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Thinking about investing in a marketing automation tool?
There’s no better time than now.
Statistics show that 76% of marketers that implement marketing automation generate a positive return on their investment (for CTRs, open rates, and subscription rates) within the first year. Not just that, 44% of them record a return within just six months.
The statistics are shocking, right?
No doubt, you’re looking to be part of these incredible statistics.
Thanks to the advancement of marketing automation software, you can.
You can now offload major time-consuming tasks, which leaves you time to focus on what’s important for your business. This means increased productivity in your company, reduced overheads, and added ability to scale your business without the complication of multiple resources.
This article will dive into marketing automation and how it’s changing the nature of work in marketing. It’ll also compile some of the best marketing automation tool examples you should consider for your brand.
Before you get too far, let’s start with the basics.
Marketing automation is leveraging tools and software to automate activities. Marketing automation tools help marketing departments automate repetitive tasks such as posting on social media, email marketing, and ad campaigns. Automation aims at not just efficiency but also providing personalized experiences with every touchpoint with the customers.
Wonder why 63% of the marketing are increasing their marketing automation budgets year by year? They know better.
Marketing automation tools benefit businesses in various ways:
Delivering personalized messages: Marketing automation winning capacity is how they help your business personalize marketing messages and content.
Efficient marketing: The tools make you more efficient in your delivery. For instance, in a case where you need to generate more revenue, they serve to streamline and scale lead management and other marketing activities. Automation tools bring alignment to the existing processes.
Holy grail – attract high qualified leads: Attracting quality leads is the main reason why most marketers integrate marketing automation tools. Bet this is your ultimate reason why you’re considering automation in your marketing. Gaining conversions, leads, and marketing at a large scale with personalization is the reason why marketing automation tools have been hugely adapted.
Automation will help you gain leads in various ways:
Tracking user demographics and behavior; their actions, fallout levels, what they are best engaging with creating landing pages that intertwine with your website, creating dynamic content with a high focus on personalization, streamlines funnels making it easier for teams to generate and convert leads
With these three elements combined, you can send the relevant messages to the right prospects at the right time–all of which are key to generating leads. Your content will connect and engage with the prospect or existing customers on a deeper level.
But marketing automation tools will not solve a fallout in your business. Think of it, qualified leads are the result of great marketing and sales collaboration. Such collaboration will fill funnels and lead to better experiences. As such, ensure your marketing is in sync with your sales; your marketing automation tool will only enhance lead generation to an already working business.
Marketing automation is a powerful tool to have in your business but to make it work, you must understand the best way to approach it, its components, complications, and nuances. Automating your marketing using automation tools requires strategy implementation.
Ask these questions to know if it’s time to integrate marketing automation:
The feedback from these points will act as great signs that you can proceed to integrate a marketing automation tool. Positive feedback would mean that automation would work for your business. Remember, marketing automation helps you scale existing successful efforts. It will not transform a marketing system that is not working.
When considering a marketing automation tool, ensure it includes features that support your overall goal; gaining and nurturing leads. If you have a different goal, ensure the software checks for those features.
Your automation software needs to help with sending a series of automated emails. The flow helps engage the prospects from the time they join the sequence to conversion and even when they become a customer. Lead generation and nurture is your ultimate consideration; if the software doesn’t allow this, it isn’t right for you.
Email personalization; to develop better relationships with customers, the software needs to achieve a high level of personalization. Don’t fall for anything that doesn’t.
Your marketing automation software needs to help you run email campaigns to nurture leads to align the sales cycle. Can you send direct and personalized emails to a large audience? If yes, go for it.
Your marketing automation tool may help you attract leads, but if it doesn’t allow the transfer of the information between marketing and sales, question its effectiveness. Without interlink between the two, your system will not ensure efficiency.
Creating campaign landing pages and forms is increasingly becoming essential in today’s marketing. The need for quick landing pages for A/B testing is forcing marketers to value this capability in a marketing automation tool. You don’t want to be spending your budgets and time to have a landing page created by a web developer. Fix it for yourself in the automation tool. Of course, most of these will not only capture the information but will also link it to various systems for storing or lead nurturing.
It would be great if all it took is a single ad to convert a potential customer. Unfortunately, that rarely happens. The advertising automation feature helps you create campaigns that trigger a series of highly targeted and relevant ads for a segmented group.
The PPC marketing automation software should help to unify data across different paid channels. Further, it should allow you to create and manage campaigns from a centralized place. It should connect with the advertising tool you’re using to run ads. Whether that is Google Ads, Facebook Ads, Twitter Ads, there’s an advertising automation tool that will work for you.
