow up with those leads and convert them? Day after day? Week after week? Month after month? What about over the years?

Imagine a tool that could help your sales team communicate to those 8,000 missed leads with compelling, relevant information to draw them back in. Imagine closing just 10% of those 8,000 missed leads. How much more business would that mean for you?

The lead nurturing tools that marketing automation provides can get your sales teams working more efficiently than ever, following up on every lead so they never miss an opportunity to close a deal.

Understanding the complexities of successfully integrating marketing automation tools is just the beginning. Strategy and effective process workflows are important to deliver success. Relying on a team that has years of experience as pioneers of digital marketing in the Caribbean to guide you through the process can help you get up and running quickly, learn, test and expand.