As a busy marketer or business person, you may be tempted to disregard the essence of performance, analytics, and reporting features in a tool. This shouldn’t be the case. Measuring performance should be a top priority to better your marketing initiatives. You won’t know what’s working for your business unless you spend time looking back at the results. One challenge you may have is; understanding reports doesn’t come easy.
The marketing analytics software should collect, analyze, and report data in a way that’s easier for you to understand. With them, you can get relevant, easy data, such as website traffic, user behavior, or complex data such as the return on investment (ROI) of your campaigns. It should have advanced features, such as comparing the performance of different campaigns and channels.
This feature enables automation in scheduling, management, and measurement of social media efforts without spending time on the platforms. You can schedule posts ahead of time, use mass posting to publish them in bulk, and optimize your social media marketing efforts.
Lead onboarding sequence
One best example of marketing automation software in use is email lead nurture. These are a series of emails sent to a lead from the time they join your email list. They help educate the lead about your products or services and introduce your brand and how it can help them.
One of the best ways to get a visitor to sign up to your email list is by offering a free offer; a guide, report, trial, challenge, 30-minute consultation-basically something for them to have an experience of your brand before they become a customer. Signing up only means one thing; they are interested in your offer and are willing to share their email with you to communicate with them.
This offer not only helps your lead familiarize with your business but is also one of the best ways to build trust with them before selling to them. Think of it, it’s so difficult to buy from someone you don’t know, especially online where just about everyone seems to have something to sell.
For example, at PPCexpo we give marketing and PPC experts campaign optimization tools and insights that help them make the right decisions in their Google Ads account to ensure they get the maximum success. As a way of capturing the right prospects, we offer several free and unconditional trials. One of our main ones is a free trial of PPC Signal, our tool that provides actionable insight from Google Ads accounts for our leads to take necessary action.
We use the free trial for leads to test out our tools; this is our best way to entice website visitors. Once they join the list, we send the onboarding emails, purposely meant for building trust, so by the end of the trial, they’ll be more likely to purchase from us.
When considering using a lead-nurture auto-responder, think of 10 obstacles that prevent your audience’s businesses from moving to the next level.
Create each email to show them how they can overcome one obstacle and schedule the emails with an email marketing automation software as follows:
And so on. You can tailor the way you wish your emails to go out, the number of days before the next email is sent.
Even better, get creative by monitoring user behavior and sending emails based on the actions your leads take. For instance, if you sent emails asking one of the marketing challenges your audience face with a poll or as a quiz, your results may be:
Following up on the results, you can use a marketing automation tool to send emails to the following groups.
As you can see, the marketing automation tool helps you segment your email list, evaluate the matching behavior in your audience, group them, and send content that matches their behavior or pain points.
Marketing automation tools help you set a trigger ahead of time, define your trigger, and the action that will be taken when the rules are met.
Here are examples of other actions you can take with an email automation tool:
To get the best out of these automation tools;
Figure out which areas of your business your prospects drop off, which ones are bottlenecks, and which can increase revenue.
Pay close attention to the metrics for which are changing.
Absolutely. Marketing automation is a fantastic tool to grow and nurture leads across different channels. It can do that for your company. But it can also be problematic if it’s not right for your company.
The popularity of marketing automation has blinded many marketers to believe that marketing automation software is the solution for any falloffs in any marketing growth. They adapt platforms thinking they’ll help them solve the slowdowns in generating leads. They lean in for sophisticated tools which they integrate into the middle of their funnels, but no solution for generating new leads.
Faced with this challenge, some marketers purchase leads (email addresses) then nurturing them with the automation tools. While this may seem like a quick fix to their current marketing challenges, their leads fall off before they know it.
Why?
The spammy approach of sending unsolicited emails to people who may not know your brand hurts your IP address reputation lowering your deliverability rates. It also produces incredibly low ROI.
As such, you must understand your company well to know what challenges your audience facing and what your automation tools will solve. Ask the right questions before investing in the software to avoid getting into pitfalls that many marketers have.
As a marketer, you may also fear that automation tools may replace you in an organization. That’s a mistaken view. With evolving and expanding roles in marketing, as a marketer, you’ll always find befitting roles. Consider marketing automation software as tools that will make your job easier, faster, and more profitable.
Whether you’re investing in marketing automation for the first time or you’ve been an existing user, the numerous available technologies can cloud your decision-making. Marketing for new marketing automation is an arduous task. But the recent changes in the automation sector are entirely reshaping the landscape.
The marketing automation platforms now come with combined features such as CRM, marketing automation, email server provision, and other marketing features. In addition to consolidating the digital infrastructure, the platforms are consolidating all platform features into one place for companies to have the best ROI.
As such, when thinking of a marketing automation solution consider:
Business results and long-term partnerships rather than individual features. The features are easy to replicate, but the depth of relationships can’t.
Overall product capabilities and the bigger picture; Think of the bigger picture in terms of reliability and how it helps you achieve your overall business goal.
Shared vision with the automation provider: Think of how your business goal aligns with the vendor. Will they help you solve your current challenge? The vendor should already be articulating a cogent solution to the marketing challenge you’ve established in your business.
Compatibility with existing IT architecture and databases: As a marketing expert, you face the pressure to consolidate and rationalize the many digital products and services. This is one of the challenges you want your automation tool to solve.
The marketing automation tool should easily integrate with your current systems; otherwise, you’ll have a difficult time ensuring efficiency. If possible, choose a platform with real-time insight into your customer journey and activity. This will come in handy when activating relevant and timely marketing campaigns.
Your customer journey: Before sourcing for your software, look through your sales process and map out your customer journey. Define critical information such as how long your sales process is, how many products you sell, the ROI for each product. This information determined the best-fit vendor as you’ll spot the key areas of your customer journey.
If you’re a B2B, the sales process may be linear — a prospect is looking for a solution, finds three or four options, evaluates them, requests a proposal, and settles for one that suits them. At some point on the prospect’s journey, they will be passed on to the sales team rather than the digital conversion. It’s essential to determine at what juncture the prospect qualifies as a lead and a sale.
If you’re a B2C, you’ll pay a lot of attention to the conversion rate on the website-so the sales process is digital. As you can see, this differentiates the marketing automation tool you’ll need.
Step 1: Plan. The first step to choosing the right-fit marketing automation tool is to understand your business. What are you trying to accomplish by having a marketing automation tool? If you haven’t thought your vision out, chances are you’ll invest in a solution that will not meet your needs.
What a waste it can be investing your massive budgets and time only to be back in the market for a new solution.
Step 2: Implement. Once you’ve chosen the platform, have your team trained. The automation tool needs to unite the people, tools, and processes in your marketing and sales team. Once the automation software is up and running, frequently check it’s working as desired.
Step 3: Measure. Use the analytics and reports to price the impact of the marketing automation on your marketing efforts.
Step 4: Optimize. Aggressively look for opportunities to better the results from your marketing tool. With the data you’ve obtained, determine the marketing initiatives that are best for lead generation and which ones are for driving leads.
One of the best areas to automate in your business is your PPC campaigns. With the increase in the number of ad platforms and networks, it’s becoming increasingly impossible to keep up with managing campaigns effectively. Automation tools in PPC are fundamental in helping brands optimize and scale paid marketing efforts.
By using PPC automation, not only will you free up time from your team, but you’ll also improve campaign performance, increase efficiency, and reduce stress managing campaigns. With that out of your hands, you can focus on aligning internal processes and top-level strategy.
So, what exactly are the main benefits of using PPC automation in your workflow?
Bid management: This is certainly a time-consuming task. PPC automation will alert you in case of very high bids and manage bids for you with a higher level of accuracy and profitability.
Keywords: If you’re managing a large account with many ad groups and campaigns, your automation tool can optimize your ad copy based on website copy.
Reporting: For success in managing campaigns, you need valuable and advanced data. Time is of the essence when reports are needed as they help you make strategic decisions. It becomes difficult to conclude from immense amounts of data.
Now that you’re aware of the benefits to expect with PPC automation, the main reason you should give it a trial is that it sets you up for success as you scale your campaigns. Again, if you’re managing many clients, automation will offer immense benefits by empowering your team and having one source of all your data.
As a digital marketing expert, data analyst, or PPC manager, you need a tool that will save you time, efforts, and budgets.
Not only will the system alert you of threatening changes that may negatively affect your campaign performance, but it lets you know of opportunities that can potentially bring a positive ROI.
The automation tools have put a heavy emphasis on features that increase operational efficiency. Monitoring your campaigns through PPC Signal will help you make changes to your campaigns that will increase conversions.
The best thing is; you don’t need to spend all hours of your day on the platform. Put a little time every day and long before you realize, your ROI has dramatically improved.
Here’s how PPC Signal helps you grow your account:
The key to marketing automation is delivering the right message when your audience needs it. Your business must deliver a consistent cross-channel communication to nurture trust with your leads.
To effectively do this with a marketing automation tool, you must clearly understand your customer, otherwise you’ll have a challenge reaching them. Thoroughly understand their challenges, who they are, and the best solution they need. Clearly understand what they care about.
Your marketing automation tools will not figure this for you.
The good news is, once you figure this out, marketing automation will take care of the rest for you. The tools will help you gain insights into what your leads are engaging with, their purchasing behavior, and essential data you can use to effectively segment the leads.
Once that is in order, ensure your business is tailoring to their specific problems and offering solutions at the right time.
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